So, Apple just dropped its new "Liquid Glass" design language, and yeah, it looks slick. Translucent, fluid, subtly animated. The kind of thing that makes you nod and say, "Yep, that’s Apple." But while everyone’s drooling over the aesthetics, I’m sitting here having a serious Vista flashback. How many CPU cycles is this beauty actually costing us?

Let’s be real: eye candy always comes at a price.

Remember macOS’s dynamic video wallpapers? Gorgeous when you login to a couple windows open on your screen. But open a few Chrome tabs, a Figma project, and a Docker container? Suddenly that serene mountain vista starts stuttering like a flipbook. I’ve had it freeze outright mid-scroll, crashing back to a black image more times than I can count. It’s a microcosm of the problem: When the system’s stressed, the pretty things break first.

Remember Windows Vista’s Aero. That glassy transparency and window animations? A notorious resource hog that brought mid-2000s hardware to its knees. Fancy compositing effects, reflections, blurs, fluid morphs. They chew through GPU/CPU time. Always have.

I have this little web app I built for my kids to help them manage their day. It has those tiles that animate when you hover on them. Looks buttery smooth on my Ryzen 9 and NVIDIA laptop where I develop it. But the app runs on Raspberry Pi 4. The moment a single tile wiggles? The entire UI crawls. Why? Because the tiles blur the background. Now a blur is nothing compared to physics-based animation like Liquid Glass suggests.

Here’s my hot take: Apple knows exactly what they’re doing. They’re shipping Liquid Glass now because the M4 (and M3, M2...) is absurdly overpowered for what 90% of users actually do. Checking mail? Browsing? Streaming? Your M4 is bored out of its silicon mind. Liquid Glass is Apple’s way of saying, "Fine, you’re not pushing the CPU? We’ll burn those idle cycles to make your dock shimmer."

It's stealth bloat.

You might not feel the drag today. That’s the point! The M4’s raw power is the perfect smokescreen. But those cycles aren’t free:

• Battery life? Subtle drain adds up.
• Thermals? More work = more heat = more fan spin (even if quieter now).
• Future-proofing? What runs smooth on an M4 today might chug on baseline M5 in 3 years when macOS demands more.
• Real workloads? Try rendering a 4K video while those fluid animations dance. Suddenly, those "idle cycles" aren’t so idle.

Liquid Glass isn’t a "deal breaker." It’s Apple flexing their hardware muscle. But let’s not pretend it’s computationally weightless. This is Vista Aero wearing a $2000 cashmere sweater. Smoother, quieter, but still making your hardware work harder just to look cool.

Is it worth it? For Apple’s vibe? Probably. But next time your fan whispers or your battery dips faster than expected… maybe blame the glass.

TL;DR: Liquid Glass is gorgeous tech debt. Your M4 can afford it… for now. But never forget: fancy pixels demand fancy math.

Whether you're an economist or not, a financial professional or not, it's still your money that's being affected.

Like many people, I've avoided looking at my 401k these past few weeks. Well, I peeked, and it's all in the red.

There are so many interpretations of what's going on. It's either a genius move or the work of a madman. While we wait to figure it out, we have to live through the chaos and hope it works out for the best.

These were my thoughts amidst the tariff wars. Thoughts I kept to myself because our new political reality is that every other week we move on to a new problem.

I'd like to understand it better for myself so I can plan for my own future. I don't just want to think positively; instead, I want to analyze the current reality and see how I can still come out on top.

First, I'd like to compare tariffs as a tool in the midst of a crowded market of tools. Let's symbolically represent tariffs as Twitter. When Twitter came out, it was an odd addition to the book of social media. It only supported 140 characters per tweet, that includes spaces. That was completely ridiculous in the era of blogs, Facebook, and videos. In a world where you could express yourself freely, someone came in to limit that expression to 140 characters. That's a sentence or two, or just a single thought. Somehow, Twitter survived and thrived in that era.

