by reichenstein | 2026-03-01 11:43:57+00:00
You can find a fault and imperfection in everything if you really want to. I share your perspective in many ways, and my frustration is that no matter what we do, we get put in the same bad bucket with the very instances we have been battling forever.

I mean, what are you doing on Hackernews if you're a black-and-white AI guy? Look at the top page here: "AIAIAIAI".

Meanwhile, sooner or later, every post that points to us gets ghosted by the system (similar to Daring Fireball, as soon as you cross a threshold, the post gets hidden), who knows why, likely though we're perceived as too SV subversive or it may just be a bug. I am not writing this because I think anyone but you will see it, or because I think I'll change your mind. Just getting steam off my chest. I also take any critique as a critique that I haven't communicated clearly enough, but I still get frustrated and upset by such absurd diametral mischaracterizations sometimes, well, every single time this happens I get very annoyed.

Mostly, people understand where we come from. Even on social media, mostly they understood the last article. One guy thought he was clever framing it as "just an long boring ad from a competitor". Haha, "competitor"... Calling iA Writer a "competitor" of Word like calling "Hank's Special Brew" he makes in his garage a competitor of Heineken. I think that was one guy, and his idiot friend that agreed before he read the article. It still bothers me when I give my very best to be clear, entertaining, and as truthful as one can possibly be when you have a product you sell.

You're criticizing that we may have been too complex in our reasoning for V7? It fucking is a complex matter. No matter how much you want AI to just be a stealing operation... Hardly anything is fully black and white. AI and coding, f.i., are a much better match than I'd have expected. AI for writing much less. But not being a native speaker, it does help me with typos. To deal with reality means that you accept it first and then do what you can. This is what we did with V7. I am very proud of what we did there. It took courage, creativity, and determination.

After 15 years of mostly swimming against the stream, feedback like your initial one makes me fantasize about becoming like everybody else. "Flip the tables, switch sides, and float downstream for once, stop trying to do the right thing, and just make money, sell the whole thing, collect the ‘congrats,' and retire." I'm 55, fighting against windmills is not the healthiest thing.

I also know, however, that I am not swimming upstream because I am so heroic and tough. I just can't be a shameless opportunist to join the SV ranks. It makes me puke. It's against my nature. If our actions were motivated by pure virtue, I could calmly argue against it. Opposing power, for me, is not a conscious choice, it's who I have always been. In spite of all the complaining above, it kind of works, too. Now, if, who knows, against all odds, we do get a little slice of the part of the Swiss software cake that looks like it may be redistributed to a certain minor degree, let's say we get a handful of schools using our products, it would not be unironic (because I was the same relentless troublemaker in school that I am in tech), and yet not entirely undeserved.