Steve Butterworth

Relentlessly Simplify ™

@charlierward @sab8a @_brandswell @harry_uglow Mymind via their MCP?

Having this conversation more and more regularly. Most recently with @sab8a @_brandswell @harry_uglow. Feels like best practice is still being developed in real time, and lots of people are midcurving it. Surely a product to be made here? And no it’s not just Obsidian.

@heyitsgeorg @brokencuffs But FiRe still feels like buying later freedom by sacrificing present freedom massively in your younger healthiest years. Whilst also training your brain to continue with that perspective of delay gratification.

@brokencuffs Starting a new business is a delightful choice after achieving financial freedom. So is buying a patch of land and farming. Or making music. Or traveling. The idea is not to retire and do nothing, but to buy the freedom to do with your life what you please.

The idea of FIRE never made full sense to me I watched my dad retire at 60 with enough money and he just lost his mind so he started a business When you retire early what do you do with all the time?

@a16z @pmarca @david_perell This idea has been doing the rounds for at least 15 years. Seems great idea on paper but no one found traction so far.

Amazing idea. It almost happened. @pmarca @david_perell

@alexchristou_ Being systematic and patient. Not expecting any positive metrics for months is my survival strategy with the marketing grind.

A good metric for marketing, gtm or sales is failure How many marketing vids flopped this week? How many no’s did you get from cold DMs? A lot of the GTM game is failure, which makes it harder to actually do. Tweets get 32 impressions, DMs never replied to. Tiktoks stuck in the ‘algo trap’ Turns out you have to actually fall on your face 100-1000 times on this stuff and actually iterate and improve. Hence failure is a good metric to go for. Will be depressed and stop if you only tracking wins and things you can’t control

@p_millerd Agreed, horrible. Why with such a successful brand and money can he not afford to take the higher ground and be good for humanity

People will say this is good strategy But I say you can just live your life without optimizing every last ounce of attention

@alexchristou_ Yeah me too. You can strategize forever and not do the thing and Claude will help you procrastinate if your not careful

@stevewillbe Cheers Steve. Yeah it's a good tip - but sometimes find myself doing this 3 or 4 times before actually doing the thing

Sitting down to do marketing for your app is tough. Just doesn't feel as solid and certain as having a feature to implement or improve in claude code. When you sit down for a claude code sesh you have a clear outcome. When you sit down to do GTM there’s literally 100s of things you could be doing . Any tips?

@karpathy Working on this right now over at govping.org. We’re on mission to make all government updates accessible in one place, annotated with frontier AI and accessible with MCP too

Something I've been thinking about - I am bullish on people (empowered by AI) increasing the visibility, legibility and accountability of their governments. Historically, it is the governments that act to make society legible (e.g. "Seeing like a state" is the common reference), but with AI, society can dramatically improve its ability to do this in reverse. Government accountability has not been constrained by access (the various branches of government publish an enormous amount of data), it has been constrained by intelligence - the ability to process a lot of raw data, combine it with domain expertise and derive insights. As an example, the 4000-page omnibus bill is "transparent" in principle and in a legal sense, but certainly not in a practical sense for most people. There's a lot more like it: laws, spending bills, federal budgets, freedom of information act responses, lobbying disclosures... Only a few highly trained professionals (investigative journalists) could historically process this information. This bottleneck might dissolve - not only are the professionals further empowered, but a lot more people can participate. Some examples to be precise: Detailed accounting of spending and budgets, diff tracking of legislation, individual voting trends w.r.t. stated positions or speeches, lobbying and influence (e.g. graph of lobbyist -> firm -> client -> legislator -> committee -> vote -> regulation), procurement and contracting, regulatory capture warning lights, judicial and legal patterns, campaign finance... Local governments might be even more interesting because the governed population is smaller so there is less national coverage: city council meetings, decisions around zoning, policing, schools, utilities... Certainly, the same tools can easily cut the other way and it's worth being very mindful of that, but I lean optimistic overall that added participation, transparency and accountability will improve democratic, free societies. (the quoted tweet is half-ish related, but inspired me to post some recent thoughts)

@MrSimonBennett I think it’s a clear indication of what Twitter has become and who it attracts. Sad but true.

