Interesting reminder: Wall's statement of virtues was provocative as a counter to programmers following corporate rules and various software design fads.

But both emphasized personal virtue and reputation in a way that seems quaint in an era where people are schooled to harness systemic forces to their advantage. Even highly flawed people succeed if they manage access to a river of value.

Hypercard lore has it that Jobs asked Atkinson to stop writing fit-to-use software that fits on a floppy and instead write something that requires lots of graphics and has no real functional limits, so Jobs could sell people a mac with an unimaginably large 20MB hard drive.

The free money now likely lies in making use of the oversupply of AI compute once projections fall flat, for uses beyond LLM's. Tomorrow's tech titan will need the following virtues:

Laziness: find the work end-users want to offload instead of protect

Impatience: don't wait for fads or technical swells to start paddling

Hubris: assume you can write new algorithms for AI hardware, and (that) you will find new applications, if you just work at it.