A few years ago I made a bet with John Carmack for $10,000. I lost the bet, which unfortunately timed with some pretty hard life experiences, so it took a little while to pay it all off, but it’s finally been settled.

Has there ever been a technology which people felt more emotionally attached to or revolted by? Why do people like crypto so much? Why does it piss them off so much?

I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve learned some stuff. A lot of the reasoning for why is simply learned experience, and to give you that experience I’d have to tell you long boring stories. Here are some notes which have been bouncing around my head which may be useful to you and, should you heed them, may save you a great deal of pain and time.

Being a founder is a lifestyle. You adopt a certain language, you end up running into a lot of the same people at various industry events and parties, you value certain things and feel certain pressures. There is a lot of pressure to not just be a founder, but to be a “successful” founder. Raise money, get users, make money, grow the product, etc.

We’re in a weird time.

We are largely conditioned to talk to agents either in a one-on-one chat, or in a way where the characters are orchestrated by some system to take turns.

I used to think that zero-to-one was the most interesting and important part of software development, and that meant getting from zero products to one product. What mattered was the MVP. Like a store preparing for it’s grand opening, we’d identify our target users and plan for how we’d get them once we had a product they wanted.

I love capitalism. Look at how far it has gotten us. Look at what it has brought us.

I wanted a blog. Nothing fancy at all. In fact, I wanted the most simple, self-hosted, bare bones thing I could find, just to write some markdown in.

This is my first post.