David Chico Pham writes on technology, sourdough, and current events.

I had a correspondence with Alex Petros, a core engineer on HTMX. We had some overlap when he was an engineer at the Washington Post. He said something that has stuck with me for several months. Building websites is needlessly complicated.

Most of what is on a page is largely static, but we insist on cutting edge frameworks that can scale to unicorn level performance. We are still just building HTML, CSS. The JavaScript is too much, in my view, to justify picking frameworks such as NextJS, Remix, etc.

I am exploring Astro and so far it has struck a great balance in it's partial hydration or architectural islands. In a sea of static contents, a section is marked for dynamic updates. It can sometimes feel like, it can't be this simple -- we must prove our value at work by abstracting further these tools.

It's a little bit of bullshit, and fooling ourselves.

Larry David for the New York Times Opinion, wrote a piece satirizing Bill Mahar's dinner with a dictator at the invitation of Kid Rock.

Larry David on Hitler is so charming:

I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.

Subversive and cunning, the whole thing is brilliant. See?! Bill Mahar, this is the difference of being funny versus being played.

The clarity Te'Nehisi Coates brings to his writing and thinking is why he is so effective in driving uncomfortable truths. I keep revisiting his writing because it so closely resembles James Baldwin. It strikes like a hammer and cuts like knife. His words haunts me like a night of regrets and embarrassments.

Bill Maher had dinner with President Trump over the weekend. He had a fine time with him. Maher went on his show to tell his audience he is going to be bring the hard truth: President Trump is a fun hang at a private dinner.

In an opinion piece, Leon Krauze for the Washington Post lists examples of people visiting dictators and strongmen, and coming away charmed:

Herbert Matthews of the New York Times traveled to the Cuban mountains to interview Fidel Castro, then a little-known guerrilla leader. The reporter came back enthralled. “The personality of the man is overpowering,” Matthews wrote.

Joseph Stalin was remembered by close comrades such as Nikita Khrushchev as a man who could be jovial in private settings, telling jokes and singing Georgian folk songs late into the night — just before ordering purges that would cost thousands of lives.

Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger were both startled during their historic 1972 visit to China: Mao joked with them, played with words and made them feel at ease — a deliberate mask concealing one of history’s most devastating authoritarian records.

Maher was charmed by him. I can't imagine Charlie Chaplin having dinner with Adolf Hitler and then being over the moon because Hitler autographed a movie poster of The Great Dictator

The brilliant and always direct, Adam Serwer of the Atlantic makes it very clear: we are in a constitutional crisis right now. Trump is openly shrugging at ¯_(ツ)/¯ a decision from the Supreme Court, but in the most unserious and contemptful way:

Last week, the Supreme Court instructed the Trump administrationto follow a lower court’s directive to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return...the Trump administration has chosen a third way: pretending it is complying while refusing to do so.

A character that nobody thought would become a central villain in the descend to madness, is Secretary of State Marco Rubio. As a senator he often was the most miserable person in the chamber. He never looked like he enjoyed the job. And when running for president, he was constantly humiliated by President Trump. Adam Serwer again:

During the Oval Office meeting, Rubio chimed in to say that “no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

I hope when we are the other side of this, these folks face justice at the Hague. Secretary Rubio does not have any place in history besides standing next to Castro and Pinochet.

Trump is definitely planning on rounding up citizens on fake criminal charges, with no trial or legal recourse. He has found his secret police and gulag in ICE and El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). The Supreme Court is acutely aware of the dangers of such a plan:

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson accompanying the Supreme Court’s order last week, which was issued with no public dissents, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” More broadly, this matter is no longer just about deportations or undocumented immigrants. The Trump administration’s defiance of a Supreme Court order is a new step into presidential lawlessness, in that it suggests that the administration will not abide by any court orders it does not feel like complying with.

The Supreme Court is now faced with a real decision.

The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will. This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.

