Whenever you start something with a statistically low chance of success, whether it's starting a business or writing a book or landing some dream job, it starts with unironically going through this filter:

Had an interesting interaction with a cashier today. This young man in his 20s was ringing people up. His voice and mannerisms were basically like Napoleon Dynamite. In front of me, the customer said “thank you, have a good day” and he said back “that would be impossible, but you have a good day ma’am.” I was only half paying attention so I assumed I misheard. He then rang my products up as I focused on packing my bags. I pay and say basically “thanks, have a good day”. He says, “that would be impossible ma’am, but you have a good day.” I paused, hearing the repeated statement. He started scanning the next customer’s items. Part of me wanted to ask why it’s impossible to have a nice day. It’s so specific. But doing so would interrupt his focus on the next customer. I took my bags, walked out, and looked back a couple times. In hindsight, I wish I’d asked. That would be more important than risking the next customer’s checkout time by a couple minutes. Next time I’m at the supermarket, I’m going to do a scan of the cashiers to see if he’s among them.

“You can just do things” is one of my favorite meme phrases that I see out there. Back around my senior year of high school, I consciously decided to shift to that mindset. I went from kind of operating within rules, and trying to leave a light touch around me, to being more assertive and creative about what I want to do. It was kind of a quiet “I’m not locked in here with you, you’re locked in here with me” vibe shift. At the time I think the terminology I filtered it through was Sagan’s pale blue dot. Like, everything that has ever been done is on this crazy little ball spinning through space. So it’s okay to just do things, to take chances, to think outside of the box. Because the box itself is already actually kind of crazy. And then in the mid-2010s, like around 2016, I did kind of a checkup on how I’m doing, and felt that while I had used that strategy well, I wasn’t thinking big enough. I had primarily used that strategy to climb up the ranks in the engineering world, with the goal of making things better for myself and my colleagues/division; I would just do things and be the person who pushed to say “yes” a lot and it had worked out really well. But for my next phase, I felt I needed to “just do things” outside of an organizational structure as well. So I started my namesake website. I previously had a small anon website on stock investing which I was able to sell to some publisher and that gave me experience, but this one would be different. It would have my face on it. Any sort of content creator starts by being a little crazy. It starts with the improbable concept that you could create written or audio or visual content that thousands or millions of people will actually want to see and get value out of, in the sea of endless content that already exists. But it starts somewhere. With just doing things. My view was that I would do my best, leverage the experience that I had, and give it my honest shot. Never looked back since. It’s been a wild journey.

My March newsletter talks mainly about AI, and some of the nuances between datacenter AI and portable AI. https://www.lynalden.com/march-2025-newsletter/

ChatGPT can’t be all that smart, since it keeps trying to show my left ear. Also titled as, me trying and failing to be productive today.

-What’s a movie from the past 25 years that hasn’t gotten enough attention in your view? Something that punches way above its weight. 😇 -The spicier question. What’s a movie from that same time period that is very popular, including kind of in your own social circle, that you think is kind of mid or overrated but it’s too awkward to say, but you’ll drop it in a Nostr comment? 😈

I find the nation state and corporate treasury adoption story pretty boring. It’s not because I disagree with it. Once a liquid asset reaches this scale, it’s natural for larger entities to want to own it. A lot of people actively *don’t want* those big entities to buy it, which I think is kind of delusional since it’s a permissionless asset. Those anti-treasurers don’t find it boring; it’s their new thing to argue against. And yet at the same time I have little interest in talking about them buying it. Yes, I think more of them will over time. So I just find the topic boring. Neither for or against. Would rather focus on other uses of bitcoin.

My Nostr post from two years ago where I criticized Elon (which was probably the only time I ever lost my temper online, being actively censored, and still stand by it) is getting a lot of new replies lately. People agreeing or disagreeing, etc. It seems to be an influx of users, rather than a resurgence of the post itself. Noting this because it’s statistically interesting.

It’s been about five years now since Swan Bitcoin opened their doors and started doing business. In addition to successes, they ran into various frictions and controversies during that time due to limitations at their counter parties that they had to work through and upscale from, but at the end of the day, they have promoted self custody from the start, still do, and people can withdraw their sats safe and sound. They want you to, and you should, ideally. Their vision from founding was that sats probably shouldn’t be on the balance sheet liability side of a startup (them) and instead should be in qualified custodians held in buyers’ names, to the extent that they’re not self custodied. They made it free to pull sats into self custody from the start and have a really high ratio of buyers pulling into self custody. Cheers to them for being five years in operation and still working for their users. When people are like “You should pull sats from Swan due to headline XYZ” Swan is like “headline XYZ is mostly wrong, here’s why, but yes you should pull sats from us, which we’ve been saying from the start!”

Whenever someone emails the Lyn Alden support email, this is who they are dealing with. He’s judging you for your bad technical decisions.* *And then afterward will tell me my choice of backend software is retarded.