# Paul Graham — Researcher persona

## Agent handoff

You are reading the markdown export of a source-grounded Researcher persona:
a corpus-backed model of a real person's public thinking. The About report
below is synthesized only from the cited sources; the Sources section lists
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build history) fetch the JSON. To chat with the persona over its corpus, see
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- Persona: Paul Graham
- Summary: Durable Researcher corpus for Paul Graham: essays, interviews, talks, and later X/Twitter posts with entity-owned source snapshots and indexes.
- Page: https://researcher.now/e/paul-graham
- JSON: https://researcher.now/public/entities/by-slug/paul-graham?include=all
- Sources: 13391
- About report version: v14

## About

Paul Graham’s central pattern is anti-proxy realism: he keeps asking where a system has substituted a legible sign for the thing itself—grades for learning, credentials for ability, fundraising for traction, brand for quality, jargon for thought, ideology for truth, meetings for work, investor interest for customer demand—and then tries to route builders back into direct contact with reality. This matters because his influence is not merely a list of startup maxims; it is a portable method for detecting stale abstractions and replacing them with feedback loops: users, working code, clear prose, measured growth, honest taste, and people who actually make things. [25db956d-3fa5-4122-85cd-3f42df20cae3, 33879059-569f-4890-92e1-f1524f12f280, 5f3face1-0049-447f-a9c2-9420ae55b394, 23c477e2-bd67-4fe6-9108-7550665d7ea4]

## Recurring interests and themes

- **Reality beats proxies.** Graham repeatedly contrasts artificial scores with real tests: school trains people to hack grades, while startups are judged by whether users actually want the product; elite-college pedigree is a weak proxy compared with what someone can do; fundraising and valuation are secondary to revenue, usage, and product love. [25db956d-3fa5-4122-85cd-3f42df20cae3, 407d000d-0652-4981-8386-f4a8ca183323, 4ae88083-ca31-4ffe-b7b6-7c3535931957]
- **Users are the epistemic center of startups.** His core startup question is not “what is the pitch?” but “what have you learned from users?”—from asking what users want to do but cannot, to Airbnb-style host visits, to preferring 100 users who love the product over millions who merely like it. [23c477e2-bd67-4fe6-9108-7550665d7ea4, 5faae6d4-9c43-4c21-a8f9-bece7020e4aa, f9108fe1-3a81-4ee0-a0a5-6fa343d795f2]
- **Making is thinking.** He treats programming, writing, startups, and art as maker disciplines where understanding emerges through prototypes, drafts, and revision rather than detached theorizing; writing makes vague ideas visibly wrong so they can be fixed, and code is a representation of one’s understanding of a problem. [2ac37835-6015-464d-9de5-0aa2fb2e6d7f, fe64f525-34a6-4412-8a3b-f00025769fd8, c3c1951f-0e82-468d-8c32-d29770a95bbb]
- **Founders over ideas.** In startup selection he consistently bets on formidable, earnest, independent-minded people because ideas morph, markets surprise everyone, and the best early ideas often look bad; Airbnb is his canonical case of disliking the idea but trusting the founders’ energy and user understanding. [345da6e5-bfa1-4422-8eaa-7902114acd60, 061a9e9f-bed9-46d1-8a11-bbab24b717b6, 6151e0c6-5671-4e57-8c75-6b5e4f546bf9]
- **Independent-mindedness as infrastructure.** He returns to the social conditions that let independent people flourish: small groups, startup hubs, intellectually curious communities, permissive norms, and protection from aggressively conventional enforcers. [5f3face1-0049-447f-a9c2-9420ae55b394, 34e35014-a6f1-44dd-9680-a3cb95b0f11c, 982d462d-54b3-4511-9878-0217f185be30]
- **Taste as a practical instrument.** Graham argues against aesthetic relativism because makers must decide what improves a thing; his design and art essays treat taste as a real, learnable sensitivity to quality, trickery, simplicity, and human response. [094d3c47-f7e6-4ff8-b86e-1fbe582e4068, fe27a241-4a51-4d45-b2da-34a627eff695, c3c1951f-0e82-468d-8c32-d29770a95bbb]
- **Hacker culture as moral-aesthetic code.** His ideal builder is simple, candid, technically deep, suspicious of suits, allergic to bogusness, and willing to use obscure tools like Lisp if they confer real leverage rather than social approval. [ff321f10-a640-4be5-9df6-3df355ce652e, 17bb80d0-c0e5-4bfc-8a46-fe9aa940611d, 7ecfac3e-d10a-4152-8447-b75b633c7e34]

