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Three years ago, I pub­lished my ini­tial work to un­der­stand and re­verse en­gi­neer my car, specif­i­cally the head­unit of my 2021 Honda Civic.1

The ini­tial re­sponse was in­cred­i­bly en­cour­ag­ing. I’m writ­ing to give a pro­ject up­date.

Keys to the Kingdom

The biggest progress has been made while map­ping out the up­date process.

Honda sup­ports up­dat­ing the head­unit via USB. There are a num­ber of Honda-specific checks, but ul­ti­mately the USB drive con­tains a signed AOSP up­date file that gets staged and ap­plied via Android re­cov­ery. The good news? They left the pub­licly-known AOSP test key in res/​keys*, and, even though they mod­i­fied the re­cov­ery bi­nary, the ver­i­fy_­file sig­na­ture logic matches stock AOSP.

So as long as you can prop­erly for­mat a USB drive and sign it with the pub­licly-known AOSP test key, you can in­stall what­ever you want to the head­unit, with­out con­ven­tional root ac­cess (no need for su with se­tuid). This means that, as long as the head­unit has power and an at­tacker has phys­i­cal ac­cess to the front-most USB port, they have ar­bi­trary code ex­e­cu­tion on the head­unit via the up­date path.

This is an evil maid at­tack. Since it re­quires phys­i­cal ac­cess to the cabin of the car rather than the ho­tel room, I call it an evil valet at­tack. Imagine a jour­nal­ist dri­ves to a ho­tel and leaves their car with the valet. The valet, who works for a three-let­ter agency, in­stalls an up­date via USB. When the car is re­turned, the jour­nal­ist does­n’t know the head­unit has been mod­i­fied. Since I want a cool vul­ner­a­bil­ity name, I’m call­ing this “EvilValet”.

This blog ar­ti­cle is not in­tended as a tech­ni­cal writeup. If you want the gory de­tails, see the tech­ni­cal docs.2

I’ve also pub­lished a new tool, ota-builder3, that al­lows peo­ple to eas­ily pre­pare up­date files that will be ac­cepted by the head­unit. While in its early days, it should be triv­ial to now build an up­date file that, for ex­am­ple, in­stalls an su bi­nary with se­tuid set (i.e., to root the de­vice).

*I have strong rea­son to be­lieve that all up­dates are signed with the pub­licly-known AOSP test key, but I don’t have ac­cess to every pos­si­ble of­fi­cial up­date file, nor ac­cess to every head­unit vari­ant and its filesys­tem. My head­unit has the AOSP test key in res/​keys, though I’ve also in­stalled HondaHack, so it’s pos­si­ble that it in­jected the key into the key­store. However, I’ve also con­firmed that MRC_EU_SW_v12_4.zip, a pub­licly-avail­able EU soft­ware up­date file, is test key signed. This file was down­loaded from a pub­lic fo­rum4 and was never mod­i­fied by me. So it seems highly likely that all up­dates are signed with the AOSP test key. Contributors are wel­come to help sup­port or re­fute this hy­poth­e­sis.

Building Tools

Beyond the up­date process, the most use­ful work has been on apk-re­builder5. It has one very im­por­tant job: take in a Honda Civic up­date file from the Internet, and pro­duce a clean tree of out­put files that au­to­mates every­thing a re­verse en­gi­neer would oth­er­wise have to do man­u­ally, in­clud­ing:

Resolving re­sources

Reconstructing .smali code

Repacking APK files

Extracting the ramdisk

And more

This also serves an im­por­tant role be­cause we can’t pub­lish ac­tual Honda source code. We pub­lish a func­tion that takes in an up­date file (that we don’t host) and spits out Honda .smali code, im­age as­sets, etc. The re­sult­ing out­put fol­lows a clear di­rec­tory struc­ture that can be ref­er­enced in doc­u­men­ta­tion with­out ac­tu­ally up­load­ing the sen­si­tive files them­selves.

Outstanding Work - A Call for Contributors

There are a few out­stand­ing things that would be nice to have.

Known Versions

The up­date process is frag­ile and re­lies heav­ily on ver­sion num­bers. This does­n’t limit the abil­ity to run un­signed code, be­cause the ver­sion num­bers can be “spoofed” (see the tech­ni­cal docs). But in or­der to build an up­date file in the first place you need to know what ver­sions your head­unit ex­pects. Further, any changes to the head­unit soft­ware that don’t match my build could lead to un­ex­pected be­hav­ior and re­cov­ery loops.

