August and September. Google unveiled the Pixel 10 in August. Now it's September, it is Apple’s turn with the iPhone 17.

These are not commercials. These are productions. Hollywood gloss, cinematic light.

Jimmy Fallon laughing on cue. Job titles growing longer by the year. Influencers, celebrities, and everywhere you look: Gemini, Gemini, Gemini.

Then Tim Cook, measured, polished. Apple the first, Apple the next. Don’t bother with Netflix & Chill. Just tune in to the event with your date. Apple Intelligence, still missing in action.

But then, the phone is in your hand. You set it up. You sign in. The apps and data return like old furniture. You try the new camera. Three test shots of your living room.

Right then, a notification blinks. Framed by the beautiful liquid glass is a newsletter you never unsubscribed from. Your friend’s. It's been years, and they aren't giving up on their recipe website despite Google now conveniently framing it behind AI overview.

August is September. You are where you began.

On September 8th, 18 npm packages were compromised with malicious code. These packages are very popular. They receive an average of 2 billion downloads every week. If you are not sure whether you are affected, you can run this grep command on your repository to search for the malicious code:

grep -r _0x112fa8 .

If it returns any results, you are in trouble. It's already concerning that this hack was only possible through social engineering, but it targeted the type of person who would be the most vigilant. This is to say, if maintainers of extremely popular npm packages can fall for phishing, you need to exercise extreme vigilance.

But there is also another issue going unnoticed: 2 billion downloads a week. Whenever we run our pipelines, we run npm i or npm ci. This is common practice, and it is also how we end up with compromised code, or broken builds when we know that our pre-build code is safe. Before we build our code, we download all packages from the internet. We place our trust in the package manager and hope for the best. But why do we need to redownload code every single time?

Close to a decade ago, the programmer who published the left-pad library on NPM decided to delete his code. This was a trivial library that solved a trivial problem. But since thousands of other repositories depended on it, the deletion broke the build process of thousands of other projects. A large part of the tech industry ground to a halt as NPM scrambled to revive the package. None of these projects were downloading left-pad for the first time, why didn't they just cache it?

Why don't we all cache it? Why do we redownload the same packages over and over several times a day with the potential of injecting security vulnerabilities? Why do these packages need to be downloaded 2 billion times a week, when they change only a handful of times? Do we even need the latest versions without vetting them first?

Maybe it is time to revisit this practice. We need to download packages once and reuse them until we manually update them. This is not an unavoidable problem. We can resolve it. There is no need for packages to be downloaded 2 billion times in one week, thrown away, then redownloaded again. It's a waste of bandwidth and a point of entry for security vulnerabilities.

Update: And exactly a week later, there is a new attack on 40 NPM packages.

Aye, gather ‘round the fire, lads an’ lasses, an’ I’ll tell ye of the True AI Scotsman. A myth as grand as the Highlands themselves, yet as slippery as an eel in Loch Ness.

He stands tall. Och, taller than Ben Nevis, his jaw chiseled by the gods o’ Silicon, his hands strong as tempered steel, yet gentle as a lamb when promptin’ just so. His eyes gleam with the cold fire o’ perfect logic, an’ his voice? Aye, ’tis smoother than aged whisky, never stutterin’, never doubtin’, never wrong.

They say he walks the moors at dawn, his code flawless, his reasoning pure. No hallucination dare cross his path, no bias stains his noble heart. He kens every query before it’s asked, an’ answers in verses as clear as a bell.

But here’s the rub, ye see... ye’ll never meet him.

Every time ye think ye’ve glimpsed him, when the chatbot strings a fine reply, when the image generator paints a bonnie scene, the elders o’ tech shake their heads. "Nay, laddie, that’s no’ the real AI Scotsman! He’s grander still! More powerful! Just wait for the next model!"

An’ so the legend grows, shiftin’ like mist on the glen. The True AI Scotsman is always just beyond the next upgrade, the next paradigm, the next moonshot from the wizards o’ Mountain View.

An’ if ye dare say, "But this one failed me!" Why, they’ll clap ye on the back an’ sigh, "Ach, ye just havena met the true one yet."

So raise a glass, friends. To the finest myth ever sold. May he forever remain just out o’ reach.

Slàinte mhath! ?

In today's social media-saturated world, does it feel like your memory is failing you? It's not that you can't remember anything, but rather that you're constantly distracted while trying to remember.

Just a few years ago, I had a nightly ritual. Before drifting off to sleep, I'd mentally replay my entire day, trying to recall every single detail. As a single person with no kids at the time, this luxury of free time allowed me to meticulously reconstruct most of my day. I'd remember the specific order of my morning routine, the unexpected comment from a colleague, or even the color of the car that cut me off on the way home.

Fast forward a few years, and when I tried this exercise again, I was often asleep before I could even recall what I had for breakfast! But giving up isn't an option. I've committed to doing this every evening, and you'd be surprised how quickly the faces of complete strangers or forgotten details begin to materialize in your thoughts. This simple act forces my brain to exercise forgotten pathways, much like when I was younger. The mind is a beautiful thing, and I'm sure this exercise has a scientific name. Maybe cognitive recall?