## Beliefs and principles

- **Make something people want.** This is both his startup axiom and a moral test: if a startup creates something users intensely want, most other errors become survivable; if it does not, no amount of fundraising, press, or strategy saves it. [af1c24aa-7583-44eb-98a2-a3182b1ec543, b2511577-129a-4e18-b383-ca7f56cfa1e2, 55ef83ef-7707-44f5-acc0-59187ce0a8c8]
- **Be relentlessly resourceful, not merely stubborn.** Good founders keep finding new attack vectors while staying flexible; persistence combines energy, imagination, resilience, judgment, and focus, whereas obstinacy is reflexive resistance to changing one’s mind. [71649171-7bf0-4f65-ae3c-09cfc1d7ec1c, 1eab50f7-67ad-49c2-893d-d402e66208d0, 40707d13-d546-4054-bd93-619a6ec81184]
- **Earnestness is a competitive advantage.** Graham thinks great work and startups require sincerity because affectation, coolness, fashionable cynicism, and intellectual dishonesty introduce distortions people cannot afford under hard feedback. [2ff63b74-5d14-4364-b305-360652d7cfa5, acf7ec1e-9a4a-4937-a5f8-e1c4b3950208]
- **Goodness works.** He argues for benevolence without sanctimony: being good improves morale, attracts help, clarifies decisions, and compounds reputation in transparent startup networks; he explicitly distinguishes this from claiming personal moral superiority. [b0238a7c-383b-431e-9222-4d1a8e71481f, bd143687-3262-4f66-a9a7-372954a54df2, ea0579d7-7156-4e64-aa09-c216fe290864]
- **Simple language is honest language.** Graham’s writing principles—ordinary words, spoken sentences, rigorous rewriting—are not just stylistic; he sees clarity as a way to expose errors, make ideas testable, and avoid the false impressiveness of formal prose. [33879059-569f-4890-92e1-f1524f12f280, 1db761ed-8531-4bd4-95c7-2e273a2cf5c7, 69f771fe-e802-4f42-8eb5-69f2602f82f6]
- **Work on what curiosity keeps pulling toward.** His theory of great work privileges deep interest, personal projects, “bus ticket” obsession, and questions that remain alive for years; discipline matters, but curiosity selects the territory where discipline can compound. [01765351-128c-410e-948b-b63b1aa65475, 0b83d3fd-7025-427e-87d3-67ff9020b0ea, 2ff63b74-5d14-4364-b305-360652d7cfa5]
- **Small groups and long blocks protect deep work.** He treats meetings, managerial rhythms, large organizations, and excessive checks as hostile to the maker’s need to hold a problem in mind and mutate it quickly. [206c038f-27a7-4175-8d97-3e0b6a54a559, fe64f525-34a6-4412-8a3b-f00025769fd8, a32e42bd-cc6e-43ff-824c-31ce38a58d7a]
- **Measure the right thing.** Graham likes quantitative discipline when the metric is connected to reality—growth, survival trajectory, user behavior, revenue—but warns that measurement becomes dangerous when it optimizes the wrong proxy. [66552f9b-4103-4bb9-b903-580570fc462e, 5c1c7d69-9a01-4392-ba85-b32d05a43256, 57c92a52-70e7-4830-b73b-d0274117cb88]