I don't believe Chief Justice Roberts can save the nation from stomach flopping into the abyss. The fall is infinite. Looking up is to bare witness to the light shrinking into darkness. There is no going back.

As the great physicist Richard Feynman said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Fundamentally my worldview, to a frustrating extend in my self-confidence, is does what I know is in fact true. I have a little voice in my head that says, "you're fooling yourself."

Very haunting. I can't wait to play it.

The teaser was pretty hot too:

Judge Susan Crawford wins Wisconsin Supreme Court seat and solidifying a 4-3 liberal majority. Mr. Musk spent $25 million dollars in attempt to buy the seat. He lost and lost big. Judge Crawford won 55% to Judge Schimel's 45%. In a state that Mr. Trump won narrowly and for a state that goes one way or the other in the tiniest slivers of margins, Judge Crawford's win is a punch right at the nose of the tyrants.

I've been listening to this NPR Tiny Desk over and over again. I really like the Latin jazz, funk, hip-hop they're doing. I can't help but eye the shirts the band is wearing, especially the exaggerated faces of Ca7riel and Poco Amoroso.

When I studied aboard in Mexico, I came back to the States with an appreciation for Latin jazz. I had a whole phase of it for a couple years.

The excellent reporting in this Wired piece is so god damn killer, its gotten me mad -- it's so incredibly good in telling what the chaos means and how to understand it. The end game here is for Musk to plunder the government so completely that to rebuild it, he'll say AI must take over all of it to restore it. That AI of course would be his xAI. Like many things Musk has personally built, Boring Company, Telsa's Cybertruck, or SpaceX last two rockets, it's going to be shit.

On March 7, DOGE got one of the things it seemed to want most from GSA: a chatbot that could automate work previously done by federal employees. The tool rolled out to some 1,500 employees at GSA, with an agency wide launch planned a week later. An internal memo about the tool touted the “endless” tasks it could help with: “draft emails, create talking points, summarize text, write code.” The memo hinted at the dangers of deploying chatbots at the federal level, warning workers not to “type or paste” internal or personally identifiable information as inputs.

People who used it weren’t impressed. “It’s about as good as an intern,” one GSA employee told WIRED. “Generic and guessable answers.” This version of GSAi almost certainly couldn’t interact with the EDS discovery layer first proposed by engineers. More likely it was just the first step in an iterative approach. As one official said in the February meeting about the project, the first goal could be to “deliver this sort of janky, doesn’t-work-all-the-time chatbot” to pave the way for a “turbo-charged” version down the line.

That turbo-charged AI bot is never going to come to be. The so-called "Department of Government Efficiency" Musk installed is really a criminal organization with Musk as a paper thug. They think of themselves as pirates of the 1980's Apple days. But they're simply a bunch of criminals with laptops doing utterly brazenly corrupt and illegal things. Notably when the Coup was underway, they used their new hijacked comms via GSA seizure to lock out employees:

As would happen at agencies across the government, the GSA seizure took place in the shadows—a matter not of announcements but of calendar invitations from unknown people, of unfamiliar names appearing in internal directories. The sixth and seventh floors, which had offices and suites used by the administrator, the “A-suite,” were restricted and largely locked down. No longer could employees simply badge in through the turnstile. Now they had to pass through metal detectors and have their belongings x-rayed

And the Republicans! They are so busy trying to find ways to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the tax cuts they promised to their wealthy friends and favorite big companies. It's no surprise they are all kind of shocked how angry their constituents are. As it turns out, a lot federal workers and offices and jobs are in Republican districts and states.

Yet, I must highlight, they are letting an insider threat thrive inside the very government they swore to run. None of them seem to care what is happening. They are responsible for ushering in the end of American democracy.

Lastly, what's maddening is Senator Schumer decided to throw his hands up and allow the Republicans to cede power to the Musk and Trump through giving the Republicans votes on the Continuing Resolution.

Go read the great piece at Wired. It so good.