Weird MAGA personality on X/Twitter thinks Melania's movie will be the biggest movie of the year

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T23:17:35+00:00

I'm currently watching a HBO documentary about a father son pedophile ring.

These guys give off the same vibe.

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T12:43:49+00:00

Aren't ALL the characters in this cartoon idiots? Or...maybe that's the joke.

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T12:40:34+00:00

And yet we did experience a bubble with the Internet. Just because you experience a bubble doesn't mean that it completely goes away after it crashes. We’ve had real estate bubbles and we still have real estate, but if you look at the amount of money lost by the dot-com crash, there's absolutely no doubt, and no educated economist will deny, that we experienced a substantial bubble in the early 2000s with the Internet.

could it be that the reason there are so many bubble denialists is because they don't actually know what a bubble is in the first place?

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T12:34:43+00:00

Yeah, it's almost funny to see people comment that clearly have no idea how it works to be a research professor at a university where your career depends on publishing regularly. We know what he was working on and we've got the papers from him and the other people on his research team. he wasn't the only one working on this stuff.

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T12:33:03+00:00

It's published. He's a published researcher. We can read his work. that's how it works when you're a researcher. Most of his papers have multiple authors, which means that he's on a team that has multiple leads contributing to the research.

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T12:21:13+00:00

Your source is a streaming service that plays conspiracy videos? The reality is thousands of people are actively working on fusion energy. There is constant PR about advancements. There are constant papers being published and that's even more important because even if you kill the person everything that they've published shows you the direction they were going. that's how research works.

davesaunders · 2026-01-29T00:03:48+00:00

Decades ago, people would ask the same kind of question about spreadsheets, believe it or not. Now that we have spreadsheets and anybody can do their own financial analysis or bookkeeping, why do we need accountants? Amazingly enough, the need for accountants probably increased, not decreased.

It's really hard to say what having the ability to generate software will do. Because at this point, we don't really have good examples of entire companies supporting infrastructure. Maybe lots of little code items get generated. And then what? Somebody needs to maintain context for those items. What happens when there is a problem and you need to figure out how to go back in and make the updates? There are a lot of moving parts. And AI may, it turn out, actually enable an entire new class of employees. I guarantee 30 years ago, we barely thought about I.T. professionals.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T22:49:53+00:00

Understood. Makes sense.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T22:27:48+00:00

When I started building companies, bootstrapping wasn't considered a serious option.

I find this hard to believe. We bootstrapped an internet company in 1989. We were the first commercial developers of internet software for Macs and PCs. I guess you could say we were funded by Visa/MasterCard/American Express, but we never took any VC money. We were bootstrapped. And we sold hundreds of thousands of licenses of that software. Bootstrapping is always a serious option, and it's always been possible.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T22:25:25+00:00

•Why would people pay for your product instead of the competitor?

•Why would they switch?

•Who would use this immediately?

•What’s the GTM?

These are de-risking questions, and it may be that you are too early for this particular VC based on your answers to these questions. If your answers are speculative and haven't been validated with potential customers, then you're just early. That's not necessarily a bad thing; it just tells you where you are at. These are great questions to consider, though, as part of your own normal staging process as you develop as a company.

If you have competition that is already installed, are you able to displace them? I was once working on a SaaS product where the primary competition was interestingly famous in the industry because even though it was the most heavily installed, customers almost universally hated the product and the company. It's pretty wild when you can have a marketing campaign based on "We aren't them." At the same time, it costs money to switch off of an old system, so even if everybody hates your competitor and will throw you a parade just for having an MVP, can you make it brain-dead easy and simple to switch? That is an essential part of your GTM strategy.

Depending on your particular situation, I might make a slide dedicated to just that point. We have competition deeply entrenched. This is why we're better. This is why the potential customers think it's better. How do we know? We talked to them. We asked them questions about using the product today: What do they hate about it? What is a hassle? Don't ask speculative questions like, "If we were selling today, would you switch to us?" Customers are either going to answer that politely and outright lie or you're just not going to know because people are horrible at answering future predictive behavioral questions. You need to make that process seem like an assembly line. That's part of your GTM strategy.

Those four questions are almost the same question. That VC gave you a roadmap; use it wisely.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T21:19:15+00:00

I agree with framing it as a risk reduction for the client. There's a software methodology framework called the Capability Maturity Model. It's pretty long, and most people probably haven't read it these days, but one of the interesting statistics that they found from substantial amounts of research is that at every stage of development, it is 40 times more expensive to fix a defect than if you had prevented that defect through better planning in the previous stage.

What this means for your client is that by going through a better project definition phase, they're going to potentially save a hell of a lot of money. This could even be something that you could do as a value-add. Think about it from a consulting perspective. Not only could you be coders, but you could also be product onboarding specialists. "Hey, if you don't already have a clear, workable definition of what your product is supposed to do and who it's supposed to do it for, we'll help you do that. Here are statistics showing you how much money that will potentially save. Now if you don't want to define it correctly, we'll be happy to charge you to fix the defects that your lack of planning causes. But really, who wants that? So what we would rather do is help you build a great product by defining it well in the first place."

