I don’t care what happens to Ukraine, just don’t want us to send another dime. Hoping it can just end soon, which is more likely now than it was with previous administration.

Tariffs are a terrible idea though, but would take them if we got rid of the income tax.

As of now DOGE and Trump are doing exactly what I hoped, and I’ll check back in a year and see if I’m worried.

$4,700,000,000,000 income taxes

$...100,000,000,000 tariffs

I know I have zero worries about having to code in a new language or framework with the ability to get answers so quickly to my dumb questions, but maybe that is because I’m still choosing languages and frameworks that are fairly popular and have so much online documentation that the LLMs know about them, and if something is really esoteric maybe the help wouldn’t be that good?

This is made worse if there are breaking changes in a new release that you are using. Even when the thing is popular, like Svelte, it was giving me outdated information before the introduction of Runes that often led to deadend packages or solutions that resulted in odd performance.

I'm sure eventually it'll be resolved, but ultimately I would only recommend people sticking to more traditional languages and frameworks that have been around for many years now and are relatively unchanging in order to benefit from chatGPT. Basically, the more projects you find using that thing on github, the better your outcome is going to be with current LLMs.

They have definitely chilled out on "reinventing the wheel" quite a few years ago.

Unless maybe you are doing something radically different, like web development to graphics drivers or something.

Development skills are typically very transferable between languages, libraries, etc. And I think it’s healthy for developers to branch out and try new tech stacks from time to time.

I’d be more worried about a developer who doesn’t have the versatility to pick up something new. Because they probably also haven’t invested the time and effort to really understand what they’ve worked on in the past.

Rather than the specific language, I’m more thinking of the domain, meaning ‘web devs who know go’ being a smaller cohort than ‘webdevs who know react’.

If a developer is already an expert in the back end using Go, then great. Maybe they’ll bring a different perspective when they work on the front end. And they will probably enjoy a new challenge.

Web development is not so hard that a good developer can’t learn the basics in a couple months, especially with some mentoring.

There are so many things and concepts, multiple must-know languages, browser quirks, some networking knowledge, CORS, etc. If you do use an "industry-strength" backend framework then the complexity surely drops, e.g. it will handle injections and stuff, but not having heard at least a bit about what your framework does for you, and reinventing the wheel can go really bad really fast.

But I think it’s a sign of an unhealthy or immature team if it is unable to onboard and train new developers.

You are right that a new developer could easily make a lot of mistakes, but it is the responsibility of the senior developers on the team to give feedback and review the code of less experienced members.

Maybe this is what will get people to stop reinventing wheels.

It will be like looking for a job as Assembly programmer, when everyone else has moved into high level programming languages.

Better improve those architecture design and social skills.

Sure, it may know the language, but God save us from all the hallucinating in case of some niche lib

Nice job whipping up something so simple, yet elegant, so fast.

This is what I love about LLM tools like cursor, it makes the effort to just try and build something so low, you can just try it one night, and can make cool things that might not have been built otherwise.

But all of this has nothing to do with the debt.

We're sending in the young guns to save on government spending because trump won partly on "Biden ruined the economy". The government spending leads to the increase of government debt. Or is the debt coming from a separate source?

Passing laws to make it harder to vote, and easier to challenge a persons voter registration and ballot, and then running an operative campaign to specifically target voters on the other side of the political spectrum is a bit different than "just politics". Legal, sure. Ethical, moral, fair, absolutely not.

I’m all for fairness. For example I think we should weight votes, where everyone gets one vote for each dollar of taxes they pay.

I also want to see all landlords structure rental contracts so that the renter pays the property taxes, if rent was 2k a month but there are $500 in property taxes a month, rent would become $1500 plus $500 property taxes. That way the immediate effects of voting for tax increases is felt acutely and their blame can go on themselves instead of their “greedy landlord”.

You are joking right? Honest, question, what life experiences have you had that make you think that this would be a good idea. It would effectively mean a handful of billionaires would control the country.

> I also want to see all landlords structure rental contracts so that the renter pays the property taxes

It is a free market. Outside of a handful of places with rent control, nothing is stopping them from doing that. And if you think splitting out property taxes as a separate line item will somehow make tenants think that landlords, the vast majority of whom increase their rents to the absolute maximum that the market will bear, are somehow not greedy, I think you have a pretty bad handle on what it is like to be in the renter class.

Is that not what we have already. Do you really think your vote matters?