If you drive a 10th gen Honda Civic and are tech-savvy, I en­cour­age you to con­tribute to the “Known Versions, Display Audio Software” sec­tion of the repo.6

If you’re feel­ing par­tic­u­larly brave, read through the ota-builder code and try and flash an up­date. But do so at your own risk; if your head­unit dif­fers from mine you could get stuck in a re­cov­ery loop and soft­brick your de­vice.

Toolchain

I have an ex­per­i­men­tal/​work-in-progress tool­chain on my lo­cal ma­chine. It takes can­di­date .c code and com­piles it for ARMv7, us­ing the same com­piler ver­sion and build flags as the orig­i­nal ven­dor bi­na­ries. This proved in­dis­pens­able in my work to un­der­stand the up­date process. It makes heavy use of Docker. The cur­rent it­er­a­tion is messy and largely spe­cific to my work­flow, but I’d like to pub­lish a clean im­ple­men­ta­tion.

Custom Themes

I ex­plored this a bit while vibe-cod­ing apk-ren­der­er7. Custom themes are likely dif­fi­cult to ship be­cause they live in Mitsubishi’s fork of the AOSP frame­work, and the head­unit apps are mini­fied to ex­pect hard­coded re­source IDs. Any at­tempt to ship a cus­tom theme would likely in­volve sur­gi­cally edit­ing the ven­dor frame­work (and writ­ing a tool to do so au­to­mat­i­cally). None of this is triv­ial and prob­a­bly is­n’t worth the ef­fort, but I wel­come con­trib­u­tors.

Improve aidl-re­builder

I started work­ing on a tool to parse .smali files and gen­er­ate/​map out all AIDL in­ter­faces on the head­unit. This works but I haven’t re­viewed it fully for ac­cu­racy. This opens up the door for cus­tom apps such as vir­tual speedome­ters. Contributors wel­come.

Thoughts on Documentation and LLMs

I’ve placed less em­pha­sis on ref­er­ence doc­u­men­ta­tion and more on tool­ing. The idea is that if I can ship re­li­able, de­ter­min­is­tic tools that map the head­unit code to more di­gestible forms, then peo­ple can use LLMs to query those more di­gestible forms to an­swer what­ever their spe­cific ques­tions are. This avoids hav­ing to main­tain ref­er­ence docs that can stray from the ac­tual head­unit code, be­cause the head­unit code is the source of truth.

For ex­am­ple, a user guide that ex­plains how to con­nect to the head­unit via ADB is still deemed use­ful. But a doc­u­ment ex­plain­ing how some Java code works, when the Java code it­self is avail­able to an LLM, seems like a main­te­nance bur­den.

Wrapping up and Thanks

At this point, I’ve done most of the in­ves­tiga­tive work I in­tend to do on the head­unit. This is one of those pro­jects that I could toil end­lessly on, but I’ll likely tran­si­tion to other pro­jects. That said, the repo is by no means aban­doned. PRs are al­ways wel­come.

Special thanks to Tunas8 for the mem­o­ries, and to Hackaday9 for cov­er­ing my orig­i­nal work.

See every­one some­time down the road 🌱

Eric

McDonald, E. (2023). “Honda Reverse Engineering”. Juniperspring. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (2023). “Honda Reverse Engineering”. Juniperspring. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “Display Audio Update Files”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “Display Audio Update Files”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “ota-builder”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “ota-builder”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

fe­lixlen­nart (September 22, 2022). “Install American firmware on European head unit”. 2016+ Honda Civic Forum (CivicX.com). Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

fe­lixlen­nart (September 22, 2022). “Install American firmware on European head unit”. 2016+ Honda Civic Forum (CivicX.com). Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “apk-rebuilder”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “apk-rebuilder”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “Known Versions, Display Audio Software”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “Known Versions, Display Audio Software”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “apk-renderer”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

McDonald, E. (n.d.). “apk-renderer”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

Tunas. (n.d.). “Tunas1337”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

Tunas. (n.d.). “Tunas1337”. GitHub. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

Posch, M. (June 27, 2023). “Honda Headunit Reverse Engineering, And The Dismal State Of Infotainment Systems”. Hackaday. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

Posch, M. (June 27, 2023). “Honda Headunit Reverse Engineering, And The Dismal State Of Infotainment Systems”. Hackaday. Retrieved June 13, 2026. ↩︎

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Last year around this time The New York Times Magazine ran an A.I. is­sue with an in­tro­duc­tion ti­tled “Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything. Is That Bad?” It’s an edited tran­script from the Hard Fork pod­cast, which I think as­sumes two things are true that are turn­ing out to be false.

