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Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

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Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#31

Post by sugarpimpdorsey »

godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

I remember being the last one of my friend group to sign up. Having been an old-school internet who grew up on IRC and such, I thought it was insane people would enter their real name and picture into what looked like some shitty PHP site allegedly run by "some dude at Harvard". But all the girls were on it and the rest is history I guess.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#32

Post by emseetech »

pikseladam wrote: post #21

Ekşi Sözlük (eksisozluk.com) has always been like that, and it still is. People wait over 4–5 years just to become a user, while non-users can only read. It remains one of the biggest websites in Türkiye, yet the design is still very simple, with only one or two new features added over the years. It reached more and more users, but it never really scaled in true meaning. It still like a weekend project

I wonder if slow growth businesses like this will win out in the end. Every other social network decays under a crush of revenue expectations and an In-N-Out model of tech can grow steadily without ever falling apart.

Could be a real tortoise and the hare situation but we won't know for a long time.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#33

Post by jvanderbot »

nine_k wrote: post #30
priyanmuthu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.

Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?

Aider!

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#34

Post by nine_k »

It's only a startup when it can attain the hockey-stick growth. Otherwise it's just a sparkling hobby.

Having a hobby is great! The biggest difference is that a startup is intended to make you a lot of money, and maybe change the way people do things, so you work on it full-time, and a hobby is intended to make your life immediately more enjoyable, and costs you money.

A cargo ship and a pleasure boat have a number of things in common, but...

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#35

Post by derwiki »

jvanderbot wrote: post #33
nine_k wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?

Aider!

+1 Aider, first time I used it I knew I was looking into the future

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#36

Post by deepfriedbits »

I love this mindset and where we're headed with the cost to build so low now. I follow r/MacApps and it's been wild to see the explosion of quality, specialized apps shared there. I have often thought it's because of Cursor, Claude, and other code production accelerators showing up recently.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#37

Post by conradev »

manoDev wrote: post #26

> The cost to build is so low now. The cost seems deceivingly low right now because those AI companies are fighting for monopoly, but in reality the cost is huge – not only capital, but also trust, privacy, and environmental.

I care far more about the noise and air pollution that x.ai is causing in Memphis (ruining lives) than the environmental impact of the industry as a whole.

6% YoY growth in domestic electricity demand is frankly nothing compared to the capacity that developing economies are building out for things other than AI.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#38

Post by brabel »

nine_k wrote: post #30
priyanmuthu wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the concern is about the inference cost -- we do have open-weight models that are getting more powerful, and hardware to run small-ish models cheap. I run agents using small local models in my MacBook.

Can you use something like Cursor with your local models? Is the quality comparable? Is the speed acceptable?

For quality to be comparable, you need to use a relatively big model, which will only work if you have around 64GB of RAM or more. The latest OpenAI local models (https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/), for example, are really good, but you probably want the 120b to have results at least near what you get with their best cloud models, and that requires I think 80GB+. If you don't have that much, you can try stuff like the DeepSeek models, which are known for being ultra-efficient and runnable with "normal" computers, if you don't mind the politics of using that (and there are many models now that are similar!) but I haven't tried too many more to be able to comment.

On my Macbook M1 Pro I can run the gpt-oss-20b model without issues and quite fast.

Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale

#39

Post by amelius »

godot wrote: post #14

> Could it be bigger? Sure. But at some point — maybe even before 1,000 people — the vibe breaks. The intimacy evaporates. You stop recognizing names. People talk less because it’s harder to know who’s listening. Growth would make it worse, not better. > > Some things work precisely because they’re small. I'd argue this is true for social networks like Facebook actually. There was a magical period in Facebook between…

You could run something like Facebook but in tiny shards. It would be better. And require 1/1000th of the engineering workforce.
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