Manifesto for Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Age

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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 Cursor Posted on Xyo @pendev i can't live share edit a .pen file? it's the most needed feature Posted on XI'm coining a word "Agentsplaining" Agents condescendingly assuming the user don't know fuck and repeating the obvious Replied on X@jayhxmo @raycast Hard to explain. It's the small details Posted on X@raycast iOS keyboard is insanely good. Might resub Raycast pro just cuz of this Replied 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 > F5.2 Liked on X@anaclumos don't know what is actually improved 👀Posted on Xam i the only one underimpressed with 5.2 fable Replied on X@bvvst great minds think alike https://t.co/YRFWhb1mcO Liked 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 bots Liked on XTo be fair, the Chinese models have a much lower refusal rate Liked on XF*CK IT, im creating a library of AI slop indicators. my feed is full of taste larpers. stay tuned https://t.co/5Muv8nQRm3 Liked 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 Gzample Liked 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 out Replied on X@saradu birds eye view Liked 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/NCvmrNC53c Liked 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/X7SSskGuGv Liked on XRIP .si domain squatters

The Linguistic Inequality of the Internet

The internet changed how we talk and share what we know, and the Anglosphere runs it. URLs, programming languages, and hypertext data are mostly in English, so how much information you can reach depends a lot on the language you speak. Of 6,000 languages only around 200 show up online, and English is almost half the content. That monopoly cuts non-English speakers off from a lot of experiences and knowledge.

The Importance of Timely Participation

Woody Allen said 80% of success in life is just showing up on time. In tech, most content comes out in English, so people who speak other languages get left out. The language barrier means delays, and non-English speakers end up struggling to keep up with whatever is new. If we want platforms like Hacker News to be open to everyone, we have to commit to computational intelligence and linguistics. Send multilingual summaries and updates straight to people, and the gap closes. People all over the world get to show up on time.

Reigniting the Golden Era of Human Flourishing

Technology can kick off a new age of human flourishing. The printing press made knowledge widely available and ushered in the Renaissance, and the internet can do the same for people across language barriers. With better internet access and room for every language, I can tap into the wisdom and philosophies each language holds, and help the whole world grow and understand each other.

A Call to Action

Today, I pledge to rebuild the internet into a place that welcomes everyone, whatever language they speak. I will work tirelessly to break down language barriers, push for diversity, and make sure everyone gets fair access to everything online, the resources and the opportunities. I will make the digital world more diverse, more connected, and more alive.

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