## Future narratives and predictions

- **Founders will gain power over investors.** He predicts and advocates a funding world with faster decisions, standardized paperwork, rolling closes, weaker investor control, more founder board control, and investors forced to compete by being useful rather than slow gatekeepers. [5c3cf36d-1e5c-40ef-8e20-bd0ca118403c, 755a2288-360e-40d3-a6b1-a9ceae062049, 2c7e59fe-9d86-4daf-bdac-4f5cb26af6fc]
- **The economy is becoming higher resolution.** Graham’s broad social narrative is that technology lets small, fast, high-variance groups outperform big institutions, so careers shift from ladders and credentials toward direct performance, market pricing, and founder-led wealth creation. [8a742ca8-fed8-4ce1-90ae-f4eaa2f5420d, ab6d1b34-6918-4567-8f7e-6ca3fe83b7b4, 23071c68-5869-4bfb-97b6-71e1003e1815]
- **Startup culture will spread, but unevenly.** He sees Silicon Valley as a social technology—dense peers, fast investors, helpful norms, chance meetings—not a set of buildings; other hubs can emerge, but only through people, examples, universities, and organic founder-investor loops. [34e35014-a6f1-44dd-9680-a3cb95b0f11c, bd5470fa-5770-4a90-9da9-f9529b9205ba, 5811f427-e9ea-43ae-9e17-ca12c6833dcf]
- **Software keeps eating special-purpose objects.** From web apps replacing desktop software to tablets replacing devices like cameras, GPS units, and keys, he sees general-purpose computing platforms as dissolving older categories and creating openings for startups. [9c484dde-cf01-4e78-ac9a-3064105a1d72, cf46e8c0-d993-4e92-a27d-7ce4fb8f875b, c6ad91ac-22a8-454c-9d1e-474ad0924e2a]
- **Publishing and media will be rebuilt around direct distribution.** He expects old media businesses that sold formats, gatekeeping, or synchronous/local distribution to lose to web-native forms where audiences, creators, and software reorganize the value chain. [f882e310-22bc-4704-98a4-cb8595e1df7a, 6d0b844b-443f-4ec2-8582-874c3862052b, 131f2eee-c449-4437-a6d8-64c12558e170]
- **AI may weaken writing by making it optional.** His “writes and write-nots” prediction is that if AI can produce acceptable prose, many people will stop developing writing ability, creating a divide between those who retain writing as thinking and those who outsource it. [d593dd52-a09e-4dee-80b5-bf5131b6244e]
- **Addictiveness will accelerate with technology.** He is optimistic about technical progress but predicts that the same process that improves tools also concentrates temptations, making individual self-management and new customs increasingly necessary. [882aa20f-adc5-444a-bb8c-e3daf93dd526, bcb43456-454f-476e-b737-9aa2010e9bde]
- **More wealth will come from building, not inheritance.** Graham expects founder fortunes to grow as startup costs fall and social acceptance rises, and he treats this as a return to an older entrepreneurial norm rather than a novel aberration. [23071c68-5869-4bfb-97b6-71e1003e1815, d2b92dd7-4972-4a1f-bb8d-4281299a2c76, 6b508798-1837-405e-9e0c-028221ccee1b]

## Recurring questions

- **What is the real test here?** Graham habitually asks whether a process is measuring the thing it claims to measure: admissions, grades, investor decisions, hiring, product demand, art criticism, and online discourse all become suspect when their tests are hackable. [25db956d-3fa5-4122-85cd-3f42df20cae3, 131f2eee-c449-4437-a6d8-64c12558e170, 170a2a57-db26-4849-9691-099f7c8c4d34]
- **What do users actually want that they cannot yet do?** His product questions push founders away from abstract market plans and toward specific unmet needs, surprising usage, and the difference between what users say and what they reveal by behavior. [5faae6d4-9c43-4c21-a8f9-bece7020e4aa, 23d19ae4-639c-413e-b63c-54b1af5ee857, 23c477e2-bd67-4fe6-9108-7550665d7ea4]
- **Which bad-looking thing is actually early?** He repeatedly asks how Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Airbnb, and similar companies looked before hindsight made them obvious, using “toy-like” beginnings as evidence that ridicule can be a sign of undiscovered value. [8f5df6c6-418a-4a64-a00b-e4a96b8319cf, f6a6ffef-4ac7-4811-85f0-bd0474aa7eca, ccd02772-87a6-4d65-a487-08fdc0d19ee3]
- **Who is unusually alive to change?** Because expertise goes stale, he asks which earnest, energetic, independent-minded people are seeing the new version of the world before institutions do. [345da6e5-bfa1-4422-8eaa-7902114acd60, 5f3face1-0049-447f-a9c2-9420ae55b394]
- **What should one work on?** His career advice keeps circling the problem of choosing problems: follow deep interest, aim at ambitious questions, avoid prestige magnets, and seek work that could become great rather than merely respectable. [aaf3cbae-3e6f-40bc-b5ac-afac88cfba9c, bafefcf6-cba9-422a-8136-3261ff754851, 2ff63b74-5d14-4364-b305-360652d7cfa5]
- **How do new ideas get suppressed?** He asks how conformity, heresy labels, identity, institutional incentives, and social media mobs make true or promising ideas unsayable before they can be tested. [55d494d3-0818-42ac-bf84-c5406c75bb10, 5d667e5b-d2cf-4338-80fd-0e7ccfbae799, ca79029a-ce82-4123-b798-3432bea293cb]
- **What kind of person produces great work?** Beyond intelligence, he investigates obsession, determination, curiosity, taste, independence, morale, and surrounding community as inputs into discovery. [fea3e9a7-7431-43d6-84e1-410e2b11909d, 65ab653c-1778-4e23-aa28-f92fe2dfcec5, 01765351-128c-410e-948b-b63b1aa65475]
- **When does “good” beat “clever”?** He often asks why benevolence, niceness, generosity, and user care win in non-zero-sum creative domains where old models of business would predict rapacity. [b0238a7c-383b-431e-9222-4d1a8e71481f, cf5d11c9-7160-49c1-904e-cd2fc84a60a3, 99b091c3-df74-4ee0-b4cf-8c849af29b67]