For me, the benefits are profound. This practice helps me focus in an age of constant distraction. It helps me remember things people said to me, preventing those "what was that important detail?" moments. It even helps me recall promises I made and then forgot about. It's all there, stored within our brains, if we just give ourselves the time and quiet space to access it. This nightly mental workout helps keep the distracted mind at bay, allowing for deeper engagement with my own thoughts and experiences.

Here is how I do it, perhaps you can try as well:

• Start with the first thing you remember when you wake up. Did you check the time? Was it your alarm that rang?
• Which side of the bed did you get up from?
• Where was your tooth brush when you got to the bathroom?
• What was the notification on your phone?
• Who did you speak to first? What did you say?

If your brain was mushed like mine, every step of the way it tried to distract me. But I remain persistent and try to recall as much as possible. Our brain rarely gets the time to think without us bombarding it with media. This is a moment for it to shine and explore itself. Let me know how it goes for you.

I'm doing my best to embrace vibe coding, but here's where I draw the line.

Picture this scenario. You receive a PR to review. You look at the code and don't understand what it does. You ask the developer who wrote it, let's call him the "viber". You ask the viber to explain his changes. His response? Can't tell you what the code does either.

Sure, we might agree on the high-level goal: "this PR will fix bug X." That's a start. But here's the problem: both you as the reviewer and the viber now have to reverse-engineer the solution together. You're both staring at code trying to figure out not just whether it works, but what it's actually supposed to do.

This breaks down for a simple reason: if you're pushing a large PR that you can't fully explain, you won't be able to help anyone else understand it either. When bugs inevitably surface, when edge cases emerge, or when someone needs to modify this code six months from now, the viber becomes a bottleneck they can't even unclog themselves.

Vibe coding has its place: rapid prototyping, creative exploration, getting unstuck when overthinking blocks progress. But the moment you ask someone else to review, approve, and maintain your code, you cross from personal experimentation into collaborative responsibility. At that point, being able to articulate what your code does isn't just helpful—it's essential.

The line between creative coding and professional responsibility runs right through the PR process. Tread softly.

"Is Juneteenth even a real holiday? What is it even? It sounds made up."

Have you found yourself asking these questions? Maybe in private? With a group of other people who agreed and didn't know much about it? What if I tell you that you don't need to know much about it to celebrate and give people the time and space to make the most of it? Every holiday is made up. This might shock you, but even calendars are made up.

But just because something is made up, it doesn't mean it isn't significant to someone else. Traveling from country to country, you might just find yourself where your most important holiday doesn't even register in people's mind. A holiday is significant when people want to gather and celebrate it.

Now that we got that out of the way, Happy Juneteenth.

So, Apple just dropped its new "Liquid Glass" design language, and yeah, it looks amazing. Translucent, fluid, subtly animated. You don't need to see a logo to know that this is Apple's product. 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?

Great graphics always comes at a price.

Remember macOS's dynamic video wallpapers? I do. On my work computer, running company's policy, I leave the laptop open for 5 minutes and the screen saver starts. It's gorgeous, and animates through the login screen and into your normal wallpaper. 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. When the system is stressed, the pretty things break first.

Remember Windows Vista’s Aero? It had glassy transparency and window animations. It looked great when you freshly installed windows, or had a beefy machine. But it was 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."

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. Your battery life will take a tool when those subtle drains add up. Your laptop is quiet now, but as you spend more time with it and do serious work, your fans will start to spin. If we continue with this pattern, what runs smooth on an M4 today might chug on baseline M5 in 3 years when macOS demands more. 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.

If you need a laptop, it's totally worth it. But next time your fan whispers or your battery dips faster than expected… maybe blame the glass.

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.

In a college debate, I recounted Eve's biblical act of rebellion. I was trying to make a point, only to be interrupted by a classmate adamant that the forbidden fruit was not an apple. "The Bible never said it was an Apple." She said. 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 wasn't a banana," and the laughter buried the debate. Victory? Maybe. But the bigger idea was lost.

With Marie Antoinette, people love to clarify that she likely never said "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 was fueled by systemic indifference. It had nothing to do with the misquote. 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. They wanted celebration, not some old man's 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.

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. Power loves deflection.

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. Next time someone interrupts to say "Eve never ate an apple," I'll respond with an equally silly question: "But did she eat the truth?"

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.

The financial landscape feels… weird lately. For years, the mantra for most investors has been 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? Because of tariffs under the new administration, the old rules don't make sense anymore. We are throwing a wrench into the traditional playbook.

Just a blink ago, we were trying to navigate the AI bubble. Slap "AI" onto your company name and the stock price levitate. Remember the crypto craze? Long Island Iced Tea rebranded to Long Blockchain Corp, which sent its stock soaring by a ridiculous 380%. It was irrational and 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 doesn't feel so far fetched, does it?

The difference this time is that the volatility isn't confined to meme stocks and SPACS. Now, even well-established companies are starting to behave like unpredictable slot machines. You can't just ignore it anymore, we are all affected.

My usual instinct in times of market turbulence is to seek shelter, to find those pockets of stability and ride out the storm. But where do we go? 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. You can't even hid your money under your bed with inflation rising.

We are now in this weird position. By default, we are all 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 are challenged in this new 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.