Through these barebones limitations that forced you to be concise and straight to the point, creativity started emerging. People found a way.

People started posting links. These were too short, so URL shorteners came to life. Twitter didn't support images, so people found ways to share them. Even retweets didn't exist, and people came up with solutions. It forced Twitter to augment their platform with all these tools created by the community. Today, Twitter is a glorified blog engine, but if it had started this way, it would never have found the same success.

Now back to tariffs. They're creating the same restrictions that Twitter imposed on itself. They will force America to look internally and find solutions. Not because tariffs are a genius idea, but because that's the reality we're facing now.

And a reminder: Twitter is not the most successful social media platform. In fact, it is collapsing in on itself. I see tariffs the same way. As something that can only exist temporarily, or they will end up destroying the very things they're trying to create.

This probably happened to you. Halfway through making a point, someone swoops in to correct an irrelevant detail. “Eve never ate an apple.” “Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’” Suddenly, the conversation shifts from substance to semantics, and the original argument fades into the ether. It’s a small victory for the nitpicker, a hollow one for the rest of us.

Take the story of Eve. In a college debate, I recounted her biblical act of rebellion—only to be interrupted by a classmate adamant that the forbidden fruit was not an apple. The Bible doesn’t specify, of course. But my point wasn’t about apples; it was about choice, consequence, human nature. Yet the room fixated on fruit taxonomy. To salvage the moment, I quipped, “At least we know it’s not a banana,” and the laughter buried the debate. Victory? Maybe. But the bigger idea was lost.

This pattern repeats with Marie Antoinette. People love to clarify that she likely never uttered “Let them eat cake.” Fine. But does it matter? The phrase remains because it crystallizes a truth: the monarchy’s grotesque detachment from the starving masses. The French Revolution wasn’t sparked by a misquote, it was fueled by systemic indifference. The guillotine didn’t care about semantics.

Fast-forward to today’s elites, who’ve mastered the art of symbolic distraction. Take Blue Origin’s recent “historic” all-women spaceflight. Bezos’ team called it a triumph, a payload of “inspiration.” But the world rolled its eyes. Why? Because launching millionaires (or carefully curated celebrities) into suborbital space while we can't afford eggs, feels less like progress and more like a galactic “Let them eat cake.”

Remember when William Shatner’s took his space joyride on Blue Origin? Captain Kirk returned shaken, describing an overwhelming grief. The vast darkness of space juxtaposed with Earth’s fragile beauty. “It felt like a funeral,” he said. But his existential clarity was drowned out by champagne pops and PR applause. The script demanded celebration, not introspection.

The latest Blue Origin flight learned from that mistake. This time, the crew chirped about feeling “super connected to love.” An empty soundbite for the cameras. No messy emotions, no uncomfortable truths. Just a shiny, sanitized spectacle. It’s Marie Antoinette’s ghost, whispering: Let them watch space tourism.

Power Loves Deflection. Whether it’s quibbling over apples vs. “fruit,” dismissing a misattributed quote, or masking inequality with rocket launches, the goal is the same. Distract from the rot beneath the surface. Symbols and semantics become tools to obscure accountability, to replace substance with spectacle.

People see through the cake eventually. The French Revolution guillotined a queen. Today’s public is responding cynicism and memes. Real change demands more than correcting myths or launching payloads of platitudes. It requires grappling with the apples and the orchards. The systems, the disparities, the uncomfortable truths we’d rather laugh away.

Next time someone interrupts to say “Eve never ate an apple,” ask: “But did she eat the truth?”

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TL;DR: Nitpicking semantics and staging PR stunts are age-old tactics to dodge real issues. Whether it’s apples, cake, or spaceflights, the lesson remains: don’t let shiny distractions eclipse the rot they’re meant to hide.

Let's be honest, the financial landscape feels… weird lately. For years, the mantra for most investors has been clear: diversify, buy stable index funds, and let time work its magic. It wasn't the most thrilling advice, but it was generally sound. The idea was that the underlying fundamentals of the economy and the companies within it would eventually drive long-term returns.