I don’t think my tenants ever thought I was greedy. And I don’t think a vast majority of landlords who aren’t some big corporation are. Though people will think they are regardless, so just want them to sure the accusation of greed with that of the bureaucrats, and the public schools who simply flush money down the toilet.

I think if landlords structured rental contracts that way (and maybe give a $50 discount if you choose that option), you will see a huge amount of school levies fail which is a net win for society.

At least in the current setup, they are required to maintain and fund a vast propaganda apparatus, lobbying efforts, and political organizations in order to secure their power. And even with all that effort, they still only have a tenuous control over our institutions. Your proposal would literally just hand the keys over to them.

> I don’t think my tenants ever thought I was greedy

As a lifelong renter, who has for the most part had relatively good relationships with my landlords over the years, I can assure you that they do. At the very least, they probably don't have a very positive opinion of you, even if they are nice to you in person. After decades of financialization of our housing market, we now have an entire swath of our population locked out of the housing market. And if you think these folks like handing over a significant chunk of their income each month to a bunch of rent-seekers, I think you are solely mistaken.

Dang, I guess I should’ve just gotten all the money I could’ve if tenants feel that way regardless.

Trump won because enough people were sick of the garbage they heard from the progressive left being crammed down their throats.

How people can think a billionaire like him relates to the average guy, is quite crazy, but just shows how incredibly bad the democrats are at actually relating to the people.

I didn’t vote for him the first two times, but after I saw his immediate response to the assassination attempt, I knew I would this time. There are millions like me.

I’m all for making it more difficult to vote. Let’s just be ruled by a set of elites like we already are, but at least be honest about it.

If I get what I truly want it won’t really matter as much who is president because the federal government would have like a 1/10 of its power and a 1/10 of its budget, and states and local municipalities would have far more say. Ultimately I think the 18th century anti-federalists were right. I hope Trump just lays waste to the federal government agencies and completely neuters it.

Numbers are published by U.S. Elections Assistance Commission. Read it if you want.

They'll dismantle the federal state alright. But not for the reasons you think or want.

https://www.vcinfodocs.com/venture-capital-extremism

https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no

That would be completely illegal and unconstitutional. If that's the way things are going to go, you're definitely not going to like what will happen when the power is wielded by someone who doesn't align with you politically.

And I've got a brand new shipment of bridges to sell you if you think Trump is out here about to neuter the power of the federal government. He is consolidating power.

At least it is enjoyable to see progressives squirm. And to gut dept of education and usaid, both very solid ideas so far.

He also signed into law bills that were passed explicitly to reduce the president's power because of the way he saw Trump abuse it.

> And to gut dept of education and usaid, both very solid ideas so far.

You may agree with these ideas now, but you should go through thr proper channels to get rid of them. Otherwise, things you like will just disappear by fiat the first time a progressive is in office.

Your president has threatened war on Denmark, a close ally to my country (think your relationship with Canada until he started threatening them with war too). If I knew nothing else about him that would be enough.

I’ve been using American web hosts since the ’90s. I’m currently in the process of moving away from Digital Ocean to a European host. I’m cancelling as many other services (Netflix, Strava, etc) as possible. Not much, about $300-400 less per month from me to the US.

I’m happy I got to visit New York a few years ago.

But I appreciate dictator Trump. If they wanted to go to war with Denmark they would just crush them openly, rather than as they do today with countries who disagree with them, where we covertly undermine them to get what we want.

Though maybe I’m a bit of an enigma, I don’t think the US should’ve declared independence from Britain, and wish we still had a monarchy. Problem is kings need to be noble, which none of our politicians, including Trump, seem to be.

Oh well. Peace to you on the other side of the pond.

I think most of what Trump is attempting will work out poorly, for America, Trump, and the world in general. I can't prove that and there are so many presumptions in my world view, my estimation might be incorrect.

Trump was elected. I think a lot of that support came from people who had been voting for either Kang or Kodos for years and knew the outcome of that wasn't going to be what they wanted. I believe those people know exactly what kind of person Trump is, but that Trump acting in his own self interest might cause government action that is at least not-as-bad as the alternative of a perpetual status quo.

I don't think that is the case, but I think it would be unreasonable to declare that someone who believes something different is wrong simply because I think my opinion objectively carries more weight.

I appreciate your post, and I think there is some truth to what you're saying. The problem is that... It's hard bordering on impossible for me to process what these people see good in what he's doing. I've tried, mind you, I've really truly tried. But this whole thing sounds insane to me. There is no way for me to erase the bigger picture from my mind that I get to the point... "yeah, he's doing a good job."

