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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

201–210 of 398 posts

Re: The only moat left is money?

#201

> 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.

OK, say you build a Whatsapp clone in a week. How many Whatsapp users will switch to your app?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#202
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?

could you automate a BJJ coach?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#203
post #192
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…

> if you are going to do something for a living, make sure it is NOT scalable I guess it also means that if you build something for a niche audience then big companies will never be interested in it.

That's not really a bad thing, IMHO. Many people successfully make a living creating niche products.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#205
post #196
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you automate a tailor?

Isn't tailors by and large already outcompeted by cheap new clothes?

A big point of seeing a tailor is getting yourself fitted for custom clothing that is specifically made just for you. As someone who's bought $200 off-the-rack suits and $2,000 tailor-made suits, there's a world of difference between the two, especially when you have an atypical body type.

(Granted, to the main point, I still think a tailor could be automated in some distant future, but we'll need robots to perform physical interactions, not just software.)

Re: The only moat left is money?

#206
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?

Even if it does, there will probably be a prolonged economic period where robots are doing dangerous/messy stuff like welding, plumbing but there is a human master guiding them from a few yards away, via prompts, controllers, etc. More of a semi-autonomous power tool than an fully autonomous master that is delivered by drone on-demand. Scalability is still a ways off.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#208
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?

Do you expect we’ll have AGA, artificial general automation?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#210
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…

That's also the advice of the founder of this website, but not his investment firm since it's looking for moonshots. https://paulgraham.com/ds.html
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