Dennis Hackethal

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Forum Rules

Veritula welcomes a wide range of discussion topics. Generally speaking, people have free speech here. Unpopular topics will not automatically get people banned. The goal of moderation is to preserve productive, truth-seeking discussion.

Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress is a bannable offense. Such behavior includes, but is not limited to, harassment, brigading, rage baiting, public shaming, and persistent bad-faith argumentation or refusal to engage substantively.

Veritula takes intellectual property seriously and reserves the right to take down content that infringes on others’ intellectual property.

Veritula also reserves the right to take down obscene content such as pornography.

Content written with AI may be submitted, but only if disclosed: when posting, tick “Text written with AI?” if AI wrote any part of your idea, including polishing or translating your own writing. Veritula is a place for genuine discussion and truth-seeking, so we’d prefer to avoid talking to meat proxies without realizing it. AI content is notoriously verbose – don’t flood discussions with it. In addition, it’s your responsibility to ensure that AI detectors give negative results for content you don’t mark as written with AI. Repeat submission of content written with AI that is not disclosed and/or overly verbose is a bannable offense.

Badges reward your own contributions, so ideas written with AI don’t count toward them, disclosed or not. Badges follow the current rules, so those earned under earlier rules may be revoked.

To ensure a high quality of discussions and avoid having to refute and re-refute ideas already known to be wrong, members of Veritula are expected to make an effort to act rationally and take ideas seriously. They should stay at least somewhat up to date on discussion outcomes and avoid repeating the same discussions. Advocacy of ideas with pending criticisms and/or rejection of ideas without pending criticisms – in short, deviations from rationality as defined here – may result in a warning when someone should reasonably already know better. Repeat offenses may result in a temporary or permanent ban. Don’t rely on memory alone to decide whether to adopt an idea. Look it up on Veritula and go by whether the idea has pending criticisms – dispassionately, the way a judge would look up a law in a legal text. If you personally disagree, you can say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’ To make things easier, there’s a search page. You can also subscribe to notifications on an idea to stay up to date on any new criticisms (hit the bell icon in the upper right corner of an idea). You can also enable email notifications in your settings.

Serious instances of off-platform behavior that clearly would have violated these rules on-platform may result in removal.

Depending on the severity of an infraction, moderators may issue a warning, revoke badges, temporarily lock an account, or permanently ban the account.

Looking for loopholes in these rules, or abusing the letter to violate the spirit of these rules, is a bannable offense.

Moderation decisions are at the discretion of Veritula.

Users may appeal moderation decisions by contacting the moderators within a reasonable time after a decision. Appeals should explain why the decision was wrong. Appeals are reviewed at the moderators’ discretion. The same decision may be appealed only once. Excessive arguing over a moderation decision, asking for exceptions or special treatment, complaining about the rules, and similar behavior, are all bannable offenses. What counts as similar, excessive, and asking for special treatment is up to moderators. It’s usually best to accept a moderation decision and move on.

Talks with moderators should remain respectful and constructive. Changes to these rules should be proposed by criticizing this idea before issues arise. Changes are generally not retroactive unless specified otherwise.

Site-wide terms and the terms of any bounty you take part in apply as well.

Kitty Comes Home: my first game made with Claude Opus 5.5.

You play as a little kitten trying to find your way back to your mom.

Play for free here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/kitty-comes-home

Teaser trailer: https://youtu.be/bcM2BI-41cY

Kitty Comes Home: my first game made with Claude Opus 5.5.

You play as a little kitten trying to find your way back to your mom.

Play for free here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/kitty-comes-home

Teaser trailer:

Play here

Playing the video here sends data to Google.

youtube.com

Kitty Comes Home – Teaser Trailer | Made with Claude Opus 5.5

Dennis C Hackethal

This takes me back to my startup days in Berlin. It was common knowledge among founders that anyone overly worried about telling people about their great idea because someone might ‘steal’ it was a newbie founder. It’s almost always a mistake not to tell people, for several reaasons:

1. Your idea probably isn’t new anyway. Somebody has probably already tried it before you and realized why it doesn’t work.
2. If you don’t share your idea, you don’t get any critical feedback. You’ll make more mistakes. It will be harder to launch it.
3. Most people don’t care. They have their own problems. They’re not looking to copy ideas.

Tik Tok came up with reels and then Instagram copied the feature. Arguably, Instagram does it better now. Imagine the founder of Tik Tok getting angry with Zuckerberg and trying to shame him online. That would be ridiculous.

People get angry because they hope to control more than they actually can. Ideas spread; we can’t control people’s speech. One can’t expect secrecy from people who didn’t agree to secrecy. If it’s important, like industry secrets or product launches, one should make people sign NDAs. If something is truly secret, the only person you should tell is your lawyer. Aside from that, sharing generously and openly is more profitable for you 99% of the time anyway.

This takes me back to my startup days in Berlin. It was common knowledge among founders that anyone overly worried about telling people about their great idea because someone might ‘steal’ it was a newbie founder. It’s almost always a mistake not to tell people, for several reaasons:

1. Your idea probably isn’t new anyway. Somebody has probably already tried it before you and realized why it doesn’t work.
2. If you don’t share your idea, you don’t get any critical feedback. You’ll make more mistakes. It will be harder to launch it.
3. Most people don’t care. They have their own problems. They’re not looking to copy ideas.

Tik Tok did reels and then Instagram copied the feature. Arguably, Instagram does it better now. Imagine the founder of Tik Tok getting angry with Zuckerberg and trying to shame him online. That would be ridiculous.

As Ben points out, reels go all the way back to Vine! Which corroborates point 1 above: the idea probably isn’t new. And your customers don’t care either way. They only care that your product solves their problems better than the competitors’ products.

People get angry because they hope to control more than they actually can. Ideas spread; we can’t control people’s speech. One can’t expect secrecy from people who didn’t agree to secrecy. If it’s important, like industry secrets or product launches, one should make people sign NDAs. If something is truly secret, the only person you should tell is your lawyer. Aside from that, sharing generously and openly is more profitable for you 99% of the time anyway.

It also pays to be concise: the more you write, the more text there is to criticize. It’s in Vincent’s own interest to be less verbose. Not sure he realizes that.

It also pays to be brief: the more you write, the more text there is to criticize. It’s in Vincent’s own interest to be less verbose. Not sure he realizes that.