For those of you who believe smoking is all or nothing, here's my experience.
Started smoking at age 11 (yeah Im French), gradually increasing to about a pack a day in my 20s. Reduced to about half a pack in my 30s. Did the vaping thing then, trying cold turkey a few times, without success. Then one day, I just didn't want to smoke anymore, stopped completely. (I was already smoking only half cigarettes for a while, cause I didn't like the feeling anymore). I didn't have urges to smoke at all for years, even when going out, getting drunk. Even with all my colleagues would go out for a cigarettes and I had to stay alone in a room.
Nowadays, I am in a situation where maybe once every two months I go to a party and I smoke a few cigarettes. Maybe over a weekend, I'd smoke a pack, then I don't smoke at all for another two months. If there is no party I don't smoke, if there's one, I may. I have zero urges the next days, I don't even think about it.
I think it's a question of age, maybe I don't go to that many parties anymore, maybe I don't feel the need to relax or to take a break anymore. I am 100% remote, live in the countryside, that might help compared to office work in a big city as I used to do.
I am not advising anyone to pick up smoking after years of stopping.
But I am writing this just to say that to me the usual things that people say about addiction weren't true at all:
- It wasn't difficult to stop (that last time, I'd already tried a few times before and failed). For some reason, it just happened that I didn't want to continue. I didn't have a date, I didn't have a "last cigarette then it's over" moment. I just didn't feel like smoking anymore. It also sort of happened gradually, first I didn't want to smoke entire cigarettes anymore, then I would stop smoking after half a cigarette.
- I smoked and vaped several times since, sometimes for several days in a row, sometimes at my house, I never felt I would go back to by a addicted smoker. My wife also does this, I can tell she's having a bit more of a hard time not smoking again, but she manages too, so I am not the only oddball here.
You're being judgmental but I think you're just misinformed.
Vaping can be difficult to stop because:
- it's more accepted
- it's smoother on the throat, and there's plenty of tastes.
- there is no "dose", if you want to you can just vape non stop, and you can pace yourself. With a cigarette, you can't smoke slowly, or you'll loose half the cigarette.
All in all, it's just more convenient and cheaper to vape. If you're hooked, I can see it quite a challenge to stop. You can always say : "oh I am just taking x drags a day".
Personnally I didn't like vaping much, cause it was the beginning, the tastes were weird, the gear was not great battery-wise. So I kept going back to smoking. Eventually going cold turkey from cigarettes was way easier than through vaping.
Sure and maybe also cover why you wont add pure nicotine to your heroin instead of subjecting yourself and others to documented cancer risk from cigarette smoke.
Well, if smoking cigarettes is easier to quit, then it might be better overall for some people to take up cigarettes a few months and quit, than to keep vaping for the rest of their lives.
Not saying it's the best way to stop, quitting cigarettes has been proven to be very diffult. But GP branding those people as stupid is a bit harsh imo.
If your goal is making small apps, websites, things that aren't too critical performance-wise, I don't think you should learn to code.
But code isn't disappearing. Calculation-heavy processes, large apps, video games, basically things that need a deep understanding of tradeoffs, still require a lot of human inputs.
Will it be always that way, I don't know. But I'd like to think AI won't totally kill the code, in the same way compilers didn't kill assembly dev.
But still, I am building relatively small apps and I do nor see any AI making clean, organized, long-term code. I do not see any path that they could do it in a near future.
I think Boris is a really smart, competent guy. He doesn't deserve the hate. That being said, he was just the person in the right place at the right time to have been empowered to vibe-code Claude Code into existence, with the momentum of unlimited tokens for the strongest agentic coding model behind him. Nothing about CC was revolutionary or insightful really, everyone was building harnesses at that time, and TBH Anthropic was a bit behind the curve in that regard. He's not some kind of "wizard" in the way that public figures in programming of the past were, and I think people are putting that on him, leading to a bit of ego inflation here.
Don't listen to those other people who tell you you can do it alone. You can't.
You have 4 kids, there is no way you have that kind of time.
Regarding the patent: I know this is going to sound harsh, but what is likely is that it's going to be harder to find someone who finds your invention cool than to defend against anyone who might want to steal it.
Patents defend technical inventions useful in the industry, a social media gizmo not so much. Filing a patent will take a lot of time, and you won't have the money to litigate anyone who steals it anyways.
In your position, I would just throw the idea out there, make a kickstarter campaign or something. Try and get anyone interested. If there is interest, then it's easier to find a cofounder who might want to be in with you on this.
There is a good chance that the kickstarter result is a giant "meh" from the world. And you can go back raising your children and chase that GS15 (Idk what that is).
Also if you do this just to scratch your own itch, build the stuff just for yourself (LLMs and 3D printers make everything quite simple these days), and post a youtube video about it.
Anyways my take is:
- you need a cofounder to launch something
- but you need to validate the idea before finding a cofounder.
also don't be greedy with your cofounder, split 50 50 or close to that, it may be your idea, but you can't do it without the other person.
