OK but why?

When Spotify was first released in 2008, you needed an invite to join for free. It was a popular mechanic at the time because it helped throttle the growth to match infrastructure scaling and gave an air of exclusivity. Basically, you needed to know a guy.

On top of that, it wasn't available here in Poland. It launched in the Nordics, UK, France. However, if you logged in from a supported country, you could then "go on vacation" for two weeks and use it anywhere. It was a bit of a wink and a nod.

Obviously, a friend of mine quickly decompiled their Java client and we had a simple script to run that login class from cron on a server in a supported country. And so I was on a weekly vacation right at home.

This was the previous wave of personal software. You knew a guy. You were in an IRC channel. Someone would share a mIRC script, or a simple program they wrote, or a crack. So many cracks. Warez was another massive part of personal software at the time: scripts for cross-seeding, various media catalogues before Plex and Jellyfin.

Later, open source software matured and you didn't have to know anyone or crack anything. You could just get it from a repository. Nicely packaged, automatically updated, with friendly forum members and IRC dwellers who could answer your questions and help you along.

The promise of open source software to me has always been that someone somewhere has likely already encountered whatever challenge you're facing. And they solved it. Using ssh over a flaky/roaming connection? There's an app for that. Want to keep your browser's config on a ramdisk? You're not the only one! Which means we have all collectively become more capable. We can spare the cognitive resources for something else, like scrolling TikTok.

However, the truly magical moment is learning of something I didn't even think I needed, some cool new way to use a computer. Like Bartosz Ciechanowski, who hand-rolled a little web 3d engine just to explain how an internal combustion engine works. Or Russ Cox, who figured you can draw with data inside a QR code to create QArt.

Now with LLMs, you already know a guy. On the level of personal scripts and hacks, they can do pretty much anything. Decompile old games, profile codecs, optimize performance, write whole applications from scratch.

You still need to know what to do and have some general idea how to achieve it. Then you have to do it, even if it's just prompting your agent on.

And when you do, it's just software for one. Much like multiplayer often takes games to a whole new level, so do other people using the same program. They bring in their ingenuity, ways of working with it, and just make it better... not quite Metcalfe's law but definitely Metcalfe's spirit.

I vibecoded AuditCrowd to view Polish companies' financial statements as a series. Financial controllers already find this comparison useful, which is why they provide the previous year's results for reference. But a longer series is obviously even more informative.

And then I thought that once the statement is uploaded, you shouldn't need to upload it again for viewing. So I had Fable add a feature to save them. But it was still single player. This is all public information anyway, just shared somewhat inconveniently by the government, so why not benefit from each other's uploads?

Now, AuditCrowd gives you an option to pull statements from other years that other users already uploaded during their research. You can also make a convenient link to share your analysis with others. It's a multiplayer and positive-sum game.

This is what I hope to achieve with other items on 247365.pl

• introduce you, dear viewer, to something you didn't think of, but that we can benefit from together,
• save you a few tokens,
• or at least accurately record my descent into AI psychosis.

Peruse the tiles at 247365.pl and let me know how successful I was: ireadthewhyarticleandhaveacomment@247365.pl

This article was almost entirely written by hand. I don't expect this to happen much in the future, on or off 247365.pl.