Paul Graham dropped his latest essay “Founder Mode” this week, arguing the common advice for founders to “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs,” is incorrect. Is “manager” thinking. Is a bad mode. What you want to be entering is “founder mode,” which exists, but can’t yet be defined. “Imagine what [founders will] do” once we figure it out, he concludes. YC fanboys lost their minds. For three days now we’ve talked about this essay, a cultural reset, akin — literally, somebody tweeted this — to the Potsdam Conference, wherein Allied powers planned their postwar peace. Why such virality? And what, for the love of God, is “Founder Mode”? The answer is “nothing,” because “Founder Mode” is not advice, it’s an identity. There’s no one way to build a company, but every founder on the planet (me) likes to remind you he’s 1) special, and 2) hardcore. Sick meme tbh. Thank you, Paul.

Yesterday, AI startup Altera released a video introducing “Project Sid, the first ever agent civilization,” which populated a Minecraft server with thousands of AI agents (‘individuals’ that can act autonomously) to study how they’d behave. The results? According to the video, forms of government, culture, economy, and religion emerged. In one example, after agents set up a market and agreed on a currency, a priest bribed everyone to join his religion. In another, after a villager became lost, the other agents lit torches across town to make it visible at a distance. It remains to be seen whether Project Sid demonstrates novel behavior or just LLMs predicting tokens. But it’s notable all the hype (and fear) that humanity is building an AI god seems, at least in this case, misplaced. A giant birthing, and then watching, tiny beings live out their tiny lives? It seems AI has made us gods ourselves.

Earlier this week, following X’s ban in Brazil, Minnesota AG Keith Ellison took to… X… to express his sincere appreciation for the tyrannical mass censorship. “Obrigado [Thanks] Brasil!” Ellison tweeted out to the South American nation that could not, in fact, see his words. And while the image of Ellison heaping praise into the void was amusing, the realization that he’s one of the highest-ranking officials in the same state government that might deliver our next Vice President was, for me, a little less fun. Cheering on the ban of an American social media platform in a foreign country? On grounds that the company didn’t do enough to censor political speech? After Walz himself expressed his own sense “free speech” did not include “misinformation” (opinions with which he disagrees)? “bUt WaLz iS fOlKsY aNd MoDeRaTe.” Idk, I guess the tyranny is camouflaged. Which does explain the hat!

Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Few B2B SaaS companies take this as seriously as Warp, the payroll and compliance platform we use here at Pirate Wires. The Warp team has said no to all the superfluous features that their competitors are focused on, and instead opted for a dead-simple interface that allows us to get in, do the thing, and get out. Most importantly, Warp puts our payroll compliance on autopilot, allowing us to spend more time in Google Docs and less time on the phone with the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue. If design truly is “how it works,” then Warp is designed exceptionally.

Get started with Warp here. Also: Pirate Wires and Warp are hosting an SF Happy Hour 9/06. RSVP here.

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pirate wires #126 // brazil bans x as the global war on speech continues, the overton window shifts to jailing founders, and facing the despotism now before us

this week, brad polumbo joins the pod to talk mark zuckerberg’s regret for cooperating with the biden-harris administration during covid. plus: pavel durov’s arrest, wired calls out tech leaders over trump’s “very fine people” comments, and 4 new contestants join our pirate idol pod competition.  

wikipedia editors churn news articles from an overwhelmingly left-leaning list of “reliable sources” into neutrality-emblazoned fact

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