I felt the burden of accumulated rules and scarcity mindset back in Europe. And if you want to build a company you feel the push down at every layer. You feel it from family, friends, clients, co-founders, the government, etc. I cannot see myself coming back and living there.

People are different and countries are different, so you can experience a glimpse of abundance mentality in Europe too at different levels, but very very far from the way you experience it in the US. They have tons of problems too, but if you solve problems at scale you make the money to solve most of those problems.

Obviously, it becomes better to have local models running on your own hardware — that will be best. I don't think we are there yet, though. Software, yes. If you tweak Pi and DeepSeek Pro, you can get Claude-code-level stuff. You'd still need to buy the hardware, though. Not cheap. Eventually, it will get very cheap.

I ended up creating an algo using color variance and auto-sizing, an LLM to select the fonts and text and nano banana. The thing I need is nano-banana-level images with Canva+human-level abilities automated.

It would be awesome to have a free LLM that can do that. Running on a 16GB RAM Mac. I have a lot of images and templates I can train on too. Not sure if I overengineered it, would love to have just one LLM that can do everything for free.

Should I try 4.8? I am happy with 4.6. I am not happy with 4.7.

The rest of them seem to avoid thinking outside a small info bubble/closed system, not sure why, but it looks like it creates anxiety when they start feeding too much info. Instead of trying to extract abstractions that make it possible to model the complexity and fuzz the non-important parts.

The same people, when they come up with a product implementation idea, avoid thinking about all the things required to be in place for the product to actually satisfy some real need/want. The product ends up detached from user need. The tech doesn't work.

And it doesn't matter if they can code or if Claude can work, because the directions required to define what needs to be there are not present.

I realized I need to take the thinking of these people as their ideas and advice — as inputs that need to be sanitized. The easy way I found is to remodel why they think the way they think — it's like having a safe VM running their code (thinking) through my computer (my brain).

These same people, usually years later, realize you were telling them things they were not able to comprehend at the time, but they realized those things were so important and would have saved them from suffering so much. They start to treat your voice with reverence instead of thinking through with their own minds and stress-testing against reality.

I would love to read some research about this and how to take advantage of it, or at least avoid the toxic influence such minds can have against one's own well-being and success.

I would not pay all that money to have something on that is that bulky and get annoying after a couple of hours

I was skeptical at first, but I tried using that and then asked Claude if the changes were okay, and they were, and the code works fine.