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.

---

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.

While U.S. tech giants are busy hyping AGI as some kind of all-seeing, world-domination-level superbrain that’ll make us all obsolete, Deepseek is out here flipping the script. They’re not building Skynet; they’re building something far cooler. AI for the rest of us.

Here’s how Deepseek puts it in their repo:

"Why? Because every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey. Daily unlocks begin soon. No ivory towers—just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation.

Maybe AGI is not what I thought it was. Maybe the "General" refers to the general public after all. AI for the general public.

The moment I heard about DeepSeek, I ran to check my Stock Portfolio to see how badly I was affected. Everyone and their grandmother are predicting the downfall of Western Civilization as we know it. Nothing has changed in my portfolio, because of course I was too late to invest in Nvidia. I am still late, but that's not the point here. The point is DeepSeek is the new Open Source model that rivaled ChatGPT on a shoestring budget.

It cost OpenAi upward of $75 million dollars to train their models. For each new iteration, this price continues to grow steadily. Those new models are proprietary to the company, and are not publicly available for anyone to use. We can refer to those models as closed source since only OpenAi has access to them. So when I heard DeepSeek is open source, and their latest model was trained on a budget of $6 million dollars, my first thought was to go ahead and download the training data and run it myself.

And that's where the open source term kinda falls apart. When we think of an AI model is open source, we swallow a gulp of air between open and source. We imagine access to the code, the data, and the inner workings. But in reality, the training data is never available. The data would include all the information scraped from the internet. Be it text, video, images, the majority of which is copyrighted. When we say a model is open source, we are referring to the weights generated through training. It is open weights. (Doesn't have that same ring to it, does it?)

For example, OpenAi or Deepseek will gather data around the web, build/train the model using this data, then call it AI. In the case of OpenAi, they keep the resulting model a secret only they can enjoy. Deepseek releases these models to the public as R1 and V3. Although they are a black box and we can't roll them back into the original data. However, we can still use these open models in our own devices. Anyone with the resources can download the model and run it.

It's not open source in the traditional sense where you have full access to the data. It's open source as in you have access to the model and its weights for free. We probably won't ever get an open source model in the real sense. But for now we will have to settle for "sorta kinda" open source.

As an aside, the market is responding to this news as if Nvidia has lost its edge now that we have a model that can be trained for cheaper. I think this is absurd. It looks more like we had an inefficient algorithm that required 100% CPU to run, now we've come up with a better algorithm that only takes 6% CPU. If anything, we can do more now with less hardware. In fact, now that we have all this hardware available, it will be trivial to do more training. I suspect we will see a leap in the LLama models in the coming days.

As the US moves to ban the TikTok app today, I couldn't help but think about a passage in the book Life of Pi.

In the book, Pi’s family is preparing to leave India, the only home they’ve ever known. The scene lingers with something profound: as the Patel family gets ready to board the ship that will take them to Canada, Pi’s mother, elegant in her finest sari, makes a small but significant gesture.

Mother was apparelled in her finest sari. Her long tress, artfully folded back and attached to the back of her head, was adorned with a garland of fresh jasmine flowers. She looked beautiful. And sad. For she was leaving India, India of the heat and monsoons, of rice fields and the Cauvery River, of coastlines and stone temples, of bullock carts and colourful trucks, of friends and known shopkeepers, of Nehru Street and Goubert Salai, of this and that, India so familiar to her and loved by her. While her men -I fancied myself one already, though I was only sixteen- were in a hurry to get going, were Winnipeggers at heart already, she lingered.

The day before our departure she pointed at a cigarette wallah and earnestly asked, "Should we get a pack or two?"

Father replied, "They have tobacco in Canada. And why do you want to buy cigarettes? We don't smoke."

Yes, they have tobacco in Canada-but do they have Gold Flake cigarettes? Do they have Arun ice cream? Are the bicycles Heroes? Are the televisions Onidas? Are the cars Ambassadors? Are the bookshops Higginbothams'? Such, I suspect, were the questions that swirled in Mother's mind as she contemplated buying cigarettes.

Today, for the first time ever, I've downloaded TikTok. I didn't bother creating an account. I just wanted to have it on my phone before it was removed from the App store.

Do I use TikTok? No. Will I use it if it is reinstated? Probably not. But I downloaded it anyway the same way Mrs Gita Patel wanted to buy cigarettes. It wasn’t about need or use. It was about the loss.

I've always advocated against tiktok. It is a time-sink that drowns our brains in a perpetual state of climax. Every video is designed to bring you to climax, and before it is done, the next video is loaded only to do the same.

But I've downloaded it because it was banned for the wrong reasons. TikTok wasn’t banned for ruining our brains or harvesting our data. It wasn't even banned because of National Security. No. It was banned because it didn't conform to manufactured consent.

The public's opinion may be completely irrational, but in a country that preambles with "We the People" we have silenced the voice of the many to please the few. If the ban is lifted tomorrow, it doesn't change anything. It's the very fact that it is possible to do so for "our protection". It makes you wonder: who’s really being protected here?

Sometimes, it’s not the app that’s dangerous. It’s what happens when we allow our freedoms to be erased, one ban at a time.