If you’ve lived long enough, you’ve had that moment when you almost lost everything, but somehow didn’t. You accidentally deleted your customer database, but a backup you’d only just set up saved your business. You sold an asset the day before it surged in value, but the exchange canceled the trade because of an error. You could have lost your life, but an incredible confluence of circumstances saved you. None of us would have trouble recalling a moment like that.

What changes a person more: losing something important or keeping it by sheer luck?

When launching a startup, don’t make it multilingual until you have stable revenue and a team to support it. You can’t know whether the startup will become profitable, so early on, your time is better spent finding PMF and acquiring users. AI can write scripts to manage translation files and help with text translation, but the quality will still be poor. Users might as well use the browser’s built-in translator.

If you build the service in 10 languages right away, you’ll struggle to maintain it. Every interface change means updating translation files across all languages, even though most of your users will likely understand an English interface anyway. But if you’re building for a specific country, build it in that country’s language and don’t add English. Even two languages at the start are worse than one. With a single language, you can keep text directly in the code instead of splitting it into separate translation files.

— Why did my last post on X get 0 impressions? Is it a shadowban?
— It’s not necessarily a shadowban. First, X shows the post to a small group of followers, and if there are no reactions, it doesn’t push it any further.
— So it showed the post to 0 people, got 0 reactions, and didn’t show it to anyone else?
— Yes.
— But if there were 0 impressions, how could there be reactions?
— Maybe the stats just haven’t updated. Try posting this from another account.
— The stats haven’t updated in 2 days? Why would I post it from another account?
— You’re right. I got sidetracked. Going back to your original question. First, X shows the post to a small group...

You start out wanting to become a millionaire. Then you become one and realize you’re just one of a million people just like you. You’re not special, you’re no better than anyone else, you’re not even one in a thousand. You’re one in a million.

I once asked Composer 2 to add support for a third-party API in the code. I was so lazy that I just dropped the token into the chat and gave it the task. It replied in bold “This is urgent. You sent the token in the chat. Revoke it right now”. At least it wasn’t in all caps. It didn’t even try to do the task. No other model has ever talked to me in that urgent tone, like some cheap marketing gimmick. Of course, I didn’t bother changing the token.