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I wish someone would expand this comment into a full-length study on the evolution of regulations and infrastructure within Burning Man. It's a really interesting topic.

One thing I learned recently is that Vanguard Total Stock Market Index (VTI) is float-weighted. That means that SpaceX's percentage in the index is based on the value of the floating shares, not the total market cap. As a result, a fund like VTI, for now, doesn't have that much SpaceX. It will add more as the lockup periods expire and the float increases, but increasing float might also drive down the price.

As a programmer, Claude Design helped me see AI productivity tools in a new light.

I find it really strange that there is so much negative commentary on the _code_, but so little commentary on the core architecture.

My takeaway from looking at the tool list is that they got the fundamental architecture right - try to create a very simple and general set of tools on the client-side (e.g. read file, output rich text, etc) so that the server can innovate rapidly without revving the client (and also so that if, say, the source code leaks, none of the secret sauce does).

Overall, when I see this I think they are focused on the right issues, and I think their tool list looks pretty simple/elegant/general. I picture the server team constantly thinking - we have these client-side tools/APIs, how can we use them optimally? How can we get more out of them. That is where the secret sauce lives.

I found it a useful overview. My primary question about the client source was - is there any secret sauce in it? Based on this site, the answer is no, the client is quite simple/dumb, and all the secret sauce resides on the server/in the model.

I particularly valued the tool list. People in these comments are complaining about how bad the code is, but I found the client-side tools that the model actually uses to be pretty clean/general.

My takeaway was more that at a very basic level they know what they are doing - keep the client general, so that you can innovate on the server side without revving the client as much.

I can't read this article, but I live in a market that Waymo is just beginning to develop (St. Louis). I have seen two Waymos in our area in the last week. I am really, really looking forward to having it available, but I think it is several years away.

It will be useful for me and my wife, but it would have been transformative for my kids in the pre-driving teen years. We do so much ferrying them around, and to be able to put them in a safe car and get them where they are going would have made such a difference for us. I think it might be here in time to make a difference with my younger child.

For that use case, trust and safety are really, really important to me. That plan only works for me because I suspect the Waymo driver will be safer than I am. I think for companies developing self-driving cars, the safety reputation matters a lot. Right now Waymo is the only one I would consider, because their roll out has been so methodical and competent.

As a small business that started with a one-time/upgrade based pricing policy, and moved to a recurring policy, I don't think it is too late for tailwind to do so for future upgrades/improvements. I am saddened that they laid people off before trying. I understand doing that is a leap of faith/risk, but that is what you need to do.

The key thing they need to recognize is that some percentage of their customers are serious businesses that want them to continue developing/maintaining the software, and that these businesses will be supportive as long as the deal is the same for everyone (you can't ask them to pay out of the goodness of their hearts, as then they feel they will be taken advantage of by people who don't pay).

When we switched to a recurring pricing model, I thought it was going to be a disaster. In fact, I got an angry call from exactly one customer (who then remained a customer despite threatening to leave). I got subtly expressed approval/relief from many more.

The book "How to Sell at Margins Higher than Your Competitors" was helpful to me, and might be helpful here as well. The key is to realize that you want to sell to people who really value your product and will pay for it. You don't want to maximize volume, you want to maximize revenue x margin.

You already have an installed base of people who value your product enough to pay for it once, you just have to create a system that enables them to sustain the technology they value in order to get ongoing support/upgrades/fixes/etc. The people who are going to complain on hacker news about recurring pricing aren't the people you want as customers anyway.

If the majority of your customers don't value it that much, then you are pretty cooked. But you may as well find that out directly. If people really don't want to pay for the software, don't waste time creating it for them.

We made the switch about 20 years ago. Since that time, about 70% of our lifetime revenue has come from recurring payments. Had I not had the courage to make the switch, I would be writing now that the business has been an unsustainable mistake, but that would have been false.

This article is the second time I have seen a news outlet try to 'break' the vending machine experiment. That is definitely really entertaining. In this case, they convinced the AI that it lived in a communist country and it was part of an experiment in capitalism. That's funny!

But I really wish Anthropic would give the technology to a journalist that tries working with it productively. Most business people will try to work with AI productively because they have an incentive to save money/be efficient/etc.

Anyway, I am hoping someone at Anthropic will see this on HN, and relay this message to whatever team sets up these experiements. I for one would be fascinated to see the vending machine experiment done sincerely, with someone who wants to make it work.

The reality is that even most customers are smart enough to realize that driving a business they rely on out of business isn't in their interest. In fact, in a B2B context, I think that is often the case. Thanks.

I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. I feel like HN used to love nothing more than complaining about patent trolls. Anyway, this article suggestions an action through regulation.gov which, based on the content of the page, seemed worth doing to me.

I think this is an interesting idea, but the details on how the incentives get aligned, and how graduated students support the university are unclear to me.

