# how do I stop participating?

Jan 18, 2026

This one is for the complainers and whiners.

First off, if you think I ever worked for big tech, you don’t know much about me. I had 3 internships at Google, two when I was very young (18/19) and got a great education that paid me, and one where I just wrote open source software. I worked at Facebook in 2011 for 9 months and quit before any shares vested cause I thought the mission of “wasting the world’s time” was dumb. And oh yes the 5 weeks I worked at Twitter hoping maybe it could be different.

I don’t have too much money; the money I do have I made from pwn2own, CTFs, crypto contracting, and basic market goes up investing. The main reason I have money is because I don’t spend money; for example, I have travelled all around the world, and the best travel experiences I have had were way below cost of living in America. I have never made money from big tech, so I’m definitely not telling you to do something I didn’t do. I’m actually telling you to do exactly what I did.

I started two companies, comma.ai and tiny corp. While I took a small amount of VC from a16z for comma, I never gave up any control, and have 0 intention of doing hypergrowth ponzi scams (lol sorry but ur the bigg scammer). comma and tiny’s last rounds were from individuals who are aligned with the mission.

Both companies are sustainably profitable with reasonable business models – selling boxes for more than they cost to make. They also produce MIT licensed open source software, ensuring that even if control is lost they can’t be pivoted to rent seeking, and ownership lies with the purchaser of the hardware. I think who owns the robots is going to be a key aspect of what the future looks like. And I don’t mean “owns” from a legalist perspective, I mean “owns” as in the hacker meaning, like “owning” the box. Who has root?

comma has an open source operating system for robotics, currently used in 30k cars for driving, but all robotics tasks are quite similar. There’s a thriving community of forks of the openpilot software and third party openpilot hardware. As it was designed, as it should be.

I realized at some point in comma’s growth that a lot was going to come down to who owns the computers capable of training the models. Hence my second company, tiny corp, with the mission to “commoditize the petaflop.” Petaflops will always be a scarce resource, the best we can hope for is that they are a commodity available to everyone without massive benefits of economies of scale.

We develop full stack software for training, from models to MMIO registers. It’s small and portable, so our hope is that 20 Chinese accelerator companies can be on a level playing field with NVIDIA. NVIDIA’s value comes from their software, not their hardware, what else explains the huge gap between NVIDIA and AMD’s market cap?

What would you do if you were me? Do you have a better idea about how to fight against what’s coming? If you think you can somehow just buy safety for yourself, you are both wrong and pathetic. The best hope any of us have is to maximize the number of things that survive. If you and everyone else sell to bankers in hopes of buying a personal ticket out, we are all dead. I’m not playing defect, and I shame you for doing so.

To the haters, I have given my life to this shit. What the fuck would I do with a billion dollars anyway? Buy a yacht and fuck Instagram models? Boats are a huge PITA to maintain and ugh I have slept with Instagram models mid experience that I think men only like to show the pretty girl off to other people.

I take this all quite seriously, and I’m trying my best to end up in a good future. Clearly not everyone is. To everyone working on ads, surveillance, gambling, secret research, enshittification, cloud lock-in, what are you doing with your life? Why are you selling out the future?

It doesn’t require everyone to stop, just enough people. And it starts with you.