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Liked on XI made a mistake. When Jack and I decided to organize this $100K Hackathon, my biggest concern was cheating. Unlike a regular hackathon, everyone participates from home. And because the winner is whoever makes the most PROFIT (not revenue), there are so many ways to manipulate the numbers. So I added a $99 entry fee. One thing I’ve learned from building businesses is that people tend to be more committed when they pay for something. I thought it would filter out spam, attract serious builders, and make the competition fairer for everyone. But I completely missed the other side. 3 years ago, I was a living with my apps. Today, I’m financially free. My life changed so much that somewhere along the way, I lost perspective on what $99 means to someone else. For someone in India, someone struggling to pay their bills, or someone trying to make their first dollar online, $99 can be a lot of money. And those are exactly the people I want to help! I’ve spent years sharing what I’ve learned, reviewing random people’s landing pages, and organizing free meetups around the world. Not because there’s money to make, but because I genuinely love seeing people build things and succeed. And somehow, I was so focused on keeping cheaters out that I didn’t realize I was also keeping genuine builders out. That’s my mistake. So I’ve decided to make the $100K Hackathon completely FREE :) Everyone who already paid got a full refund. I’m still worried about cheating. That problem hasn’t disappeared, and Jack and I will have to figure out better ways to verify profits and keep the leaderboard fair. But that’s our problem to solve. Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts. Sometimes you need people to remind you of things you’ve forgotten. I genuinely hope this hackathon changes someone’s life. ❤️Liked on XIt’s time to bring back Cafe CursorPosted on Xyo @pendev i can't live share edit a .pen file? it's the most needed featurePosted on XI'm coining a word "Agentsplaining" Agents condescendingly assuming the user don't know fuck and repeating the obviousReplied on X@jayhxmo @raycast Hard to explain. It's the small detailsPosted on X@raycast iOS keyboard is insanely good. Might resub Raycast pro just cuz of thisReplied on X@ishuagra02 I saw a theory that F5.2 is a post train of 5.1, but O5.5 is a distillation of F5.5(unreleased new pretrain) and thats why O5.5 > F5.2Liked on X@anaclumos don't know what is actually improved 👀Posted on Xam i the only one underimpressed with 5.2 fableReplied on X@bvvst great minds think alike https://t.co/YRFWhb1mcOLiked on XClaude Fable 5.2 is out and it's the perfect time to run this god-level prompt on your codebase: "I want you to audit our codebase, is anything here unnecessary, overly complicated in our current setup, or based on weak assumptions? Challenge them. - What can be deleted entirely? - What can be simplified now that unnecessary pieces are gone? Then make the changes. Prefer deleting over simplifying, simplifying over optimizing, and optimizing over automating. This product is being used by thousands of customers, do not cut any corners." This prompt is one I run often and leads to the best results.Replied on X@akshayadinesh19 @bot can we please BYOM for botsLiked on XTo be fair, the Chinese models have a much lower refusal rateLiked on XF*CK IT, im creating a library of AI slop indicators. my feed is full of taste larpers. stay tuned https://t.co/5Muv8nQRm3Liked on XJENSEN! THATS NOT WHAT WE MEANT BY CHINESE MODELS!!!!!!!Liked on Xmy parents had to declare bankruptcy when I was a kid, so they had every reason to pressure me towards a more stable career path instead, they were so patient with me, even as i failed startup after startup for years so getting to tell my mom that everything turned out okay was a really special moment :) for those who can't read Korean, her first message roughly translates to: "Really!!! Congratulations my son. So much :') Thank you God!" i know I've been posting about my exit for like a week now, but it really is a big deal for me and my family! i'll share more about how this all happened and some tactical advice later this week, but for now i'm just riding out all the emotions to quote my mom, thank you God!!!!Liked on X@thefarmers_Dog it stands for Egg GzampleLiked on X🦍 Introducing Memorilla: memory as a modality for LLMs Memorilla turns everything a frozen LLM needs to remember into just 16 memory embeddings ⚡ It uses up to 4,212× fewer tokens and is 27× faster than full context inference while more accurate 🎯 Pushes the Pareto frontier over RAG and agentic memory in personalization, long-document and knowledge QA A thread 🧵:Liked on XThere's a huge product opportunity downstream of Tailscale etc too. At @tldraw we've started designing for "high trust networks" and it's been a beautiful thing. 1. Features that would be a nightmare on the internet are okay on my computer and mostly okay on private networks. Websites that execute user-generated scripts, control production systems, allow for users to send desktop notifications, spend tokens, or directly prompt my agent. Crazy stuff that would only make sense if everyone was in a committed polycule. 2. When everyone on the server can be trusted to have _external_ reasons for good behavior (eg keeping their job, or maintaining friends, family, church, mafia org), the software can be designed in a default social way. Most apps default to isolation, low horizontal visibility, highly restricted collaboration. Makes sense if the social contracts are inside of the app, but if you can trust that they live outside of the app then you can get wild. Example being small group chat names as an emergent comedy phenomenon because anyone in the group can change the name. 3. This can work for commercial products, too, not just internal stuff. Security matters more than ever but the way we've seen that manifest is that more companies are more confident in their own solutions than anything we could provide, to the point where owning data and access is a better value proposition than having it managed. Always has been true for big companies but now even small companies can get a good secure network set up pretty easily, and the hooks we need to build are easy enough. tldraw offline got us started down this road (and shout out to @pendev for first introducing me to the idea of desktop + mcp). We've been bringing that product to private networks and it's been exciting to see how much we can get away with. Keep an eye outReplied on X@saradu birds eye viewLiked on XApplications close in 2 days!! If you have a cool bio idea, and $5-10k will go a long way for you, please apply!!! https://t.co/NCvmrNC53cLiked on XWe've been early adopters of Rust since 2018 and a lot of our infra, voice tech, and even some of the current client is already Rust, the holy grail was getting the whole client there. That means Electron goes away, and so does React Native, mobile keeps native UI but shares app code with desktop via Rust. We hope to get it into testing with users soon™. (And it's not Tauri, it's GPUI, so good guess everyone.) Alright, back to staring at the WoW Forever login screen.Reposted on XOh boy. https://t.co/X7SSskGuGvLiked on XRIP .si domain squatters
Guillermo Rauch