I am a fan of the idea that universities need a new pricing model that is correlated to career results. Like, maybe universities are only eligible for students to receive gov't loans in proportion to the increase in W2 income of their past students, etc.

But I am not convinced that the model in this article, as described, scales. It might be a model for attracting very high-value students and thriving. But in that case it might just be about selection effects, and not about delivering a value-add in education.

I also think that the article fails to recognize that one of the main tasks of major universities is research. Quite possibly the research and education functions should be separated, but I wish the article addressed some of these issues more explicitly.

Still, $100m towards and effort is interesting. Maybe it will evolve in an even more interesting direction.

The incentive structure of higher education is broken. My gift to the University of Austin is meant to change that—by tying its success to the real-world achievements of its students. By Jeff Yass.

I agree. I read an article a few months ago about how frequent MAID (medical assistance in dying) is in Canada. I am surprised that that has not led to larger scale studies about the dying process.

In this particular case, the press release notes "Scientifically, it's very difficult to interpret the data because the brain had suffered bleeding, seizures, swelling...". That does seem to limit how much can be generalized from this one case. A larger study of MAID patients would be more useful.

Edit: Maybe the issue is that the MAID itself would alter the brain state. That actually seems pretty plausible.

I think Steve Ballmer's quote was something like "Measure a software project's progress by increase in lines-of-code is like measuring an airplane project's progress by increase in weight."

I have been reading the book “apple in China” after hearing the author on a podcast. It has fundamentally altered my view of apple as a company. From a consumer perspective, I thought it was a an amazing company. But looking behind the scenes, I came to understand how morally compromised it has been for a very long time. In retrospect, I feel complicit in things I didn’t understand I was part of.

I read your comment before reading the article, and I disagree. Maybe it is because I am less actively involved in AI development, but I thought it was an interesting experiment, and documented with an appropriate level of detail.

The section on the identity crisis was particularly interesting.

Mainly, it left me with more questions. In particular, I would have been really interested to experiment with having a trusted human in the loop to provide feedback and monitor progress. Realistically, it seems like these systems would be grown that way.

I once read an article about a guy who had purchased a subway franchise, and one of the big conclusions was that running a subway franchise was _boring_. So, I could see someone being eager to delegate the boring tasks of daily business management to an AI at a simple business.

Wasn’t there a post on HN about someone who made a lot of money with an API that told you the geolocation of an IP address quickly? Maybe 5 years ago?

Final follow up. My wife forwarded your info/website/brief summary to the guy. I don't know if he will follow up, but hopefully so. Best wishes!

Thanks, I will ask my wife to ask the guy who gives the talks (their internal expert in billing matters) if he is interested and send him your email. Personally, I really think your solution has potential to help them, in the sense that they don’t have a sustainable/automated process for training clinicians to write notes in the correct way, or to detect issues when the clinicians don’t know or remember to do so. I know that meeting wasn’t perfectly attended, but even if it had been, they add like 8 new people at the beginning of July, and those people won’t attend the billing meeting until the next one happens in a year. The push for more revenue has been within the last month or so (I think maybe due to Trump related cuts to grant funding and concerns about Medicaid), so it’s an issue that is currently on the mind of leadership.

Just FYI, it’s definitely not fraud, it is just that clinicians don’t know when they need to specifically document things that they are actually doing. They do things, don’t specifically mention them in the note because they don’t know it matter, then the billing is lower than it should be. But it’s definitely not fraud.

My wife is a doctor at a major university. They are under pressure right now and are looking to increase revenue. Changing the way they document cases can substantially alter the billing outcome. Note that these are not errors, they are omissions of work done in the note that prevents the downstream billing experts from using higher paying codes.

They have been aware for a few years that many clinicians aren’t documenting their work in the best way for billing. The current solution is to have an annual talk given by the one billing expert in their department pointing out where people often lose revenue due to poor documentation.

Not all the doctors attend this talk. There is no internal process for measuring subsequent improvements quantitatively. There are 85 doctors in her group.

Anyway, this is just to say that something automated to help doctors document their work in a billing friendly way seems powerful. But for my wife’s group, the issue doesn’t seem to be denied claims or “errors” per se. More omissions/sub optimal documentation due to lack of knowledge. Or lack of follow through on knowledge which is only occasionally communicated.

Thanks, this is helpful. I tried Claude Code, and thought it had a lot of potential, but I was on track to spend at least $20/day.

For a tool that radically increases productivity (say 2x), I think it could still make sense for a VC funded startup or an established company (even $100/day or $36k/year is still a lot less than hiring another developer). But for a side project or bootstrap effort, $36k/year obviously significantly increases cash expenses. $100/month does not, however.

So, I'm going to go back and upgrade to Max and try it again. If that keeps my costs to $100/month, thats a really different value proposition.

This is a good point. I had not thought of it this way before.