Once you’ve tried AI, you use it “for every­thing.” No, in fact most peo­ple who’ve tried it are just oc­ca­sional AI users.

Once you’ve tried AI, you use it “for every­thing.” No, in fact most peo­ple who’ve tried it are just oc­ca­sional AI users.

AI has got­ten so good that de­spite any mis­giv­ings, “everyone is us­ing A.I.” No, in fact large chunks of the pop­u­la­tion aren’t us­ing AI at all.

AI has got­ten so good that de­spite any mis­giv­ings, “everyone is us­ing A.I.” No, in fact large chunks of the pop­u­la­tion aren’t us­ing AI at all.

(It is­n’t re­ally strictly de­fined in the ar­ti­cle, but I’m tak­ing AI to mean gen­er­a­tive AI ac­ces­si­ble via a chat in­ter­face.)

Take Gen Z, where AI aware­ness is the high­est: in the last year, even though AI has sup­pos­edly got­ten a lot bet­ter, Gen Z AI adop­tion has all but stalled, with a mean­ing­ful per­cent­age of the Gen Z pop­u­la­tion still us­ing AI rarely, if at all.

Here’s Gallup’s year-over-year (2025/2026) break­down:

79/81% use AI at least rarely

79/81% use AI at least rarely

41/42% are anx­ious about AI

41/42% are anx­ious about AI

32/31% use AI only monthly/​every few months

32/31% use AI only monthly/​every few months

22/31% are an­gry about AI

22/31% are an­gry about AI

21/19% never use AI

21/19% never use AI

This tracks with Microsoft’s new United States AI Diffusion site, based on “anonymized, ag­gre­gated Microsoft teleme­try.” Their as­so­ci­ated blog re­ports “more than 30 per­cent of the US work­ing-age pop­u­la­tion is us­ing AI [meaning about 70% is­n’t], an in­crease of 3 per­cent­age points from the end of 2025.” The un­der­ly­ing aca­d­e­mic pa­per spec­i­fies that us­age is de­fined as “engagement with ma­jor AI ser­vices in­clud­ing ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and oth­ers….with at least 90 min­utes of us­age time in a given month.”

The Microsoft data is brand new, and it mir­rors an­other us­age study from Datos from last year, also based on real-world us­age data. The Datos study found sim­i­larly that, as of last June, only 21% of desk­top de­vices vis­ited “AI Tools” 10 or more times a month, 62% vis­ited 0 times, and the re­main­ing 17% in be­tween.

Back on the sur­vey side, a re­cent Searchlight Institute study found “58% re­port us­ing or try­ing AI, specif­i­cally tools like ChatGPT or Claude, di­vided evenly be­tween fairly reg­u­lar users (30% use at least a few times a month) [roughly match­ing the Microsoft/Datos data] and more in­fre­quent users (29% have used AI, but only once a month or less).” And fi­nally a new sur­vey from The Argument finds “most Americans use AI once a week or less.”

All of this tri­an­gu­lates to AI use in America at ap­prox­i­mately one third ac­tively us­ing AI, one third oc­ca­sion­ally us­ing AI, and one third never us­ing AI, with some move­ment de­pend­ing on how you de­fine those terms. In any case, this split is a far cry from “everyone is us­ing AI for every­thing;” it’s much closer to “some peo­ple are us­ing AI for some things.” AI use also has­n’t shifted that much in the past six months to a year. In fact, the only thing that has sub­stan­tially changed is neg­a­tive sen­ti­ment about AI has gone sig­nif­i­cantly up, for ex­am­ple the Gallup’s Gen Z poll re­port­ing anger about AI jump­ing about 40% rel­a­tive year over year.

I think it is a rea­son­able con­clu­sion to draw from all of this data that a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion is ac­tively lim­it­ing their AI us­age. The Searchlight study ex­am­ines a big rea­son why: real con­cerns peo­ple have with AI. The top three con­cerns found are “AI will re­place jobs and cause un­em­ploy­ment” (42%), “AI will vi­o­late peo­ple’s pri­vacy” (35%), and “AI will spread mis­in­for­ma­tion and lies” (33%).

