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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#181

Post by miyoji »

phil21 wrote: post #159
autoconfig wrote: post #63

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…

It's just another way of saying "Ideas are worthless, execution is what matters" which has always been largely true. Yes, you need the idea first of course. But that's truly the easy part. 99% of "ideas" rely on great execution to be worth even looking at - much less paying for - for anyone else.

That isn't what it's saying and I don't think the idea that "execution is what matters" is even true, other than to point out that ideas aren't valuable by themselves.

This is about marketing, about getting people to know and care that the thing you built exists. You can execute perfectly (in terms of making a great product) and not get a single eyeball.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#182

Post by ahnick »

AntiDyatlov wrote: post #39
elliotbnvl wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahhh that lines up with a thought I had recently: you get out of life what you put into it. I am beginning to believe that there's some kind of metaphysical rule here that is true everywhere, all the time. So maybe the solution is: find the hardest stuff to do and do the crap out of it.

I really don't think that's true, you can put a lot of effort into a wrongheaded strategy, netting you no or bad results. Conversely, a good strategy can get you good results without that much effort.

Wrongheaded strategies that net you bad results, often result in lessons and ideas that can be further pursued on their own merits.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#183

Post by neom »

ncphillips wrote: post #174
neom wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked during the digital revolution in film, I've told the story a zillion times on HN but basically, I went through the first pure digital film program in Canada, by the time I graduated 70% had dropped out, as far as I know I'm the only one who made a proper go at it, and even then when my startup was taking off, a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when…

> a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought they were special I don't know much about film industry, and I have a ton of brainfog from being sick today. Could you say more? What made them a hotshot? They thought they were like, creative geniuses with digital film or something?

They often WERE creative geniuses with a digital camera! Brilliant people! In fact they were the ones who came and went the fastest, what makes you useful in industry is very frequently nothing to do with genius or creativity or mastery of the tools. It's things like reliability, stability, team spirit, open mindedness etc.

Creative genius is one game, but it's far from the only, or even, main one.

Hope you feel better. <3

Re: The only moat left is money?

#184

Post by scoofy »

So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago.

He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable.

If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to compete against the tailors in your neighborhood, and you can easily find a neighborhood that doesn't have a tailor. If you're building a scalable product, you'll always be competing against the best, most well funded, smartest people in the room.

Everyone here has grown up in the birth of the internet -- a once in ever event -- where building something scalable was just there for the taking. That's never going to exist again basically.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#185

Post by femiagbabiaka »

scoofy wrote: post #184

So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…

automation makes every job scalable, no?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#186

Post by MichaelRo »

apsurd wrote: post #111
autoconfig wrote: post #63

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…

sounds like the author is discovering business. I didn't read the article, but yes, going from 0-1,1-10 is really hard and really rewarding. And it got easier with the Internet. Going from 10-1k and 1k-1M is a different ball-game. Always was. The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that…

>> The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P

To me having one own's company was just a means to the end: making enough money to live comfortably without the need to get a job ever again for the rest of my life. I too learned programming as a means to achieve that end but eventually realized that I don't need a company if I can short-circuit the path to money. By switching to the right domain - finance, where what I learn might be eventually put to use directly by investing capital into profitable trading strategies.

Back to OP's article, if there's a domain where money as a moat is not a problem, that's definitely finance: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and...

I work in this domain since almost 20 years and can tell you, noone's gonna risk a billion dollars on crap vibe coded by AI. I wrote before, I don't know what crack these AI people are smoking but when there's real stakes at play, they don't play around with toys. And AI in programming is a toy. The unlikely triumph of "Can I haz teh codez?" CTRL+C / CTRL+V "prompt experts" (mocking it, lol) strategy on Stack Overflow, along with the people who employ it.

I'm not worried about MY particular future in this industry. I'm not worried that AI is gonna replace me, us, or write anything significant here at all in the foreseeable future until it fucking evolves into AGI which is somewhere 5000 years from now, optimistically.

The party's gotta come to an end really soon along with the figures on how much money AI makes versus it's real utility - which is, simply stated, "a toy".

Not necessary but here's my mood while writing this comment: - listening to this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EWqTym2cQU&list=RD6EWqTym2c...

Re: The only moat left is money?

#187

Post by bccdee »

andsoitis wrote: post #19
saubeidl wrote: post #2

Capitalism working as intended, shifting more and more resources to the already-rich. A handful of people doesn't own most of the country by accident.

Wealth is not a zero sum game. There’s more wealth in the world today than 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 5000 years ago.

Power is a zero-sum game. We all live in the same space, exist in the same media ecosystem, and have the same number of hours in the day. The media consumed by the public, the structure of our cities, the investments we make in science, the sources we use for energy, the laws we pass and the way they are interpreted, stewardship of our environment, and the degree to which our tax money is used to drop bombs on civilians are ALL zero-sum.

I am so sick of the pretense that GDP growth means inequality is somehow illusory. Yes, TVs used to be expensive and now they are cheap. Big whoop.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#188

Post by pier25 »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #185
scoofy wrote: post #184

So, I really felt like more people should be reading Nassim Taleb's Incerto series of books. A lot of the issues that fall out of AI he dealt with in his books like ten years ago. He gives one the best pieces of advice I've ever heard: if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable. If you do something that isn't really scalable, like being a welder or a tailor, then you only have to comp…

automation makes every job scalable, no?

can you automate a tailor?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#189

Post by sarchertech »

ericmcer wrote: post #176
autoconfig wrote: post #63

> When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both. Creation has progressively been getting easier since the invention of the computer, it is not a new phenomena. This naturally pushes the boundary on what needs to be delivered in order to find paying cu…

Seriously you can ship in a week things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago. LLMs are just glue between pieces of your code you still need to be able to plug them into a coherent architecture to do something impressive.

To the extent that’s true it has much, much more to do with AWS, open source libraries, and collective knowledge, than it does LLMs.

But I honestly can’t think of anything you could do in a week that a company in 2015 would have paid billions for unless it’s something like tweaking an LLM. But in that case it’s the original model, not the 1 week or work you put in.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#190

Post by arionhardison »

vadepaysa wrote: post #177

One thing I’ve noticed doing Show HNs recently: People are flooded by new projects and assume (rightly) that most are low-signal, so they don’t engage. Because there’s low engagement, new projects get even less visibility. That reinforces the belief that nothing interesting can be built anymore. I ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much. The bot…

I commented this earlier and it was instantly downvoted for some reason, but I totally agree with both points; I also think they are intrinsically connected in many ways because using customer-development to understand and build an initial audience often helps identify distribution channels. Here are a few examples I have found

1) I made a product to help people manage their diets; crowded space so it was hard to find users, following Steve Blank's customer-development process I found that the product should have been made for Dietitians not for end users. This may have been obvious to most but it was but to me at the time.

2) I made a product for Medicare/Medicaid but it was hard to get my foot in the door to even be considered for any of the Gov. contracts, so following the same model again I found that if I used politicians that had made promises during their campaign that my product could help them to fulfill then I could use them as distribution channels.

One thing I disagree with or don't understand is

> ship earlier now (often free and open source) to learn faster, but it doesn’t change the attention dynamics much.

I have found the opposite, it seems like the bar is much higher now and not even the boost in productivity that I have gotten from using AI has allowed me to ship secure/high quality products as fast as I would like to; perhaps I am just too insecure about my work but its all new I guess.

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