cho.sh
2,244 notes
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
Government as a Service

Government as a Service

Warning

Over a year old. May be outdated

Introduction

Government as a Service (GaaS)

You pick your government the way you pick a mobile carrier or an internet provider.

Governments would compete for citizens with services, policies, and benefits, and citizens could switch to whichever one fits their needs and values best. The hope is governance that's more competitive, more efficient, and quicker to respond.

Key arguments

  1. Competition pushes governments to innovate and govern better
  2. More accountability and transparency
  3. Governance tailored to what each person wants
  4. Room to experiment with policy and find what works
  5. Citizens can move around the world more freely

But GaaS is still a baby idea, and it's open to:

  1. Monopoly (i.e., tech companies or industries colluding with a government)
  2. Society splitting apart and getting unstable
  3. A "race to the bottom" on regulations and standards
  4. Worse inequality, since rich people and corporations can shop for friendly jurisdictions more easily
  5. Trouble for traditional democratic processes and representation
  6. A harder time handling global problems that need countries to work together

GaaS could weaken the nation-state by pulling citizenship apart from territory. The international system could break into pieces, and the power gaps we already have could get bigger. The rich and big corporations would find the friendliest governance first, and resources and influence would pile up with a small elite.

Rolling this out today would be hard and risky. More choice, innovation, and efficiency sound great, but they have to be weighed against social fragmentation, inequality, and nation-states losing sovereignty. GaaS only works with solid international frameworks and safeguards that keep those risks in check and keep global governance stable and fair. Without careful planning it could leave the world more divided and less stable, the opposite of what it was supposed to do.

Notion of Territories?

Conflicts between territories and networks would be way too big. The most valuable thing a government gives citizens is protecting their jurisdiction and their physical safety. To keep that, one of the two below has to happen.

Either way, we need legal frameworks and dispute resolution that can bend to the new idea of territory. Governments would have to work together across many jurisdictions and still keep people safe. We'd also have to rethink what citizenship, identity, and belonging mean, and come up with new kinds of social and political organization that don't stop at borders. Whether GaaS works comes down to whether we can use technology to build a global society that's fair, equal, and sustainable.

Modular and federative territories (spaceship civilization)

Humans would treat territory in a decentralized, modular way, maybe with self-sufficient mobile habitats or space colonies. Each module would be its own micro-territory with its own local government and services. Modules could join into bigger networks or constellations around shared interests, values, or economic ties.

Advantages

  • Lots of room to customize and experiment with governance models
  • Less risk of big territorial wars
  • Citizens can easily move to a module that matches what they want
  • Modules are self-sufficient and hold up better against outside threats or disruptions

Challenges

  • Needs huge advances in space technology and infrastructure
  • Human society and culture could split apart
  • Could make inequality worse if only the rich can get into space habitats

Transportation technology singularity (teleportation)

If we had a breakthrough in transportation, say teleportation, our whole relationship with territory would change. With instant, cheap travel, you could live and work anywhere on the planet (or beyond) and still get the services and protection of the government you chose.

Advantages

  • You don't need to live near your government to use its services
  • Borders and territorial disputes matter less
  • Citizens can easily "vote with their feet" and move to whichever jurisdiction serves them best
  • More global integration and cultural exchange

Challenges

  • Needs a massive leap in science and technology
  • Could hurt social cohesion and community ties in ways nobody planned for
  • Could create new inequality based on who gets to teleport

The Omnipotent Power and De-facto base-country?

One superpower could come out on top and become the de facto base country of the whole global governance system. It could use its tech and political edge to be everywhere at once and have a huge say in how GaaS works.

As countries start specializing in certain services to attract citizens, the superpower could "infiltrate" through tech and political collusion. Say it develops a cure for a common, deadly disease like cancer. But you only get the cure if you've been a taxpaying citizen of the superpower for a long time, say 20 years.

In that world, a lot of people would feel they have no choice but to pledge allegiance to the superpower to get the treatment. So the superpower would be gaming the GaaS system, basically forcing people to become citizens and pay taxes to keep access to essential services.

That could turn into a rogue state, with competing nations stuck in a cutthroat, "kill or be killed" mindset. As the superpower gets stronger, other countries might get more and more desperate and unethical to keep their citizens and win new ones. You'd see a lot of anticompetitive behavior, like price gouging, service discrimination, and exclusive alliances.

In this dystopian GaaS world, the choice, competition, and collaboration the whole system rests on would fall apart. The superpower's infiltration and the anticompetitive mess that follows would make global governance deeply unequal and unstable, and citizens would end up held hostage by the very system that was supposed to give them power.

To avoid that, GaaS needs strong safeguards and checks and balances so no single power can take over. That might mean new forms of governance, like decentralized autonomous governments, global governance consortia, or fractal governance networks, that put transparency, inclusivity, and adaptability first.

If GaaS deals with power concentration and anticompetitive behavior early, it can head toward a fairer, more sustainable future. One where citizens really get to choose who governs them, and where collaboration and competition can live side by side.

Backlinks2