The second point is I feel a lot of these people are NOT arguing in good faith. If someone is not arguing in good faith, being "understanding" would just embolden them.

Honestly, this whole thing makes my head explode.

An example I like: they deport a bunch of Colombians here illegally, Socialist Colombian President refuses to let the plane land, Trump immediately says we are going to hammer them with tariffs and other things, Colombian President apologizes and says they won’t get in the way.

He is just exerting American dominance openly. He took us out of the WHO, ends the dumb climate accord. The idea that we should put our own people first.

Now it all might blow up in our face as the world gets sick of the American bully, and that will crush our empire, but I’m also ok with that, because it might be the only thing that will allow us to rebuild from the ground up.

As it is the United States military is so dominant around the world, NATO should just be considered an overseas American army for example, and Trump is essentially just exerting the us dominance in a blunt way, but it has always been wielded, but is always prettied up to not sound like what it is. A giant military empire of force. Trump is just showing us what has always been behind the curtain of the US government, and the US use of power.

I think long term it will weaken the American empire, but will also make us less reliant on globalization, but I think if all the individual EU countries took a mindset of “our citizens first” like Trump it will be a good thing.

What happened with the Colombians was the President said "you cannot land them here in chains and handcuffs" and Trump threatened tariffs, then cancelled the tariffs, then caved into the Colombian President's demands and removed the handcuffs from the Colombian citizens. Fox News and conservative media spun this as a "win" because Trump made a threat and also because they misunderstood why Colombia refused the plane.

Mostly we pass as many laws as possible, then only enforce them when it is politically expedient.

The government in passing so many laws has made the law a joke. Maybe the right wing are the progressives now and they’re just going to tear everything down?

I’m enjoying the show. Can’t wait to see what Musk digs up.

I think rails is quite powerful and great for prototyping. But I’ve noticed lots of rails developers optimize so heavily for making things DRY, they make the most hard to debug monstrosities full of meta programming all so they could write a thing one one line of code instead of 3.

Still for starting out it’s pretty awesome.

If your company grows enough that you have legacy data models that no longer fit the designs demanded by customers - First: congratulations, that is awesome. Second: you are either going to want to be very careful how you add new things to your legacy data models, and how you define your boundaries, OR consider migrating off rails. If you start just slapping things on whatever data model is most convenient, to keep up with demands from product, you are going to be in a world of hurt that will take exponentially longer and longer to get out of.

I feel like this is one of the mistakes that many developers make, and it's achieving a kind of wisdom to eventually realize it -- that optimizing for DRY above all else creates a mess.

I've definitely seen this done in many languages, but I've been mostly using ruby so much these days that I can't actually compare. Do any people who do have deep experience on multiple platforms (these people are few and far between) find this problem is worse in ruby than other places? Maybe it's that ruby gives you tools such that when you do optimize for DRY abstraction above all else you create a bigger mess, compared to other platforms?

I think that was definitely the case some years ago, but the Ruby community has matured since then. Meta programming is a bit looked down upon, these days.

I still see a false equivalency in the ruby community that verbosity == complexity, that tends to make super complex abstractions and DSLs in order to make the consumption less verbose, that then say “see how simple this is to use”

Because rails does such a good job in their DSL, I think I understand why that tendency exists. But rails under the hood is quite complex, and most DSLs are no where near as well thought out.

Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, because I hated ruby coming from a nearly all c style language background at first, but I honestly think it is pretty cool now. I think a lot of issues come from people wanting to do things in ruby like they would in C# or Java.

Yet in our consumer world, people are continually thinking of their worth simply in terms of the money they have or the money they make. I’ve known many married working moms, who decided to leave the workforce and be homemakers, who constantly felt like their worth diminished because of the decrease in their wealth, not recognizing that the bond they had with their children, was growing stronger and greater, and didn’t recognize how incredibly valuable that truly was.

Note: I’m not saying working moms can’t have strong bonds with their children, I’m talking about specific situations where for them it was hindering their relationships, and their relationships improved but was at the cost of less money.

I think a lot of times those who don’t have great community around them, are often the ones who will really chase money over other things, because the impact of not having it is so much higher for them.

Tomorrow. What a banger.

Next lines are:

You think you can keep on goin’, livin’ like a king Ooh, babe, but I strongly doubt it