This sen­ti­ment also matches a strong de­sire for safety/​pri­vacy AI reg­u­la­tion. A solid ma­jor­ity thinks “the gov­ern­ment should pri­or­i­tize cre­at­ing safety/​pri­vacy rules for AI, even if that means the U.S. de­vel­ops AI more slowly than coun­tries like China.”

Another big rea­son is skep­ti­cism in AI use­ful­ness. SearchLight asked about a range of tech­nolo­gies and to say “whether you be­lieve the over­all im­pact of each tech­nol­ogy on so­ci­ety is pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive.” AI only has an +8% net pos­i­tive rat­ing right now, right next to +7% for so­cial me­dia, which were only greater than crypto at -17%. Meanwhile cell phones, the in­ter­net, and so­lar en­ergy are at +68%, +67%, and +65%, re­spec­tively.

The Argument study broke this down fur­ther, ask­ing about spe­cific so­ci­etal ben­e­fits from AI, find­ing broad skep­ti­cism and con­clud­ing “people aren’t re­ally buy­ing the bull­ish case for AI that CEOs and boost­ers alike are sell­ing. In other words, the skep­ti­cism about AI’s ef­fects is real and deep-run­ning. And given how many peo­ple use it daily, this is not just an ill-in­formed set of opin­ions on some­thing re­spon­dents have never seen be­fore (like tar­iffs were be­fore 2025).”

It is pos­si­ble for peo­ple to have one view at a so­ci­etal level and then act dif­fer­ently at an in­di­vid­ual level, but that does not seem to be what we’re see­ing here. The plu­ral­ity oc­ca­sional us­age and large per­cent­age of com­plete avoid­ance speaks to the fact that a lot of peo­ple seem­ingly aren’t yet find­ing enough in­di­vid­ual value net of their con­cerns to jus­tify daily or even weekly us­age. The gap in me­dia nar­ra­tive (that every­one is us­ing AI for every­thing) rel­a­tive to the re­al­ity (that some peo­ple are us­ing AI for some things) per­haps re­flects a bub­ble around early-adopt­ing knowl­edge work­ers that in­cludes much of the tech press (and me for that mat­ter, though I’m try­ing re­ally hard to stay con­nected to re­al­ity).

It’s a mis­take for com­pa­nies, pun­dits, and pol­icy mak­ers to ig­nore how peo­ple are re­ally feel­ing and act­ing about AI. It’s not all sun­shine and rain­bows. It’s also clearly not bi­nary (all use or no use), but in­stead a con­tin­uum of AI opin­ions and use, with a lot of peo­ple in the mid­dle.

I think there is an apt anal­ogy to be made here to pref­er­ences around meat con­sump­tion. Another thing that seems to be every­where right now is pro­tein. Telling us how im­por­tant pro­tein is in our diet is anal­o­gous to telling us how use­ful AI is for pro­duc­tiv­ity. And, meat be­ing a pri­mary source of pro­tein is anal­o­gous to AI chat tools be­ing a pri­mary source of gen­er­a­tive AI. And yet here’s how Americans break down in terms of their meat con­sump­tion pref­er­ences, based on a hand­ful of U.S. stud­ies from this decade:

95% eat meat (Gallup, 2023)

95% eat meat (Gallup, 2023)

70% re­port re­duc­ing red meat con­sump­tion (Rutgers, 2024)

70% re­port re­duc­ing red meat con­sump­tion (Rutgers, 2024)

30% eat (all) meat only rarely/​oc­ca­sion­ally (Gallup, 2020)

30% eat (all) meat only rarely/​oc­ca­sion­ally (Gallup, 2020)

12% don’t eat red meat (Nature, 2026)

12% don’t eat red meat (Nature, 2026)

4% don’t eat any meat, that is are veg­e­tar­ian (Gallup, 2023)

4% don’t eat any meat, that is are veg­e­tar­ian (Gallup, 2023)

1% don’t eat any an­i­mal prod­ucts, that is are ve­gan (Gallup, 2023)

1% don’t eat any an­i­mal prod­ucts, that is are ve­gan (Gallup, 2023)

That is, not every­one eats meat, a ma­jor­ity ac­tively curbs their con­sump­tion of red meat, and a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age don’t eat it at all. Different peo­ple have dif­fer­ent (not mu­tu­ally ex­clu­sive) rea­sons for lim­it­ing their meat con­sump­tion, in­clud­ing health, cost, en­vi­ron­ment, and ethics. Those are all also pri­mary con­cerns for AI con­sump­tion!