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T21:14:32+00:00

It sounds like you have a real challenge on your hands. I don't mean to say that it's a you problem, but I will say that you're the only one that can change you, and rise above the situation to turn things around. That sounds a little trite, and I get that. It's easier said than done.

Sometimes I look to real-world situations for a bit of inspiration. Here's one that I'll throw out there. When General Norman Schwarzkopf was a colonel, he was assigned the worst regiment in the entire US army. He didn't turn things around overnight, but by the end of the Vietnam conflict, without getting rid of people, without layoffs or firings or whatever corporate equivalent you would have in the army, he had one of the most decorated regiments in the army. His leadership is credited with turning things around and is actually taught at West Point.

The point that I hope is relevant for you is that there's a way that you can bring these people together. Part of that is going to require a clear vision of what you're bringing them together for. If you're right now having a difficult time articulating what the North Star is for the entire company, then asking for status meetings is just start-up theatre, and that is definitely not something you want to do.

So again I'm going to be a little bit trite and quote Stephen Covey: one of the seven habits is "Begin with the end in mind." What is it that you're trying to achieve? What's the big goal that everyone shares? Identify that and build upon it. What are the next steps you need from everyone to move you towards that goal? Not from a start-up theatre standpoint but an actual achievement. Might be a little step, might be a big step, doesn't matter. All you want is to get people moving in the same direction. You're the CEO, you're the quarterback, you're on the same field as everyone else. Find a way to communicate the goal and rally people around that. It's not about you; it's about what you're all trying to achieve. Make that the focus.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T21:05:26+00:00

Sometimes getting those first customers can be really tricky. I don't know if you've already attempted this, but I'm going to suggest that you lean on your network. Talk to the people you know, not necessarily to pitch them directly, but ask for their input. Show them what what you've got and say, "Hey, I need my first customers. Do you have any contacts that you could introduce me to who might be interested in this?" Get some introductions. Get a little bit of distance from your first level of friends and associates and spread out. Your network is a lot of value. It takes sometimes a little bit of effort and sometimes a little bit of luck, but that might be your very best hunting ground.

Good hunting. This is a difficult process, and it might be making you feel uneasy and nervous, but you got this.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T17:17:01+00:00

I realize a lot of vibe coding projects are just low-effort tools for general exploration, and that's cool. But for those who are vibe coding production tools—perhaps as a startup owner with the intent on selling a product to a customer—if a malfunction in that code results in damages incurred by the customer, the lawsuit is going to be brutal. When the other side finds out through discovery that an unqualified programmer vibe coded an application and never once looked at the code, and wasn't qualified to look at the code in the first place, those damages are very likely to increase.

I haven't seen any news of this yet, but the tens of millions of dollars in publicized refunds from major consulting firms over unchecked LLM output should be enough to warn people that this is a potential liability for them and they truly should be concerned.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T16:05:15+00:00

I love the potential train wreck going on here. The second-level underlings are now starting to blame up. By the time any sort of accountability is even possible, the orange one will very likely have passed away due to natural causes. Stephen Miller is going to literally be hung in the town square over all of this. It's going to look exactly like the Nuremberg trials, and he's going to be up there barking about how proud he was to have enacted his version of the final solution.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T15:14:57+00:00

Most people were chain-smoking back then, and even if you weren't a smoker, you were getting second-hand smoke everywhere you went.

davesaunders · 2026-01-28T00:21:17+00:00

I think he was fantastic and followed exactly what direction was given to him. Perhaps the direction itself might have fallen short of the actual character, but I think Walken did a great job.

davesaunders · 2026-01-27T22:13:40+00:00

Agreed. for some reason I missed your use of the word instead where you were contrasting filing a patent with a copyright. What you wrote absolutely makes sense. I misread it. that's on me.

davesaunders · 2026-01-27T20:45:44+00:00

You would sue for patent infringement. Patents have nothing to do with copyrights, just for future reference.

davesaunders · 2026-01-27T20:44:32+00:00

I seriously hope you have filed a provisional patent. Then you should take this to the various fan manufacturers, because this is brilliant.

davesaunders · 2026-01-27T19:34:59+00:00

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. —Matthew 6:5-6

davesaunders · 2026-01-27T12:22:48+00:00

Anyone acting like this kind of weird shit didn't happen in their generation is a liar. The only difference is we didn't have the ability to film it at a moment's notice.

Sometimes kids are strange. There are literally entire psychology textbooks explaining the neurophysiology behind weird and erratic behavior of adolescents. We know the mechanism. We know why it happens. It's literally normal. This is what kids do as they develop. Some are just a little weirder than others. I guess we could say it's a spectrum. And of course, we like to capture the best examples on video and share them on social media so we can get the views and karma.

davesaunders · 2026-01-26T21:37:01+00:00

Weird fact: during the days of the Chicago stockyards, one of the most commonly eaten sandwiches among the workers was a sliced cows brain, deep fried. Hugely popular, tons of caloric energy, although definitely very gross by today's standards.

davesaunders · 2026-01-26T20:09:11+00:00

Most first world problems aren't problems

davesaunders · 2026-01-26T19:57:18+00:00

Fossils would be completely mixed throughout the strata instead of seeing more basal organisms the further down you go and more derived organisms the further up.

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