acheong08

I'm visited Japan for the first time recently and that's what I'd recommend as well. At first I tried to search for it online and when I couldn't figure it out within 2 minutes, I decided I'll deal with it later. When I got to the station, there are machines that support English which you can enter your destination and whether you wanna include the IC fare. Haven't had any problems so far

I have a friend who uses ChatGPT, but writes all the messages on paper, takes a picture, and sends it in. Then prints out all the responses to annotate and respond to.

I had a similar problem maybe a year back. I've stuck to Foot since. I've got a new laptop now though and might be worth giving Ghostty another spin.

Interesting. So far, Thunderbird has been the only mail client that "just works" for me. Then again, I self host my email & so no weird Gmail or Outlook bullshit.

I've been trying to get in touch with South Korea's government IT. Have got really severe vulnerabilities that could literally compromise national security. No response so far but maybe been emailing the wrong places. If anyone could point me a direction, please shoot me an email.

When GPT-5.6-sol's reasoning traces were leaked, they also used "caveman speak". Definitely a token efficiency optimization

This is nice, but the long time it took them to open source I think burnt a lot of the initial traction. I do like the idea & I'll see whether I can make use of it

Apologies! Not much of a UI guy and I thought I dimmed it sufficiently for the text to be readable. I might reduce the rows of eyes from 4 to 2 for mobile tomorrow morning or whatever helps. Let me know!

I do want a bit of personality in my site but definitely need to figure out how to make it more subtle

Oh it definitely wasn't a waste for me either. I've gone from an introvert stumbling over trying to explain technical concepts to being able to pitch abstract ideas that check all the right boxes for VCs and whatnot.

Opened a ton of doors after the hackathon. Would've never dreamed of coming over here to SF and being part of the whole startup/VC ecosystem.

The scary part to me is that it actually works. Not practically, but that upper management and whatnot actually buy it.

Most early stage startups around me right now are built on the premise of replacing groups of people. There's a startup strapping sensors and cameras onto blue collar workers in developing countries to take "egocentric" data and train "world models" to the get robots to replace skilled physical labor. Lots of "ambient capture" to then automate away the work of the employees getting recorded.

Even what I'm building right now, which was initially just a tool to help me with my ADHD and memory problems is slowly getting twisted towards the same direction based on where the money is.

I would love to know how to build a company that serves real humans rather than the accumulation of capital and the extractive nature of corporations.

I'm living in this ecosystem right now, and I see this every day. The mentality that "normal people" are beneath them.

I live a fairly social life and enjoy going to karaoke and going on hikes with friends or strangers not in tech/startups, and many of the others in the residency simply can't understand why I'd want to interact with people they perceive as less intelligent than them.

"Think about it. Think of the most average person you know. 50% are more stupid than them. And you won't get any value out of speaking to those"

Oh hey, it's my blog. Weird seeing it posted here.

It's been a while and I now have a lot more context than back when I wrote the post in anger.

Disclaimer: As a result of people I met during the hackathon, I was somehow able to get into Entrepreneurs First, a startup accelerator/residency program and moved from Cardiff to San Francisco. The organizers of the hackathon has lots of ties to people who now fund me. What I say now will obviously be more measured and possibly biased.

There's many types of hackathons, and they exist for different purposes. I went in with the expectation of something similar to Huawei's Tech Arenas where the goal is to find the most technically capable engineers for specific problems (combinatorial optimization, optical network routing, etc) with the ability to communicate tacked on. That is why they're nearly a month long with actual metrics you compete by (latency, profit, etc)

HackEurope is a recruiting pipeline for larger startups and venture capitalists. They are specifically selecting for good pitchers, not technical people (which for them is a dime a dozen)

Having now been in the startup ecosystem for a bit, I can see it playing out very similar to how the hackathon went. Oversell and call it a long term vision when probed & you'll get enough funding to make at least something, even if you have to hire or contract everything out.

I still can't believe I'm here and I feel less and less human each passing day. The temptation of capital chips away daily at one's moral compass.

P.s. Gonna go sleep. The one place I always check is email, so if there's any particular feedback you want me to see, that's in my profile.

This is very interesting. Not saying it is, but a possible endgame for Chinese models could be to have "backdoor" commands such that when a specific string is passed in, agents could ignore a particular alert or purposely reduce security. A lot of companies are currently working on "Agentic Security Operation Centers", some of them preferring to use open source models for sovereignty. This feels like a viable attack vector.

That is just factually incorrect. Most Chinese Malaysians are either Cantonese or Hokkien, with closer ties to Taiwan and Hong Kong than the mainland. A lot of the older folk don't even speak Mandarin. Keep in mind the CCP wasn't even in power when most migrated here.