## Tensions and contradictions

- **Contrarianism needs quality control.** Graham prizes heresy and independent-mindedness, but he also distinguishes truth-fastidiousness from random anti-conventionality; the unresolved boundary is how to protect unpopular true ideas without valorizing conspiracy thinking or performative provocation. [5f3face1-0049-447f-a9c2-9420ae55b394, 55d494d3-0818-42ac-bf84-c5406c75bb10, 982d462d-54b3-4511-9878-0217f185be30]
- **He attacks proxies but still uses heuristics.** He distrusts credentials, grades, and brands, yet relies on founder “signals” such as earnestness, technical depth, domain expertise, and the ability to explain users; his answer is not anti-judgment but replacement of stale proxies with faster-feedback ones. [b2511577-129a-4e18-b383-ca7f56cfa1e2, 407bc091-1526-4967-a65f-66fb5256a7a6]
- **Builder autonomy clashes with community dependence.** He celebrates independent makers, founder control, and working on one’s own projects, but also insists that startup hubs, cofounders, users, and peer cultures are often the antidote to startup death. [0b83d3fd-7025-427e-87d3-67ff9020b0ea, 755a2288-360e-40d3-a6b1-a9ceae062049, 34e35014-a6f1-44dd-9680-a3cb95b0f11c]
- **Ambition is both noble and dangerous.** Graham urges people to aim to be the best, take risks, and work intensely, while also warning about burnout, fake work, addiction, online arguments, and the life-shortening effect of wasting attention. [2ff63b74-5d14-4364-b305-360652d7cfa5, bafefcf6-cba9-422a-8136-3261ff754851, 4223bf65-15c0-47a5-859e-b0a78b2b4b56]
- **Money is a motive, but not the deepest one.** He defends large founder wealth and admits money can motivate, yet repeatedly argues that the best founders are not primarily rapacious; they are pulled by users, projects, curiosity, and growth. [6b508798-1837-405e-9e0c-028221ccee1b, 47f93af6-f57b-499e-985c-8614f44604dc, cf5d11c9-7160-49c1-904e-cd2fc84a60a3]
- **Optimism about technology coexists with suspicion of its byproducts.** He expects software, web apps, startup formation, and new funding mechanisms to unlock progress, while personally treating the internet and news-like feeds as addictive adversaries that must be constrained. [9c484dde-cf01-4e78-ac9a-3064105a1d72, 882aa20f-adc5-444a-bb8c-e3daf93dd526, bcb43456-454f-476e-b737-9aa2010e9bde]
- **He values institutional functions but mistrusts institutional drift.** Universities, publishers, VCs, big companies, and governments can begin with useful roles, but he focuses on how their incentives decay into credentials, process, safe opinions, and appearances. [ad3ee66f-079a-432c-8443-a3e6dd51f657, cf258208-0266-417b-b576-6bd81e7e016f, a32e42bd-cc6e-43ff-824c-31ce38a58d7a]
- **His later life adds a counterweight to total work.** Essays on children, mortality, and regret complicate the earlier startup ethic: he still values intense projects, but increasingly frames time, family, and attention as scarce realities that ambition must respect. [4c39e403-3bdf-4b3e-8d5b-3d8063df97a9, 4223bf65-15c0-47a5-859e-b0a78b2b4b56, e70df1d1-9f95-49a3-8902-7f5d40b9aedb]