But what happens when those fundamentals start to feel like they're shifting beneath our feet? Recent events, particularly the increasing chatter and implementation of tariffs under the new administration, are throwing a wrench into the traditional playbook. Suddenly, the predictable seems less so.

Just a blink ago, we were all navigating the dizzying heights of the AI bubble. Slap "AI" onto your company name, and poof, your stock price would seemingly levitate. Sound familiar? It should. We've seen this movie before. Remember the crypto craze? Long Island Iced Tea's audacious (and ultimately short-lived) rebrand to Long Blockchain Corp, which sent its stock soaring by a ridiculous 380%, serves as a stark reminder of market irrationality fueled by a trending buzzword.

Now, with tariffs dominating the economic conversation, can we really be surprised if we soon see companies tacking on "Tariff-Proof" or simply "Tariff" to their names, hoping to catch a similar wave of speculative enthusiasm? It feels less like a far-fetched prediction and more like a grim inevitability.

The unsettling truth is that the volatility isn't confined to the usual suspects – the meme stocks and SPACs. Even well-established companies, the supposed pillars of stability with solid fundamentals, are starting to behave like unpredictable slot machines. The daily swings can be stomach-churning, leaving even seasoned investors feeling queasy.

My usual instinct in times of market turbulence is to seek shelter, to find those pockets of stability and ride out the storm. But the chilling reality is, where do we go? With the pervasive nature of potential tariff impacts, it feels like there's no truly "safe" harbor. It's only a matter of time before the ripple effects of these policies find their way into every corner of the market, perhaps even under the perceived safety of our investment beds.

This leaves us in a weird position. Are we, by default, being pushed into the realm of meme stock investing? Is chasing fleeting trends and hoping for viral momentum the only way to potentially outpace the uncertainty and potential erosion of our savings?

The principles of value investing and long-term growth feel increasingly challenged in this environment. While I desperately hope this isn't a final farewell to sensible investing, the current climate feels like we all need to develop Diamond hands and dab our way into retirement.

I drove with confidence. I paid no mind to my car since I regularly took it for maintenance, it passed the smog check, and everything was up to date. My insurance was on auto-pay, and I was never stopped by the police.

One day, I checked my bank account, casually calculating my expenses. I noticed something strange. Something was missing. I looked for the charges from my car insurance, which I had set to autopay more than a year before. But no charges were present. I knew how much it cost; I assumed it must have been under one of those weirdly named transactions. But try as I might, I couldn't find it.

I looked through my email to find the last interaction I had with them. The last email thanking me for charging my card was more than a year old. I ran to my car, grabbed a copy of my car insurance card, and called the number on the back. The number rang and rang, and went to a voicemail. It didn't sound like a corporate number.

I went to their website. The website gave me a Microsoft IIS server "404 Not Found" page. I googled their name to no avail. But then, I found an old email from them. A farewell email. It stated that they were going out of business and provided the phone number of an alternative company.

My stomach dropped. The realization hit me like a bucket of ice water—I had been driving for a year completely uninsured. Every trip to the grocery store, every commute to work, every weekend drive to visit family—all of it had been one police stop away from disaster. What if I had gotten into an accident? What if someone had been hurt? The financial implications alone made me dizzy.

That night, I barely slept. First thing in the morning, I called the alternative company to get coverage, but I still needed to drive to work that day. I got into my car, now seeing it not as my trusty vehicle but as a liability on wheels. The wheel felt stiff under my sweaty palms. The gas pedal seemed to have two or three extra coils that made it hard to press with my suddenly leaden foot. All of a sudden, all the cars next to me were police cars. Was that siren in the distance coming for me? Did that officer look at me a little too long at the stoplight?