I hear you. I’m almost 50, and see it coming as well. I highly recommend the book Outlive by Peter Attia. Just found it recently, wish I had read it at 37. It has really good ideas on extending your “health span “.

You might find the recent Verge/Decoder podcast with Cohere's CEO interesting:

https://www.theverge.com/24173858/ai-cohere-aidan-gomez-mone...

The host is clearly trying to push the CEO of Cohere on how all this is going to make money (or just be economic). The CEO is confident, but not in a very specific way. There is a great moment where he is like "we did some proof of concepts with 5 users, and they were pretty good, but when you tell CFOs about the running costs for a full user base, its not viable."

What fascinates me about AI right now is that it seems to have very different economics from traditional software/internet/SaaS businesses. Those business scale super-efficiently. They have some initial startup costs (but still relatively low, especially with cloud providers) and low running costs.

With AI, the initial capital costs to build the model are quite high. And, the running costs to handle queries are also quite high. These companies need to find use cases that generate value significantly in excess of those costs. If those use cases are out there, they must either involve really significant productivity improvements, or the costs have to come down a lot, or both.

All that said, I remember going to a talk by Adobe's founders, in which they pointed out that when they introduced Postscript, the first Apple printer that ran it was only viable because of a last minute drop in memory prices, and when they started building Photoshop, you could fit six (6!) digital images on a powerful computer.

So, I see why the investment is happening, but its a high risk investment right now hoping to identify both high-value use cases and significant cost savings simultaneously.

> can be put trying to convince prospective partners

This is so true. Early on, I tried to sell our product through a system integrator channel. I hoped they would "do the sales for us." The systems integrator was super focused on sales, they talked to our target customer all the time, and they seemed super excited to sell our product.

But, it was a total flop. They didn't really seem to understand our product, and they would say anything to close a deal. Sometimes we did a lot of work, then got cut from the deal late in the game. More often, we ended up in the deal, but then had to deal with promises to the customer that didn't make any sense. It was like "the integrator said it would do what?"

I agree that you have to be really careful about selling through partners. Interestingly, the integrator channel was primarily for another, much larger software company. I told the CEO how excited we were to partner with the integrators. He looked at me and said "oh, we wish we could get rid of the integrators, but its too late because they control access to the customers." Luckily, we were small enough that walking away from the integrators worked for us.

If I were you, I would focus on identifying a few verticals where your product works well (say, car dealerships), then try to figure out how to sell to them. What are their concerns? What drives their decisions? How can you contact the right person to pitch your product? etc. If you can build a system around a vertical, you will feel so much better about sales. And once you build a system around one vertical, you can start looking for additional verticals to target.

A few thoughts:

1. Is your target customer a software developer? It seems like your customer would be a executive, perhaps at a smaller business. You want to get that person's attention. I think open-sourcing is more likely to get developer attention.

2. There are lots of other marketing strategies you could try (content-based marketing, going to tradeshows, cold calling, etc).

3. If you have existing customers, I think you really need to work with them on in-depth case studies that explain why they benefited from choosing your solution. You should also see if you can market to other, similar customers.

4. "customizable by any developer" - That developer should be you. This I have personal experience with. We initially delivered a product and left it to the customer to configure. Later, we discovered that customizing the product for the customer delivered better results, better relationships, and allowed us to learn about our own product and our customers.

Anyway, I would do a lot of sales/marketing brainstorming before I open sourced. It seems you see it as a marketing strategy, but I think you should consider other avenues first. Good luck!

Congratulations! And thank you for sharing your story over the years. You are an excellent writer and thoughtful founder. I am really glad you found this graceful and economically rewarding exit.

I also own a small bootstrapped company (pure software), and I am now on year 21 (!). Someday, my business will run its course. When it does, I will probably write a blog post about the entire experience of starting and owning it, and if I do I will have been inspired by your posts.

Best wishes.

I don't think I blame Google for panic here. I find myself going to claude.ai much more, and Google somewhat less. Claude feels much more efficient to me than filtering through search results for many queries. The conversational aspect can be really helpful also.

It looks like in FY2023, Squarespace reported about $1B in revenue, a loss, but about $230M in cash flow from operating activities.[1] It is growing, which helps a lot.

Mainly when I look at this, I think "it doesn't seem like its that easy to make money in PE these days." Maybe in the 80s there were lots of large corporations that were so poorly run that you could buy them with debt, cut costs, and make lots of money (see RJR Nabisco/Barbarians at the Gate, that was a terribly run company). But in regards to this deal, someone raised $6B, had to find a place to put it, and found the pickings were pretty slim.

Still, someone apparently thinks they can cover the debt service with the cash flow.

https://investors.squarespace.com/news-events-financials/inv...

This seems really wise. I often want to start with something that looks decent, and feed my content into it, as opposed to trying to develop everything from scratch.

Eventually, you should probably mention this on your website: a broad range of starter projects and high quality assets, etc.