I’m a software engineer that is also deeply uninterested in chasing shiny new things. I think another factor is that tech that I did care about has somewhat stalled out.

I’ve had iPhones since a I think the iPhone 4. I’m on the iPhone 11 which released back in 2019, I only really upgraded because my iPhone 8s battery was crapping out.

There’s just nothing exciting about these newer devices, same form factor, same OS, same basic functionality. And in a similar fashion, anything new is stuff I don’t really give a shit about. Oh it can do some kind of ai thing I don’t want, no thanks.

I’ve tried to see it as a positive. I have lots of stuff that I’ve filled my life up with, things that are meaningful to me. I think that’s what took up the space I used to fill with reading about and getting excited about this new gadget or that one. Now I’m excited to go see my niece’s Christmas recital or bake cookies with my wife to take to a friends of the library event.

Doesn’t hurt that every company seems to be in a non stop contest to see how little they can give the consumer for the maximum price while installing as much revenue generating spyware as possible.

Executive orders shouldn’t have the ability to make law or ignore laws. The legislative branch passes the laws and the executive branch is supposed to faithfully execute them.

An executive order is meant to lay out how the executive departments should carry out the laws passed by the legislative branch. And if they overstep that by failing to faithfully execute the laws or creating their own laws out of executive orders, the judiciary is supposed to act as a check.

Our constitutional order seems to have completely failed. The legislative branch is in a state of permanent deadlock, except when it comes to tax breaks for the uber wealthy and defense spending. So EOs have expanded in scope and the judiciary has just shrugged and decided that the whole separation of powers and checks and balances thing isn’t worthwhile anymore.

Evergreen tweet

For those that don’t want to give X the traffic

Violence is NOT the answer. The answer is opens history book

uh oh

frantically starts flipping through pages

uh oh. oh no. no no no. uh oh

Another fun thing about tariffs. Those domestic producers that are being protected by tariffs will increase their prices as high as they can.

For example, let’s say an American company can sell a widget for $5 and a Chinese company can sell it for $4.

You slap a 100% tariff on the Chinese widget, now it costs the consumer $8.

The American company can now sell you the widget for the initial $5 and leave $2.99 on the table, or they can jack their price up to $7.99, be cheaper than the Chinese widget, and increase their profits while gesturing around vaguely at “market conditions”

End result, you pay more for the widget, more than it the foreign producer used to sell it for and more than the domestic producers used to sell it for.

Now imagine you make something that has dozens of inputs and that happens to every input.

Truly a golden age

Wait until you get denied healthcare because the AI review board decided you shouldn’t get it.

Paper pushers can absolutely fuck your life over, and AI is primed to replace a lot of those people.

It will be cold comfort to you if you’ve been wrongly classified by an AI in some way that harms you that the AI didn’t intend to harm you.

Anyone remember in 2020 when the people elected the Dems to hold the republicans accountable for their many crimes committed out in the open and they dragged their feet until “oh no, well it’s too late now”

If the Democratic Party can’t deliver things that voters want then the voters stay at home and the democrats are shocked like pikachu.

And beyond racism it is happening in blue cities.

His supporters are primed to think that cities are dangerous places already, and that a city led by liberals is in shambles, and that all the people living there are lawless liberals that deserve punishment.

They are cheering about this because they see it as sending their troops to go hurt others. Whether those people are other because of their race, their religion, their gender, their sexuality, or their political beliefs.

And when these same people find out that something about them or a loved one makes them other they will act shocked. They will protest that they aren’t an other they are in the in-group.

And then they will learn the true nature of fascism. The in-group is constantly shrinking, because there must always be an other to blame. And they will learn that lesson too late.

I remember when I first saw them, the cyberpunk aesthetic was interesting.

Having seen them in real life though, the fog machines and laser light show were definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting.

In real life they look out of place and instead of looking cyberpunk they end up looking more retro-futurism.

To me, at least, as someone that likes the cyberpunk aesthetic, I was kinda excited for the cybertruck too. If not for it specifically, than for it opening the door for other people to adopt more sci-fi designs.

Sadly every time I see one in person I think it may have set things back instead of moving them forward.

Better than most but at the end of the day it would have been nice to give that money to the people that built the company he sold for $1.6B.

I would think there’s a lot of talented people that worked hard to build the value of that company such that he could sell it for a huge amount of money.

Definitely better than buying a yacht, but he still got to decide what to do with the value created by others.

AppNexus employs 1000 people across 5 continents. If the ceo has an extra $1.5B kicking around he could have given every person that helped build AppNexus $1.5M, which is a truly life changing amount of money for your average person.