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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

#151

Post by marcosdumay »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #148
timr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tech startups" that make enough money to be interesting [1], but do not have the property of being a winner-take-all market, are the truly magical unicorns of software. If you have one, you should covet it and guard it viciously, because otherwise someone with more money is coming to eat your lunch [2][3]. OP wasn't talking about this kind of thing, of course. The phenomenon of hobby projects being "startups" has al…

Is the vet clinic thing a lasting phenomenon? Are independent vet clinics not economically viable or is there just a VC/PE market imbalance where capital is overbidding for a business that doesn't really have a great moat. I would be perfectly willing to believe that if you knock on the door of a perfectly viable business and offer them more than it's worth as well as a salaried position at the new business, (almost)…

> I think the cash merry go round will stop eventually because the moat, in as much as there is one, is the vet themselves, not the business.

The moat is the land. It doesn't even matter if it self-owned or a lease.

The vet just can't walk away and open a new practice nearby.

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

#152

Post by lionkor »

aetherson wrote: post #56

I use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games. There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have. But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different…

Is it easy to modify, or do you think it will eventually become unmaintainable? What level of experience/software development seniority do you have?

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

#153

Post by badlogic »

Genuinely love this. I've sort of done this by hand before the advent of good coding agents [1]. But now, it is even more enjoyavle, as development time is even less an issue.

I'd love to see more people realize this and use that new power to build things that don't necessarily scale on their own, but might trigger changes for sizeable groups, either socially, or politically.

[1] https://mariozechner.at/posts/2024-07-15-two-years-in-review...

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

#154

Post by xgkickt »

rom16384 wrote: post #107
NikolaNovak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Google Plus. "Circles (of friends)" is exactly how my brain works. So I had a family circle and computer geeks circle and photography circle and general circle. It was super easy to create and manage the Venn diagrams, and be in control of both how you share and what you see. It was even easy to share circles themselves! The joy of discovering somebody's shared circle with awesome photographers to follow. I f…

I understand the negative focus group part. The internet radio stations I like end up closing. I dislike advertising, but radio stations without income are unsustainable. This makes it hard for me to design products since they will likely fail! Maybe I should design them to be the opposite of what I'd like them to be...

Reminder for everyone to donate to your favorite station (eg SomaFM).

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

#155

Post by throwawayq3423 »

saubeidl wrote: post #100
brentjanderson wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually a term for this, Context Collapse [1] that explores how social media forces everyone to have a single online persona instead of presenting in the way that makes sense for a given social context (e.g. the "you" at work vs. the "you" at school vs. the "you" with family). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..

It never went anywhere because it's an engineer's solution to a social problem.

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

#156

Post by throwawayq3423 »

positron26 wrote: post #124
saubeidl wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google Plus tried fixing that with its "circles" feature. Of course, that never really went anywhere..

Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it. In hindsight, any SNS begins as a megaphone and if it can't make statements in culture, it doesn't exist. It's not actually about the individuals. Sure, people want to post things, but they want to be feeding into something that does stuff. I don't think Google ever made that case. It was pure chicken and egg with no ice breakers.

> Circles was a killer feature. And then I never really used it.

Then it wasn't a good feature.

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

#157

Post by xgkickt »

andai wrote: post #136
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…

"What I really want is to hang out where I hung out with my friends in college, but have all my older relatives there too." —xkcd 1320

Digital Heaven. We may not get it, but our AI death masks will.

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

#158

Post by WaltPurvis »

Velorivox wrote: post #79
derefr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think of this as the Dark Forest problem of social networks. The original "Dark Forest hypothesis" is the idea that alien civilizations are silent not because they're not out there; and not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions; but rather because they've all concluded — from evidence or pure logic — that there are likely to be scary things "out there" listening; and that, by tryi…

You’ve misrepresented the core of your argument. Wikipedia on dark forest hypothesis: “The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…” > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.

Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.

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

#159

Post by aetherson »

lionkor wrote: post #152
aetherson wrote: post #56

I use Claude Code to hack together a little webapp that allows me to make hex-maps for use in roleplaying games. There are a lot of sites on the web that let you make a hex map. A lot of them are even free. Many of them have features that my little webapp doesn't have. But mine works the way I want it. I wanted rivers and forest to be modifiers on top of the base terrain of the tile. I wanted to have a few different…

Is it easy to modify, or do you think it will eventually become unmaintainable? What level of experience/software development seniority do you have?

It's a rails app with a JavaScript frontend. I know rails pretty well and feel like I can just take over manual coding if I want to or the AI gets in over its head. But I'm very out of date on JS frameworks and would have a big pile of learning if I had to take over the FE.

I assume it will eventually become unmaintainable if I add a bunch to it.

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