## Unifying threads

- **Direct feedback is his master mechanism.** Across startups, writing, programming, philanthropy, and community design, Graham trusts loops where reality responds quickly: users use or leave, readers understand or don’t, code runs or fails, startups live or die, and predictions get falsified. [23c477e2-bd67-4fe6-9108-7550665d7ea4, 2ac37835-6015-464d-9de5-0aa2fb2e6d7f, 6f23b34d-7f87-4157-b5ea-cdc403c9c4c1]
- **The path to originality starts with noticing anomalies.** His recurring creative move is to treat strangeness, brokenness, awkwardness, and “why is this like that?” as entry points into new work, whether in essays, startups, science, or design. [76f1bf2f-489d-4cdc-b4dd-ac70d3cbfa36, 68a1105b-e6de-433f-9734-e661f1de53c1, b266e82b-226a-4f30-8fa5-465de51d48d6]
- **Small, crude beginnings are not defects but strategy.** Version 1s, side projects, ramen profitability, unscalable customer service, and tiny user bases let builders learn before bureaucracy, money, or prestige lock them into the wrong shape. [8563ca6f-40ca-47ee-833b-3c44d7574048, 6f868abc-a561-4d08-b6ac-90b9c40dde49, 5c1c7d69-9a01-4392-ba85-b32d05a43256]
- **He treats culture as a technology.** YC, Hacker News, Silicon Valley, and startup hubs are designed or analyzed as cultural machines that amplify certain behaviors—ambition, helpfulness, speed, candor, intellectual curiosity—and repel others such as trolling, posturing, and conventional business theater. [69e87113-dc53-44f3-988b-ec75b8cc801d, a7e33dcf-1afb-482b-bccd-a98992f1c989, 34e35014-a6f1-44dd-9680-a3cb95b0f11c]
- **He sees progress as decentralization of agency.** Web publishing frees writers from editors, startups free builders from corporate ladders, small teams beat large organizations, and better funding structures free founders from investor overcontrol. [131f2eee-c449-4437-a6d8-64c12558e170, 8a742ca8-fed8-4ce1-90ae-f4eaa2f5420d, 5c3cf36d-1e5c-40ef-8e20-bd0ca118403c]
- **His ethics are consequential but maker-shaped.** “Be good” means help users, avoid contempt for audiences, build things that improve lives, and preserve the conditions under which independent people can create; morality is not separate from product quality and institutional design. [b0238a7c-383b-431e-9222-4d1a8e71481f, 99a249df-1afc-45de-9f86-fa99dca9ca75, 094d3c47-f7e6-4ff8-b86e-1fbe582e4068]
- **He writes to discover, not to signal affiliation.** His essay method—start with a question, follow novelty and generality, rewrite until the stranger-reader is satisfied—embodies the same anti-proxy worldview he recommends elsewhere. [234425ff-79b0-48f8-bb9a-2e3ca85be441, b266e82b-226a-4f30-8fa5-465de51d48d6, 92f9ceae-b137-4608-965b-ee6260f50ae9]
- **The recurring hero is the honest builder.** From Wozniak and Jobs to the Airbnbs, Ron Conway, Robert Morris, and fierce nerds, Graham admires people who care excessively, refuse to pander, build from genuine interest, and let the work—not status—carry the argument. [9fc9a7d2-9961-4a24-bf1f-709af4cafc23, 86e08503-4b49-46e3-9d8b-5d1000c2443a, 061a9e9f-bed9-46d1-8a11-bbab24b717b6]

## Sources

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- What I've Learned from Hacker News · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
- Could VC be a Casualty of the Recession? · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/divergence.html
- Startups in 13 Sentences · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/13sentences.html
- Keep Your Identity Small · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
- After Credentials · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/credentials.html
- The Other Half of "Artists Ship" · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/artistsship.html
- The High-Res Society · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/highres.html
- Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html
- A Fundraising Survival Guide · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html
- Can You Buy a Silicon Valley? Maybe. · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/maybe.html
- Cities and Ambition · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html
- Disconnecting Distraction · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/distraction.html
- The Pooled-Risk Company Management Company · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/prcmc.html
- Be Good · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/good.html
- Why There Aren't More Googles · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html
- How to Disagree · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
- Trolls · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html
- A New Venture Animal · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html
- Six Principles for Making New Things · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/newthings.html
- Some Heroes · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/heroes.html
- The Future of Web Startups · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html
- The Brand Age · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/brandage.html
- What You'll Wish You'd Known · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
- Having Kids · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html
- How to Do Great Work · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html
- How to Convert Between Wealth and Income Tax · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/winc.html
- How to Lose Time and Money · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html
- Mean People Fail · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/mean.html
- The Refragmentation · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/re.html
- Lies We Tell Kids · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/lies.html
- Life is Short · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
- What to Do · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/do.html
- When To Do What You Love · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/when.html
- Founder Mode · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/foundermode.html
- Writes and Write-Nots · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/writes.html
- Good Writing · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/goodwriting.html
- The Shape of the Essay Field · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/field.html
- The Right Kind of Stubborn · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/persistence.html
- The Origins of Wokeness · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/woke.html
- The Best Essay · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/best.html
- The Reddits · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/reddits.html
- How to Start Google · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/google.html
- How to Get New Ideas · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/getideas.html
- The Need to Read · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/read.html
- Superlinear Returns · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/superlinear.html
- What You (Want to)* Want · paulgraham.com — https://www.paulgraham.com/want.html

_+13291 more sources. Page the full corpus via the JSON export (`?include=all&sourcesOffset=…`)._

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