Another paying user here. Very happy with Kagi, but would cancel asap if there were ads. Don't mind paying more. I just don't want ads. But I cannot really imagine it, they would loose half their competitive advantage. (The other half being having good results)

For me it would probably mean to build a search from scratch. For 90% of my search use cases it's pretty straightforward. I mostly visit the same sites..

For finance, I find interesting the other way around. You see many fire types preparing TOO MUCH. Obviously you should not live paycheck to paycheck. But if you prepare for a 3% return fire, wasting years, your chance of dying early is the much bigger worry than running out of money.

The tricky part is you don't have a motor. It's an unpowered vehicle.

(Caveat is the start, you will be pulled up with a rope, another powered plane or have starter motor to get up once)

You can go thousands of miles without propulsion! IF the weather and wind plays nice.

So you go up with thermals (warm air) or lift from hill sides and go forward by gliding. Repeat with skill and luck.

Working in that area in Japan. I think I can provide some answers.

Payment: CC are mostly used for BtoC but if you are a BtoB SaaS you want invoice and a local presence (ie no tax or currency shenanigans for your customer).

Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers. Instead: Contact form, Cold call, go out to events, lots of drinking.

Regarding language: Many people do not speak English. I think that surprises some, but Japan is big and you can live forever happily only speaking Japanese. So if you don't support Japanese it's a complete no go.

> Many people do not speak English

More like noone speaks English, plainly put

> Hand on sales: Don't expect customers to sign up for a free plan and convert. Your conversion rate will be close to 0. Mostly scammers.

Brutal! Is that true even for Japanese companies with a traditional sales force?

Your sales team can totally utilize a free plan, while communicating with the customer. But a free sign up from the website, without sales person contact, is something we only had negative experience with, so stopped doing it. (Talking about B2B, B2C might be different)

In other words, don't bother from outside of Japan unless the SaaS has been fully translated into Japanese? That's what I'm getting from this response. Is that true?

Translation alone is simply not enough. You'll need local presence, Japanese sales people, and patience (a lot of them).

Thank you. I'm already on it.

I came here to say the same. The location is a bit hard to get to. But if you are in the area, also visit the town of Heidelberg, it is close by and worth the trip.

I went there as a child and loved it, in particular the UBoat you can enter. Next time I am going to Germany I plan to visit it again.

The people with the drive to be able to retire early are also the most likely to be bored when it happens.

Working on something fun and novel, like in his case Gemini, mentioned in the article, is the ideal.

I found the Karpathy videos very approachable. While I did study CS, I never went deep into ML. My main knowledge about matrices is for graphic development, so vectors and matrices up to 4x4 in size only. But following the videos, starting to learn about backprob and building the tiny GPT was understandable to me.

Karpathy's lessons are great to really grog the background and underlying basics. They do not go into the many libraries available, the course you link might be more practically applicable.

Regarding the perception of time, I have a complete opposite perception of the author. He mentions 20 as a middle point. I was after that, in my 20s when I first took real full control. I can remember the times before that. But I did so many "firsts" after that! My childhood years feel very short and boring to me; while the time after that feels gigantic and exciting.

There is so much in the world and so precious little time, I cannot really imagine running out of new "firsts" to do. Just I think many people never take control.

(The article itself seems to be more about raising children, being dad and fulfillment than the comments and title suggest)

Whilst I did more new things in my 20s, I do recall my perception of days as a child being much much longer. I have distinct recollection of feeling almost clinical depression when I was about 8 after being told that we would be going to the seaside tomorrow and not today. To a childs perception of time, it was an agonizing eternity.

> To a childs perception of time, it was an agonizing eternity.

For me as a child, even getting a haircut was a dreary experience. It felt as an eternity I had to sit mostly immobile, while somebody else maneuvered sharp blades around my head. Nowadays it feels like I barely accomodated in the chair, it's already over.

Children run on “sleeps” and eventually weeks - a single day is such a large percentage of their life, after all!

And each year is new, even if just teachers changing; but most have new things you can do.

Another one for personal sites is GoAccess. No DB needed, only log files. It shows nicely; which page was visited, how often, browser statistics etc. https://goaccess.io/

Same here! I lived in big cities all my life and am used to the convenience of good public transport. Want to travel and rent a nice car, just when needed.

I always feel the jump in price from standard to nice rental car is too much to bother with (like a factor of 2.5-5x). So I drive a lot of crappy rentals, but they’re just a way to get from point to point.

Automatic transmissions (for EU where manual is popular - I guess this doesn’t apply in countries where everyone drives automatics already) are generally only available with higher trim levels and yet don’t cost much more to rent, so this might be an option to get a “nicer” rental.