Ignorance was truly bliss. But setting my account to paperless and auto-pay is something I avoid to this day. I'm not saving the forest by going paperless. I'll provide my own chunk of wood if need be. But I'd like to receive my correspondence by mail and set an alert to pay my bills on time. It's a little effort, but the reward is, I don't take the risk of driving a full year without insurance.

I read this article asking, "What if we made advertising illegal?" At first, I thought, "No way, that’s crazy." But the more I sat with it, the more I realized: ads are everywhere, and they’re making everything worse.

But why? It makes perfect sense. The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear, and so would the mechanisms that allow both commercial and political actors to create personalized, reality-distorting bubbles:

• Clickbait, listicles, and affiliate marketing schemes would become worthless overnight.
• Algorithm-driven platforms like Instagram and TikTok that harvest and monetize attention, destroying youth, would lose their economic foundation.
• Facebook, X, Google, YouTube—all would cease to exist in their current forms.

Maybe an outright ban is too extreme—after all, we’ve built our whole economy around ads. But at the very least, we should heavily regulate the hell out of them. Here’s why:

1. Ads Are Psychological Warfare

Advertising isn’t just telling you about a product—it’s hacking your brain to make you want things you don’t need.

• Social media feeds you endless "engagement"-optimized trash because ads pay for it.
• YouTube prioritizes rage-bait and low-effort slop because that’s what keeps you watching.
• Google buries honest reviews under sponsored listings.

If ads were illegal (or at least way more restricted), companies would have to compete on actual quality, not just who has the biggest marketing budget.

2. Word of Mouth Works Better Anyway

"But how will businesses find customers?" The same way they did for thousands of years: people talking.

• Google didn’t grow because of ads—it grew because it was so much better than other search engines that people told each other.
• Tesla didn’t run a single ad for over a decade. People bought their cars because they were cool, not because of a billboard.
• Small businesses thrived before Facebook ads existed—they just had to make good stuff and let customers spread the word.

Imagine a world where you discover products because they’re actually good, not because some algorithm shoved them in your face.

3. Ads Are Killing the Internet (And Maybe Democracy)

• Clickbait, fake news, and outrage porn exist because ads reward attention, not truth.
• Populist politicians buy microtargeted ads to spread lies without journalists fact-checking them.
• Every website is bloated with trackers and pop-ups because they need to squeeze every penny from ads.

If ads were banned (or strictly regulated), maybe we’d get:

• Actual journalism instead of "10 SHOCKING SECRETS" listicles.
• Social media that doesn’t radicalize people for profit.
• Websites that load fast because they’re not stuffed with 50 tracking scripts.

4. Ads Make Us Miserable

• They fuel endless consumerism, convincing us we need to keep buying junk to be happy.
• They ruin public spaces with billboards, spam emails, and unskippable YouTube ads.
• They turn us into products, with every click tracked and sold to the highest bidder.

We banned cigarette ads because they were harmful. Why not do the same for ads that push fast fashion, junk food, and predatory loans?

Okay, Maybe Not a Full Ban… But Close

I get it—some businesses do need a way to tell people they exist. But instead of letting ads run wild, we could:

• Ban targeted ads (no more creepy tracking).
• Ban ads in public spaces (no more Times Square sensory overload).
• Force platforms to disclose paid promotions (no more disguised "sponsored content").
• Tax ad revenue to fund better public information sources.

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What If Ads Just… Didn’t Exist

Imagine walking down a street with no billboards. Opening Instagram with no sponsored posts. Watching YouTube with no pre-roll ads.

It sounds like a utopia because we’ve been trained to think ads are inevitable. But they’re not. We built this system—we can tear it down.

At the very least, we should stop letting ads run the world.

Twelve years. That’s how long this blog has been running, a surprisingly long time, longer than many of my other endeavors. I can’t help but think about the fact that I started it on April 1st: April Fools’ Day, of all days. Maybe it’s a cosmic joke whose punchline still eludes me. Or maybe it’s just a conversation starter. Either way, the blog is here to stay.