The amount of nonsense and abuse this received is nuts

@_lhermann @uptimerobot Updown.io - check as chips, solid as a rock

I've been with @uptimerobot for years and always recommended them. But now they are force-upgrading me to a $348/y plan. Super unfriendly towards legacy customers. Anyone know a bootstrapped-friendly alternative?

@doodlestein @yongfook 🤣

@stevewillbe @yongfook I don’t know, seems like a dangerous game to play now, especially if you have a corporate W2 job.

I don't think AI will be the 10x or 100x multiplier that people say, because I think there are natural checks and balances in place regulating everything. You can code 10x faster now? Cool, do that for a week straight and you'll fry your brain. You will need to take breaks and regulate yourself. You can build a product 10x faster now? Cool, but it takes just as long as it always did to get people to care, get customers, etc. You can tear through the entire backlog in one day? Cool now there's no more work to do and everyone is fired. Maybe lets not tell the boss this is possible. You can generate any image of anything you want? Cool, but your friends can only take so many custom meme images before they disown you. You can send 10,000x more AI-enhanced "cold outreach" emails looking for clients? Sure but it takes just as long as always to gather requirements, discuss timelines, etc. None of that is any faster. Only a very tiny % of giga-chad geniuses will have both the intellect and the agency to employ AI in a way that actually 10xs or 100xs the value that they generate. The rest of us will be limited by organic or bureaucratic guard rails. Personally I'm very grateful for the role AI plays in my life. It allows me to code 10x faster with the time I allocate, which frees up other time to do things I enjoy in my personal life. My output is more than before, not 10x, maybe 2x. And my quality of life has improved. That's well worth $200 a month!

@doodlestein @yongfook Yep it is. So many incredibly varied ways we can succesfully navigating this thing we call life

@stevewillbe @yongfook This is the same argument as “Why should I work hard when I can slack off and skate by with the minimal amount of effort?” And yeah, if that argument resonates with you, good luck with that.

@doodlestein @yongfook Liberating to mange 52 when we can manage just 1 and have more free time than ever to enjoy its rewards?

@yongfook I don’t sell anything actually, it’s 100% free and open source. Appreciate the snark though.

@sobedominik Like others mention /rc is good when it works but cloud layer does seem flaky at times. Feels pretty beta. Tailscale + Moshi is my fallback.

is there any great tool that lets me easily keep track of my Claude Code instances so I can review, interact and approve proposals while I sit on the toilet from my iPhone? 📲 👀

@milalolli @charlierward 🇬🇧 changeflow.com 🚀 London

If you are London based and Londonmaxxing building stuff. Drop a 🇬🇧 below 👇 I’m forming a group for IRL events and I want to see you there

@tadasgedgaudas @iannuttall I’m a bit more optimistic about pricing than this. The competitive landscape shows the Chinese labs catching up and the Chinese fabs not far behind. The cut throat battle among US labs isn’t stopping soon either. All good for the consumer 🤞

@iannuttall on it!

I am very happy to be the product if I get $5k+ in compute for $200 just remember: you gotta make hay while the sun shines...

@yongfook Same strategy. Let others ride the hype cycle and fix the bugs and then I’ll play with what comes out the other side.

You can set your watch by the fact that if I get into some "new tech" that probably means it's about a year old already. I got into Claude in Jan this year. And just installed Ghostty and I'm like "heh, this is cool".

@forgebitz @ImSh4yy @OfficialLoganK @GoogleDeepMind I’d be happy with a Gemini 3.1 Flash Liter but I can’t see it happening

@forgebitz @ImSh4yy @OfficialLoganK @GoogleDeepMind Crazy decision. For automated high scale use I need a very cheap half decent model. Flash 2.0 and Flash 2.5 Lite were these. They’ve taken themselves out of this market so we’re left with the lower end OSS Chinese models there now and grok 4.1 fast.

Introducing Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite 🔦, a huge step forward on the boundary of intelligence, beating 2.5 Flash on many tasks.

@OfficialLoganK @GoogleDeepMind With those price differences you’ve just axed the Flash Lite USP. This was a reliable, cheap model for scale, no more.