mvvl

"Ads don’t influence responses" - they just arrive in the same payload, measured with four layers of attribution and politely pretend to be coincidences.

Schrodinger’s monetization: completely separate, yet somehow there.

The problem isn't that it can't write good code. It's that the guy prompting it often doesn't know enough to tell the difference. Way too many vibe coders these days who can generate a PR in 5 seconds, but can’t explain a single line of it.

This is only going to get worse with LLMs. Now people can "contribute" garbage code at 10x the speed. We're entering the era of the "read only" maintainer focused on self-defense.

Tbh, for me there’s basically no difference between a repo with 2k stars and one with 20k.

Stars only matter when there are very few, like if it has almost none, that’s a red flag. Otherwise it’s just noise.

My first project came from a former coworker who moved to a new company. That's pretty much it.

Can't tell you any clever acquisition strategy. For this sort of work you need a critical mass of credibility and connections. The more companies you've worked at, the more people who can vouch for you from the inside. When you're in corpo, you are basically pre-selling your consulting pipeline, before you ever need it.

On a personal note, I quit that hustle, simply because I didn't enjoy having to prove myself every other day to new prospects. Especially since I've been a software engineer for 12 years already. Now just work on my own products that can speak for themselves.

one thing worth pointing out is that the legacy private railways work because they were never nationalized and had decades to quietly buy up land around stations before it was worth anything. That's really hard to replicate from scratch. This model is great in dense cities but even Japan is still struggling with rural lines