how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding: 1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now 2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend 3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets 4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time 5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users 6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists 7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees. 8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing 9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A 10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start you don't ~ @levelsio on X

#GM #RUNSTR 💪

Still blows my mind every time I read this: 🤯 Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud, and routine escrow mechanisms could easily be implemented to protect buyers.

#GM! #coffeechain

Not too shabby! Wordle 1,710 3/6 ⬛⬛🟨⬛⬛ 🟩⬛⬛⬛⬛ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

21km is the perfect #runstr distance 💪

Bah! Unlucky 😅 Wordle 1,707 5/6 ⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜ 🟨⬜🟩⬜🟨 🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 🟩🟩🟩⬜🟩 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Listening to @preston talk about open vs closed source LLMs: “Let's just take an example, Tannemann Square. If you're training the model, you can either have that as part of the initial data input before it compresses everything into the model and it adjusts the weights ever so slightly.” Straight out of the playbook of the Ministry of Truth. With LLMs you can literally change the narrative of the past. So many people already rely on AI for news and trust it as authoritative fact (because a computer doesn’t have human biases!) and go no further in their research to even google it or (God forbid) read a book! OpenAI is trying to control the future and make money at any cost. Meanwhile, China is trying to control the past at any cost.

“Instead, you invest your irreplaceable hours into the superficial meaninglessness of consumer existence. Your highest creative potential, that fire that could remake your corner of the world, remains dormant, suffocated beneath an avalanche of curated anxieties and manufactured needs.” Yoh! @Kudzai Kutukwa - this hits hard 👌 View article →

Yoh!