my hunch is that we're moving towards more surveillance, censorship and deplatforming in the future, and CBDCs are a major tool for that.
I like Bitcoin, despite its problems (price volatility and quantum vulnerability) but I think censorship-resistant stablecoins would be a better solution for people looking to protect themselves from Big Brother.
Shockingly bitcoin gained a lot more power for me when prominent government officials started using it to start operating outside the checks and balances of the banking system.
It is very basic now: it tells me which of the customers have cancelled their subscription and why (Stripe lets people choose the reason before cancelling). I've yet to gain a customer despite launching on the Stripe Marketplace but it's been personally helpful for me so far.
tangentially related, but as someone who built multiple internet businesses -- mostly unsuccessful, some mildly successful -- I barely have any new ideas to work on.
I don't know if this is the effect of relying on AI too much in my day-to-day work or leading a more monotonous life as of late, but I'm sure I'm not the only one. Lots of ideas that I could have built before LLMs took over now seem trivial to build with Claude & friends.
I can relate to this, in the past I felt like I could write down pages of projects to try if only I had time. Now my mind immediately goes towards "do I want to manage this long term after the initial spark".
They're done. They export oil/LNG, import food, invest the proceeds in the US companies/treasuries and brand themselves as logistics hubs + safe havens for the global rich. It's all out of the window now.
the closure of the strait (i.e. a toll booth by Iran) will cause massive inflation, destroy the GCC, and eventually lead to a global recession and the end of a petrodollar, which is how Iran is retaliating.
And if the US attempts a ground invasion to keep the strait open, it will be a complete disaster for the US.
yes. they export oil/LNG and import most of their food. and they invest their proceeds into the US economy/treasuries, which they're going to stop if this continues.
by some estimates, Qatar and Kuwait could experience ~14% GDP contraction this year if this goes on.
I've finally finished the long-abandoned project that I've been meaning to build for a while.
If you use Stripe Billing for subscriptions, your customers can specify reasons why they cancelled (e.g. too expensive, not using it, switched to competitor, etc.). However, to access those, you either have to use Stripe Sigma or pull them from the API. I wanted to build a more convenient way to access those (and also act upon them).
I've submitted the app to Stripe's App Marketplace, but I have a limited number of test invites to send out if you're interested (I will happily waive your subscription for 3 months).
The first business I started never gained traction, so I sold it in 2021 (which was a completely different time compared to now).
Notion had announced that they'd launch a beta version of their API, so while waiting for the early access, I built a landing page, login/signup, and all other plumbing for the web app.
It was a rather underwhelming launch (both for the API and my business), but I gained my first customer within a month.
Honestly, it's been a slog running this business (Notion's API is surprisingly hard to work with, so it seemed that I was stuck for months on end), so knowing what I know now, I'd probably have started a different business. My burnout didn't help either.
Claude has been incredibly helpful these last few months in solving esoteric undocumented edge cases that were plaguing the codebase for years.
I have a healthy MRR/growth rate right now and the biggest product in the niche, so I'm grateful for that.
Ditto but for Claude -- blows GPT out of the water. Much better in coding and solving physics problems from the images (in foreign languages). GPT couldn't even read the image. The only annoying thing is that if you use Opus for coding, your usage will fill up pretty fast.
Notion's built-in PDF exporter is quite disappointing to say the least, so I built (well, Claude did) an alternative. It uses a hosted puppeteer service in the background (browserless.io) and allows for more customization.
I've been using Hetzner for my business and have been quite happy with it so far. I recently migrated to a slightly larger bare metal server with 64GB RAM, 16 cores, 4 SSDs (6.5TB in total), and unlimited bandwidth for $96 bucks.
I've been a customer of Big Cloud and Small Cloud (DO, Linode).
my hunch is that we're moving towards more surveillance, censorship and deplatforming in the future, and CBDCs are a major tool for that.
I like Bitcoin, despite its problems (price volatility and quantum vulnerability) but I think censorship-resistant stablecoins would be a better solution for people looking to protect themselves from Big Brother.
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