Selling to startups

30 Oct 2026

something i’ve noticed - a lot of successful companies got going by selling to other startups

• stripe selling to YC
• scale AI selling to cruise
• turbopuffer selling to cursor

think it’s cause:

• if they grow you grow
• lowest barrier to entry, startups will just try stuff

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Indie Games As A Canary For Ai Software

30 Oct 2026

indie games as a canary for ai software

whats happening

• llms have made reverse engineering way cheaper, so people are duping indie games almost as soon as they come out
  • devs have duped other devs games just from the trailer
  • if a playtest binary leaks, someone can reverse engineer it and ship a copy before you launch, so devs are avoiding playtesting
  • cloners dupe games onto roblox straight away and take that audience, so some devs release their own roblox clone on launch day
  • so devs are obfuscating their code with bioweapon and nuclear weapon terminology, so llms refuse to touch it

why are games a canary for software?

• there are so many game devs and so much tooling that games are one of the most competitive markets
  • so games hit this stuff before the rest of software does

what does this mean?

• anything deployed locally can be reverse engineered
  • so mobile and desktop apps are at risk
• code on a server cant be reverse engineered
  • so more software might move server side to stay safe
• devs cant playtest without risking a leak
  • so a service for safe playtesting would be good
  • a way to verify playtesters would have a good network effect
• protection against reverse engineering would be good too

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The lindy effect

24 May 2026

something I think is an interesting heuristic to have is. the the idea that that the future life expectancy of non perishable things is proportional to their current age. aka probabilistically if you’re observing something you’re probably observing it somewhere in the middle of of its life expectancy.

theres a few ways to apply this but to me at least it applies to books and software. so that a book thats stood the test of time must be worth reading. and the counter point being that new things are very often not worth consuming.

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Always Be Leveraging

24 May 2026

If you want to make a bigger impact on the face of the world having a more principled way of thinking about it will help.

At the end of the day theres two things which matter, how much value your action provides and how many times you can perform this action, the leverage.

My impression is that in many domains most people are positive value and will produce value, often in many domains just introducing change will result in a positive outcome half of the time.

And so the far less under-appreciated component is the leverage side.

Currently I think theres four main ways people gain leverage:

• Capital: you borrow money to increase the size of your bet
• Human: you use other people to increase the size of your bet
• Software: you use computers to run your value producing software multiple times
• Media: you duplicate your value producing media multiple times

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Boredom And Quitting

03 May 2026

randsinrepose.com/archives/bored-people-quit

This article nicely talks about an effect ive also noticed in workplaces is that the lack of constant work is often one of the main causes for people to quit.

Theres an even interesting possible subconscious artefact of this is that maybe people do recognise this and maybe this is why they can needlessly add complexity to projects that don’t need it, just to fill their time and minds.

You also see this being used as a toxic workplace thing in some workplaces, where people who are disliked are told to simply not do any work at all and sit in a room.

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