1 pointby erikbethke4 hours ago1 comment
  • erikbethke4 hours ago
    Why? I love AI. Full stop. 54 years old and my first computer was a Vic-20, then a C64, then an Apple IIgs. have been coding since 1980 games professionally since 1995. I am having the absolute most fun of my career. As I type this, like all of you I have 6 different code CLIs open and running on everything from client-facing work, to a new game, and two new agent harnesses. It is addicting for me in the same way that World of Warcraft and Factorio were to me! Just one more PR :)

    Love AI. But, here is where I get a bit "woo-woo". I am not an AI doomer, I am fundamentally an optimist - but I do not think we are entitled to good future light-cones. I think we need agency and create those good future light cones.

    I do not want to see a future where only a handful of leading labs and the hyperscalers run a cartel on intelligence. I do not want to live in a world with 'trickle-down' intelligence. I do not want to live in a world where we are scrambling to rent 'economically competitive augmentation'. I want to live in a post-scarcity, solar punk world.

    And so I offer Bike4Mind. Hopefully, with utmost respect and humbleness, this is useful to you. I truly want you and everyone else to have sovereignty over their own AI. All of the major labs and all of the hyper scalers are working hard and fast to pull you into their walled gardens. And then like Pink Floyd's: "Mama's gonna keep baby cosy and warm", make it so much more comfortable to stay locked in where they have their fingers laced through your data and through your workflows.

    Check out our source code and inspect it, fork it and run it yourself on your own hardware or in your AWS account. Or give it a spin, we have ~$10 of usage in credits - not a free tier, just a confirm with a real email address, or perhaps subscribe for $30 if you are so inclined, our credits roll-over for 90 days. Again, I cannot think of a way we could be more correct and kind.

    How does our business work - how do we make money? Serial entrepreneur here - have founded a bunch of game companies and even had two decent exits. I have raised 13 venture rounds in my career. Bike4Mind is special, this one I have bootstrapped, and we have zero investors and we are profitable and growing. We make our money by working hard for our enterprise clients and surprising and delighting them. We are also building our own products (on B4M!) and hope to see those grow and flourish. With absolutely no shade cast on open-source community projects - we are a real, healthy business and we use B4M to do our "day job" and so building and expanding B4M is aligned to our core work. We were blown away and got two community PRs in the first 9 hours from people we never met - so cool - but B4M is not reliant on open sourced labor. And on the other side, we have no investor, we do not have a preference stack, we do not have a free tier and we are not burning capital and not chasing any vanity metrics in order to fund the next round. We are not pressured into unnatural acts. This is the most fun and interesting way we could build!