Hey y'all, not a sympathy post. This isn't me saying I'm taking time off for anything. In fact it's the opposite. My grandma passed away last week and I was cleaning out her apartment with my mother and talking to my aunt (both of them it was their mother). I can tell they're struggling. It's why I work so hard honestly on the software community on everything else. Almost none of the money goes to me. I give it to my family, my wife my friends. It's what makes me happy. I'm building a company specifically so my family doesn't have to struggle. Been helping out where I can but obviously been focusing a lot on the business. My uncle also has cancer and so my aunt has been taking care of him and also at the same time dealing with a death of her mother . Best way I can contribute has been through cash and some love here are there. With that though means I don't always have the time to do what I need to do. So honestly, I'm asking for your help if you're willing to donate to my aunt's GoFundMe on top of the help that I'm giving. I've just donated a bit and would love other people to help out. To me, if I work hard I can make sure that my whole family is taken care of. But in the small ways I can help where I can I will do my best too And that goes with asking for help from others. So if you all could help me out help them out. That would be amazing https://gofund.me/45b6655ba

This community is large and it moves fast. That's the good part and it's also the problem: valuable posts get buried, the same questions get re-asked instead of found, and spammers show up wherever there's an audience. These guidelines are what keeps the room worth showing up to. Read them once. You won't need them again, because most of this is what you'd do anyway. New here? Start with Jake's welcome post and the Foundation course. This post is about how we behave, not where to begin. 1. Build in public. Post the thing while it's half working. A half-finished build is more useful to everyone else than the polished writeup you'll never get around to, and you'll get corrected before you've spent a week going the wrong way. 2. Teach what you learn. The day you figure something out is the day you're best at explaining it, because you still remember exactly what confused you. A month later you've forgotten the hard part and your explanation gets worse. If you cracked something this week, that's a post. Nobody has to earn the right to ask a question here, but this place only works because people come back and answer them once they can. 3. Ask good questions. Specific beats polite. "How should I structure this?" gets three vague answers. "I have a 40 file client folder, the model keeps loading the wrong context file, here's my CLAUDE.md" gets a real one. Say what you tried, what happened, and what you expected instead. A more in depth guide: https://dontasktoask.com The flip side of this: "Anyone here?", "Help please", and one line questions with no context may get removed. Not to be harsh, but because nobody can answer them. 4. Give credit. If you built on someone's skill, template, folder structure or comment, tag them. It costs you nothing and it's the reason people keep publishing their work here instead of keeping it. A lot of the best material in this community started as somebody's reply on somebody else's post.

After reading the full history of thinking machines: Vote below, then tell us in the comments: which part of the timeline surprised you the most?