Guillermo Rauch

Warning

Over a year old. May be outdated

one of my role model

I only have a handful of role models whose footsteps attract me enough. Some are already popular, yet some are seriously underrated or unnoticed. One of them is Guillermo Rauch.

We must first calibrate our baseline: developer products are the finickiest to nail it. There are many reasons, but mainly:

Developers have a very nitpicky taste

It's hard to 'wow' them engineering-wise

They are not loyal; they try out and switch tools a lot

They don't spend as much.

In the worst case, developers will rebuild your app and open-source it. Just Google open-source alternatives to [service], and you will see a handful of examples.

Yet, we have witnessed some jackpot products in the past few years. Once you get the knack of how to earn developers' and communities' trust and support, you'll likely never fail. They will even go ahead and build extensions and apps for your platform. That's how you reign on developers, which will give you authority on how software gets made in this world, which, ultimately, is the backbone of the modern economy. These jackpot examples include Chrome, VS Code, and GitHub, as well as many more "indie-er" examples, such as Supabase, Tailwind, and many more.

Guillermo Rauch was at the center of these tectonic shifts in the developer landscape since the 2015-2016s.

First, he started as a front-end engineer. But he unleashed his peculiar harmony with apt software and business models sooner than later. He founded Cloudup, which Automattic later acquired, and while on the way, spawned many brainchildren we know and love. Socket.io, Mongoose, and many small developer productivity tools are his inventions. Thus, Rauch knew precisely how the developer ecosystem works. He exactly saw the limitations of the web, and he knew how much to open-source and how much to monetize. And these experiences led him to Vercel, the trendsetter of the modern web.

We have a fantasy where tech founders should look like Steve Jobs. They know nothing about tech but are so charismatic yet stubborn that they exert high standards on nerd engineers. Even if the founders knew coding, such as Zuckerberg, Musk, and Gates, they knew very shallowly about everyday engineering. They're just superbrains who happened to dip their toes into CS undergrad courses. Here, the legend still stands: brilliant, shitty, but visionary non-engineer leaders educate their nerdy book-smart coders.

But these fantasies exist because they are spicy. Software founding stories are much more nuanced than that.

To put it in some way, Rauch is more of Richard Hendricks than any of the other "Silicon Valley" founders. Well, he's much more confident and in good shape than Richard :) But I'm pointing out that he's not the typical SV stereotype founder.

Not many founders fall into this category; the best I can think of is Michael Morhaime (Founder of Blizzard. He was first a game dev and then transcended his experience into one of the most successful game companies. at… least during his time). If we expand from software to tech, Lisa Su will also fall into this category.

Rauch is still one of a kind. He built Vercel into a Mafia Company and now influences the dev ecosystem the most. With his deep knowledge of practical programming and extensive background in open-source, I hope he continues to inspire people like me to follow his path.

Written 100% by a human only with spellcheck.

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