The anal­ogy also high­lights mar­ket op­por­tu­ni­ties to ap­peal to peo­ple across the con­tin­uum, speak­ing to their feel­ings on AI and ad­dress­ing their par­tic­u­lar AI con­cerns. For ex­am­ple, we (at DuckDuckGo) make all AI fea­tures op­tional and one of those fea­tures, duck.ai, is a pri­vate chat­bot al­ter­na­tive that helps ad­dress AI pri­vacy con­cerns. To ex­tend the anal­ogy in this way, we’re a restau­rant with a va­ri­ety of op­tions on the menu, from healthy meat dishes (private AI) to veg­e­tar­ian (turn down AI) to ve­gan dishes (turn off AI), which most eaters across the spec­trum can ap­pre­ci­ate.

Does this mean about one third of the pop­u­la­tion is bound to use AI only rarely/​oc­ca­sion­ally for­ever? No. Unlike with meat, the AI tech­nol­ogy land­scape is chang­ing so rapidly that it is very un­clear both where AI prod­ucts and reg­u­la­tions will end up. Product evo­lu­tion could make AI more use­ful to the av­er­age per­son, and reg­u­la­tions could re­duce con­cerns. However, we can say that, as of right now, a mean­ing­ful per­cent­age of the pop­u­la­tion has tried the cur­rent state of AI and has de­cided to ac­tively limit their use of it.

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June 2026

(This is based on a talk I gave at the Oxford Union.)

Since this is ap­par­ently the fu­ture prime min­is­ters’ club, I’m go­ing

to tell you about some­thing it would be good if more politi­cians

un­der­stood: I’m go­ing to tell you how peo­ple be­come bil­lion­aires.

I hope this will be use­ful to you even if you don’t plan to go into

pol­i­tics. Those of you who don’t be­come prime min­is­ter can be­come

bil­lion­aires in­stead.

The rea­son I know about this topic is that 21 years ago Jessica and

I started some­thing called Y Combinator. If you haven’t heard of Y

Combinator, it’s a cross be­tween an in­vest­ment firm and a school

for startup founders. Since we started it in 2005 we’ve funded about

6500 com­pa­nies.

Starting a suc­cess­ful startup is the most

com­mon way to be­come a

bil­lion­aire, so in ef­fect I’ve spent the last 21 years train­ing

peo­ple to be­come bil­lion­aires. So far about 30 of them have, but

there are many more in the pipeline.

So you can imag­ine how as­ton­ished I was last month when an American

politi­cian said that it was im­pos­si­ble to earn a bil­lion dol­lars.

I felt like a skat­ing coach hear­ing some­one say that it’s im­pos­si­ble

to do a triple axel. Of course it’s pos­si­ble. It’s hard, but it’s

pos­si­ble.

She was­n’t say­ing, of course, that it’s im­pos­si­ble to be­come a

bil­lion­aire. Obviously that’s pos­si­ble. Nor was she talk­ing about

the dis­tinc­tion be­tween in­come and cap­i­tal gains. She was­n’t mak­ing

a point about ac­count­ing. What she meant was that it’s im­pos­si­ble

to get that rich with­out do­ing some­thing bad — with­out cheat­ing

in some way.

A cou­ple days later I was talk­ing to the founder of a startup I’d

funded. I be­gan by ask­ing, as I usu­ally do when I meet a founder,

what her growth rate was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out

that this meant her net worth was also grow­ing at 93% a month. She

was get­ting richer at a stu­pen­dously rapid rate. And yet she had­n’t

been do­ing any­thing bad. The rea­son her startup was grow­ing so fast

was sim­ply that users loved what she’d built. So she could feel

from her own ex­pe­ri­ence how wrong that politi­cian was. She was­n’t

ex­ploit­ing any­one. Exactly the op­po­site in fact. The rea­son her

startup was grow­ing so fast was that she and her co­founder had been

work­ing their asses off to make their users happy, and as a re­sult

the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you ex­po­nen­tial

growth.

Later that day I was talk­ing about her case on­line, and some­one

replied that hav­ing a few mil­lion and grow­ing at 93% a month was

rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from be­ing a bil­lion­aire.

I sus­pect many peo­ple would agree with this state­ment. But it turns

out not merely to be false, but false in a very il­lu­mi­nat­ing way.

So I would like you all to do me a fa­vor please. I would like you

to take out your phones and cal­cu­late a num­ber. I know this may

seem con­trived, but I promise it will be use­ful for you. I’m go­ing

to have you do the most com­mon kind of cal­cu­la­tion I do as an

in­vestor, and the ex­pe­ri­ence will bring home to you what star­tups

are all about.

