2024 Mistakes in Review

50% of people are below average intelligence. is it you? Is it me? It may not be - it’s a coin flip in some sense of it all. I’ve made some big errors of both omission and commission the last few years. Here are a few obvious blunders in thinking that weigh on my mind these days.

NFT’s

When bitcoin first was birthed and it was on the fringe I dismissed it. I’m not particularly obsessed with money so a new way to transmit money seemed interesting enough but didn’t really grab me.

NFT’s or “Non-Fungible Tokens” (who came up with that whippersnapper of a name, eh?) seemed to me to be more on point: Here’s a thing that can be easily traded, tracked and can represent a piece of something else. Like real estate. Some day we’ll trade small bits of real estate, easily and in liquid format. But not today and not anytime soon it looks like. Instead of real estate we create meme tokens that were worth only whatever attention the promoters could create. Bored Apes at a Yacht Club, etc. BORED APES. YACHT CLUB. YES. Every scammer in the world showed up and NFT’s are now road kill as the scammers have moved onto what is really the brother of the NFT, the FT, or the “Fungible Token”. Commonly known as meme coins or as the kids say “SHIT COINS”. Memecoins are far simpler to make, easier to pump, easier to dump. At least with NFT’s you had to come up with some designs for the tokens rather than just….

AI

When Sam Altman left Ycombinator to devote full time to AI / OpenAi I thought A: He’s daft and B: what a shame because YC is so great. I really thought it was an error of giant-epic-crazy proportions. I had friends that worked at Machine Learning companies that categorized photos based on content: Dog. Cat. Bird. That kind of thing. And variants of that. “Data Labeling” for chrissakes. All very non-interesting.
Here I am now paying $200 a month for chatgpt pro Claude Code and ready to pay more.

Irony: AI is based on tokens, which are fundamental representations of words made more compact for prediction purposes. NFT’s and ShitCoins are referred to as tokens, representing your money, quickly running away from you. Bitcoin is the ultimate memecoin. Time will tell whether collective belief in a meme has instrinsic value, not unlike The Force in Star Wars canon. As belief in The Force waned so did the Jedi.

This is the biggest tech moment of my lifetime and I’m completely unprepared. With no idea what to do.

Don’t follow me. I’m clearly blind.

(written november 2024, with reference to claude code added in 2025)

Thanks for reading. If this sparked an idea, send it to someone building cool things.