This year, I made a bold promise: to write at least 100 posts. So far, I’m on track, publishing every other day since 2025 began. And somehow, it hasn’t felt overwhelming. In fact, it’s been fun.

Twelve years is also long enough to notice how much I’ve repeated myself. Many things that once seemed important no longer hold the same weight. The technology landscape has shifted countless times, yet here we are, still writing JavaScript. Back in 2013, AI wasn’t even mainstream.

After twelve years, I’ve started forgetting some of my older writings. While I stand by my past stances, my life has drifted in new directions, and with that, some convictions have softened. Technology, at its core, remains for humans. And hype always fades with a whimper.

Strangely enough, I’m enjoying reading my own blog. If nothing else, it’s a snapshot of my life. Even if this blog eventually fades away, it will always have at least one committed reader: me.

Happy 12th birthday, blog. Here’s to another twelve.

Everytime someone says "ok but don't judge me" I like to jokingly respond: I will absolutely judge you.

I never understood what it means not to judge. We absolutely judge people for everything.

• If you say something, you will be judged.
• If you say nothing, you will be judged
• If you show up, you will be judged.
• If you don't show up, you will be judged.
• If you write, you will be judged.
• If you don't write, you will be judged.

We judge books by their covers. We judge people by what they wear, how they talk, how they look.

The virtue is not in the lack of judgement. It's in how we react to judgement.

uBlock Origin Was Removed from Chrome... Not!

This morning, I was greeted with a message that uBlock Origin has been disabled on Google Chrome. It is "no longer supported." My very first thought was: "Over my cold dead body!"

uBlock Origin is my go-to extension. The same way I used to install Chrome for those pesky users still on Internet Explorer, I install uBlock on any browser I touch. I used to care that it breaks some websites, but not anymore. If uBlock breaks your website, it's probably for a good reason.

uBlock blocks ads. But why would I want to block ads in the first place?

Ads are invasive in more ways than one. They hijack the browsing experience, they track your every move, and they degrade performance. If you want to make a living from ads, that's fine, but count me out. If you want to block me from using your website because of this, that's fine too.

Google, being an ad company, has been threatening to get rid of uBlock for a long time. But they never said so directly. Instead, it's veiled behind "security measures," Manifest V3, and whatnot. The reality is, if ads weren't so bad, we wouldn't be using tools to block them in the first place.

My argument is simple: I will block ads. If you remove the tools I use to do so, as long as the computer belongs to me, I'll find other ways to block ads. It doesn't have to be rational—it's just what I'm going to do.

And no, it doesn't matter that Google doesn't "support" uBlock anymore. You can just re-enable it for now. If that fails in the future, you can always download it directly from the source and manually install it. If that fails, switch browsers.

We know what a web without ads looks like, and we are not going back.

Remote work has become the norm, and for many teams, seamless communication is essential to getting things done. But what happens when your primary tool goes down?

Just this morning, Slack was down, and I had a realization—my team had no backup way to communicate. No email thread, no alternative chat, nothing. We were completely cut off, waiting for Slack to come back online.

It wasn’t always like this. When I first started as a developer, communication wasn’t centralized. Everyone had their own preferred chat app. AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Facebook Chat, MSN, Pidgin. It didn’t matter. I used the Empathy client on Ubuntu, juggling Bonjour and Yahoo seamlessly. If one service went down, we’d just switch to another without skipping a beat.

But today? That flexibility is gone. Chat protocols are a solved problem, yet we now live in the era of walled gardens. Every service is proprietary, locking users into closed ecosystems. Just look at Apple, doing everything possible to keep iMessage from working with non-Apple devices.

Rather than just complaining about it, though, let this be a lesson: never put all your eggs in one basket. If your team relies entirely on a single communication tool, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Having a backup channel—even if it’s rarely used—ensures that when an outage happens, you’re not left scrambling.

So take a few minutes today to set up an alternative. Your future self will thank you when Slack (or Teams, or Discord) inevitably goes down again.