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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
Era of Invites

Era of Invites

Warning

Over a year old. May be outdated

A few days ago people were sharing a site that lists the apps pinned in their dock, dockhunt.com. Great concept, so I added mine. Then I got an interesting question.

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And not just Amie. People asked if I had invites for Texts, Tana, Artifact, and more. It didn't used to work like this. There was internal alpha, then closed beta as a secretive survey, or open beta where I could simply sign up and enjoy the testing. Now invites are a somewhat closed-but-open beta. Which raises a question.

Why are all successful startup companies use invitations now?

first. We don't remember successful startups with no invite system, and all unsuccessful startups with an invitation system will never reach your attention. Did ChatGPT need an invite? Nope.

That said, invites do harness some social engineering techniques.

Association with friends. When we invite a friend, that friend will likely download and try the service, knowing a buddy recommended it. After all, it can't go wrong from word of mouth. There's a network effect too. If I get an invite, I'm more prone to share it with friends, thinking about who would be a good fit for this app.

Avoid operational hazards. Early startups mostly do not have a proper load-balancing system, not to mention the myriad bugs and errors inside. First impressions always last. Mine was Notion in early 2018. It was extremely sluggish and frustrating, and it took me two whole years to retry it. Invites will also save the Ops team a lot of work.

Excite and gather the core audience. People crave the unpossessables. With an invite a company can build a whole experience outside its own reach, making a hype-based fan group on social media. Invites are one of the best ways to make people actively seek other users on the platform, echoing more interest across the internet. Of course, this eventually builds Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). That's a topic for another day.

A priceless gift. Combined, an app invitation sometimes feels like a priceless gift even when it has nothing to do with exclusivity. Sometimes it comes with a unique integration. Back when NFTs were still a thing, I bought Superlocal's Early Access Ticket. OpenSea

Clubhouse. The most significant stimulus for companies must have been Clubhouse, a prime success example of invite-based growth. A picture is worth a thousand words, let alone a $4B success.

In the end invites are just a structured beta. Before, betas were location based (early Facebook) or group studies (most games).

One more thing. These successful invite-based software companies are primarily elite teams. So why don't big techs use invites for a new service? Does that imply that, with enough resources, invite-only is inferior to a mass-market opening?

I agree with Nat here, especially ② really easy to try. He probably meant onboarding, but that includes installation and getting access, often blocked by invite locks. I believe there should be a better way for talented technophiles to get in without an invite. It would be a net benefit for the company.

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