Well, the patent attorney was very clear that a kickstarter (at least any that offer anything remotely like a 'sale' or anything) 'voids' a lot of the protections of the provisional, and maybe even the full patent.
Yes, I know, but my point is you don't need a patent in the first place. Your patent is going to cost you a bunch, and it's not going to help at all.
If your product does not interest a lot of people, the patent is going to be useless, cause nobody will want to steal your idea.
If your product does interest a lot of people, some people may want to steal it, but:
- would you sue a Chinese company for selling copies of your stuff on AliExpress? How would you even sue that company?
- would you sue a major tech firm, while it's likely that anything that you built is likely infringeing on at least one of their patents?
- in the case you want sue, what are the odds of winning? Your patent may be void for a variety of reasons, and a copying product may not be considered as infringeing, if it has enough difference with the patented invention. What time frame are you looking at? 5 years, 10 years? Do you want to spend 10 years in litigations? What legal costs are you facing? Probably in the tens of thousands.
My advice to you as a failed startup founder myself, is to cool your head down, and stop imagining that what you invented is the next telephone, and pitch pitch pitch. If you pitch a room with 100 people, you'll be lucky if 2 guys come up to you at the end telling you your stuff is a good idea.
The patent is keeping you in a fantasy world, and that's not good.
Yes it makes you vulnerable to IP theft, and it does happen. But if you look for startup founding advice, people will tell you that it's a mistake to try and protect your idea. The main arguments are:
1. Execution matters more than the idea.
2. It's always better to get feedback / test the market earlier rather than later.
3. Your IP may be protected in theory, but in practice, companies infringe on patents all the time.
I don't know anything about provisional patents, but if selling a product that embeds patented ideas voided the protections of a patent, patents would be pretty useless.
Maybe there's some context or nuance that didn't get conveyed that I'm missing.
I would imagine you can't get treble damages from willful infringement on a provisional patent, given that they're not published... so if you publicize your item on kickstarter while the patent is provisional and/or pending, less potential damages from infringers ... but I dunno how many people get treble damages anyway.
The provisional serves as a timestamp only. It's literally not reviewed. The only reason at all to file a provisional is if you're going to file the proper one. Goods that are actually patented are under the 'proper' ones, and do not get the classic "protection" that we think of. The only thing the provisional really does is serve as the 'timestamped-steak-in-the-ground' that only you can claim as your timestamp. But it comes with conditions. You can't start selling your goods as-though-patented until you file the patents. You can put 'patent pending' on them after you file the big one and it's under review. But the provisional one doesn't really get you the 'patent pending' part at all. That's my not-even-close-to-a-lawyer version that I've learned in the last few months.
But what complicates this even more is that I don't really want to sit on the tech at all. I want it to become ubiquitous and (eventually) a standard (like how Yubico/Yubikey led to FIDO/FIDO2 later).
But others in the thread also bring up a totally valid point: I need to prove this has teeth with real people somehow.
I think I may have to bight the bullet and fork over some savings to get the proper patent done. I need to get busy with R&D to finalize the design.
Probably because while is the source of many infinite loops, and because it’s sometimes faster and more rigorous to compute the length ahead of going into the loop.
That said, I personally don’t think it’s smelly at all.
Started smoking at age 11 (yeah Im French), gradually increasing to about a pack a day in my 20s. Reduced to about half a pack in my 30s. Did the vaping thing then, trying cold turkey a few times, without success. Then one day, I just didn't want to smoke anymore, stopped completely. (I was already smoking only half cigarettes for a while, cause I didn't like the feeling anymore). I didn't have urges to smoke at all for years, even when going out, getting drunk. Even with all my colleagues would go out for a cigarettes and I had to stay alone in a room.
Nowadays, I am in a situation where maybe once every two months I go to a party and I smoke a few cigarettes. Maybe over a weekend, I'd smoke a pack, then I don't smoke at all for another two months. If there is no party I don't smoke, if there's one, I may. I have zero urges the next days, I don't even think about it.
I think it's a question of age, maybe I don't go to that many parties anymore, maybe I don't feel the need to relax or to take a break anymore. I am 100% remote, live in the countryside, that might help compared to office work in a big city as I used to do.
I am not advising anyone to pick up smoking after years of stopping.
But I am writing this just to say that to me the usual things that people say about addiction weren't true at all:
- It wasn't difficult to stop (that last time, I'd already tried a few times before and failed). For some reason, it just happened that I didn't want to continue. I didn't have a date, I didn't have a "last cigarette then it's over" moment. I just didn't feel like smoking anymore. It also sort of happened gradually, first I didn't want to smoke entire cigarettes anymore, then I would stop smoking after half a cigarette.
- I smoked and vaped several times since, sometimes for several days in a row, sometimes at my house, I never felt I would go back to by a addicted smoker. My wife also does this, I can tell she's having a bit more of a hard time not smoking again, but she manages too, so I am not the only oddball here.
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