If we in­ter­pret his state­ment in the most con­ser­v­a­tive way and

as­sume that a few means 2, her com­pany has to grow 500x for her to

be­come a bil­lion­aire. So we are go­ing to cal­cu­late how many months

of 93% growth it takes for some­thing to grow 500x.

To do this we want to cal­cu­late the log base 1.93 of 500. The eas­i­est

way to do that is to go to Google search, which lets you do

cal­cu­la­tions right in the search box. So go to Google search and

type log(500, 1.93). If you typed that right, the an­swer you get

is about 9.45.

That is how many months of 93% growth it takes to be­come a bil­lion­aire,

start­ing from 2 mil­lion. A cou­ple mil­lion and 93% growth are not,

in fact, rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from a bil­lion. They’re nine and a

half months apart.

Now you see why, when I meet a founder, the first thing I ask about

is their growth rate.

But I don’t want any­one to ac­cuse me of us­ing un­re­al­is­tic num­bers,

so let’s take a more con­ser­v­a­tive growth rate. Let’s see what hap­pens

at 15% a month. That’s not rare at all. I con­stantly en­counter

star­tups grow­ing at 15% a month.

If your rev­enues grow at 15% a month, how much more will you be

mak­ing 5 years from now? To cal­cu­late that, we need to find 1.15

to the 60th power (since 5 years is 60 months). So go to Google

again and this time type 1.15^60. The an­swer should be about 4384.

Meaning in 5 years your startup will be mak­ing 4384 times as much.

If you’re cur­rently mak­ing ten thou­sand a month, in five years

you’ll be mak­ing about 44 mil­lion a month, or 526 mil­lion a year.

And at that point, if you own as much of the com­pany as founders

typ­i­cally do, you will be a bil­lion­aire.

In the real world, growth rates tend to slow down a bit. A very

suc­cess­ful startup will prob­a­bly be grow­ing faster than 15% a month

in year 1 and slower than 15% a month in year 4. But you end up in

about the same place. If you start a startup in your early twen­ties,

it’s def­i­nitely pos­si­ble to be a bil­lionare by the time you’re

thirty. Hard, but pos­si­ble.

I wanted you to feel this by do­ing the cal­cu­la­tion your­selves,

be­cause now you un­der­stand one of the rea­sons peo­ple start star­tups.

Exponential growth is like magic. It gen­er­ates out­comes that seem

im­pos­si­ble. And that’s why some politi­cians dis­trust it. They don’t

un­der­stand the math of ex­po­nen­tial growth, so when they see peo­ple

be­com­ing what seems to them im­pos­si­bly rich, they as­sume they must

have cheated.

But now you at least un­der­stand, from hav­ing done the math your­selves,

that you don’t have to cheat to be­come a bil­lion­aire. You’ve seen

for your­selves that there are only two num­bers in the cal­cu­la­tion,

the growth rate and how long it con­tin­ues. If it’s im­pos­si­ble to

make a bil­lion dol­lars with­out cheat­ing, which of those two num­bers

is im­pos­si­ble? It’s cer­tainly not im­pos­si­ble to grow at 15% a month

ReactOS, the open-source op­er­at­ing sys­tem work­ing for bi­nary com­pat­i­bil­ity with Microsoft Windows com­puter pro­grams and dri­vers, has reached the mile­stone of be­ing able to en­joy the clas­sic game Half-Life run­ning on this open-source plat­form.

ReactOS has been in de­vel­op­ment for 28 years now and to­day its de­vel­op­ers are not­ing on X the abil­ity to run the Windows ver­sion of Half-Life. Some years ago were re­ports of the Half-Life game at least ini­tial­iz­ing un­der ReactOS while given to­day’s X cov­er­age, it seems to be the first time re­ported of the game suc­cess­fully run­ning on ReactOS and han­dling it in-game.

Granted, these days you can run Half-Life on Linux and it works well on other plat­forms via Wine, it’s fun see­ing Half-Life now run­ning on ReactOS at it con­tin­ues per­se­ver­ing in its quest of Windows bi­nary com­pat­i­bil­ity.

ReactOS user “Zombiedeth” got Half-Life run­ning on a Dell OptiPlex sys­tem with a Core i5 2400 Sandy Bridge proces­sor and NVIDIA GeForce 8400GS graph­ics.

Details on X for those in­ter­ested.