mach nine

It cannot be understated just how wrong these 'experts' were.

We raised $5M led by Dragonfly to build a global lottery

In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks. An important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn't a performance-based "rightsizing" as companies call it nowadays. It's a sound bet that anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline.

the hierarchy of local AI users: tier 1: "can it run on my macbook?" tier 2: "what GPU do i need?" tier 3: buys a 3090 and asks chatgpt how to use it tier 4: actually reads the llama.cpp docs tier 5: has 4 terminal windows open and doesn't know which one to close tier 6: the model is building games while you sleep i'm somewhere between 5 and 6

this is what 12 gigs of VRAM built in 2026. a 9 billion parameter model running on a 5 year old RTX 3060 wrote a full space shooter from a single prompt. blank screen on first try. i came back with a bug list and the same model on the same card fixed every issue across 11 files without touching a single line myself. enemies still looked wrong so i pushed another iteration and now the game has pixel art octopi, particle effects, screen shake, projectile physics and a combo system. all running locally on a card that was designed to play fortnite. three iterations. zero cloud. zero API calls. every token generated on hardware sitting under my desk. the model reads its own code, finds what's broken, patches it, validates syntax and restarts the server. i just describe what's wrong and it handles the rest. people are paying monthly subscriptions to type into a browser tab and wait for a server farm to respond. meanwhile a GPU you can find used on ebay is running a full autonomous hermes agent framework with 31 tools, 128K context window and thinking mode generating at 29 tokens per second nonstop. the game still needs work. level upgrades don't trigger and boss fights need tuning. but the fact that i'm iterating on gameplay balance instead of debugging whether the code runs at all tells you where this is headed. every iteration the game gets better on the same hardware. same 12 gigs. same 9 billion parameters. same RTX 3060 from 5 years ago your GPU is not a gaming card anymore. it's a local AI lab that never sends your data anywhere.

Your brain peaked musically somewhere around age 16. Everything since then has been a dopamine echo. Between the ages of 12 and 22, the mesolimbic dopamine pathway, the same circuit that processes cocaine and sex, fires at levels in response to sound that it will never reach again for the rest of your life. A 2011 McGill study used PET scans and fMRI simultaneously and found that music triggers dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal. The caudate nucleus lights up during anticipation of the good part. The nucleus accumbens lights up when it hits. Your brain is treating a guitar riff with the same reward architecture it uses for food-seeking and pair bonding. During adolescence, that response is dramatically amplified. Pubertal hormones are flooding the system. The prefrontal cortex is still wiring itself. Memories formed during this window get encoded with a density of emotional tagging that nothing in your 30s or 40s can replicate. Researchers at the University of Leeds identified this as the “reminiscence bump”: the period when your sense of self is forming, and the music playing during that formation becomes structurally integrated into your identity. A 2025 longitudinal study from the University of Gothenburg analyzed 40,000 users’ streaming data across 15 years. Younger listeners explored broadly across genres. Older listeners collapsed into increasingly narrow loops, almost entirely anchored to music from their teens and early twenties. Your brain stopped losing interest in new music years ago. It’s running a cost-benefit analysis. Familiar songs deliver guaranteed dopamine with zero processing cost. New songs require pattern recognition, expectation-building, and repeated exposure before the reward circuit kicks in. Past 25, most people stop paying that tax. The one variable that predicts whether someone keeps exploring: the personality trait “openness to experience.” Score high, you keep seeking. Score average, you default to the familiar forever. The fix, if you want one: deliberate exposure. Three listens minimum before your auditory cortex builds enough predictive models to generate a reward response. One passive listen on a playlist will never get there. Your brain needs repetition to find the pattern, and it needs the pattern to release dopamine.