Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just seeing it from the other side, still applies IMO. E.g. not talking about politics ("making yourself 'dark'").
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Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
191–200 of 216 posts
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#192It's crazy that medium.com has an SSR hydration issue that just goes unfixed for years.
We can vibe code crazy stuff and this still a problem? I guess our job is safe :)
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, sorry. Nazi family members come last. Family members with no respect for the rights and freedoms of others and who encourage and support inhumane treatment of others don’t get a free pass.
Unless your family members are card carrying members of the Nazi party, "Nazi" is just a codeword for "disagree with them" just as "no respect for the rights and freedoms of others" is the same.
That is either a very naive take, or a dishonest one. You don't need an actual nazi party issuing member cards to recognize someone strongly aligned with the values, opinion and realities of the WW2 (and previous decade) nazi party as such.
By all means keep trolling or worse if it makes your day, hide behind pedantry if it's any help, but you're fooling very, very few people.
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
Vet clinics have a moat (exactly as you're implying): the customer relationship. That relationship, plus optimization on the fixed costs, gives an incentive to acquire the practice, maintain the staff as employees, and collect the operating margin. It's not like you really care if your favored pet doctor works for Brand A or Brand B, and -- let's be honest -- you're price sensitive. No matter what you say, there's a…
As you’ve pointed out, people are price sensitive. One of the substantiated gripes of PE owned vets (and many other things) is that they are more expensive, not cheaper. Price pressure is working against your argument here, not for it.
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#195You realize that as the amount of people vibe-coding goes up, the “quality” of the data llms are trained on are going to drop.
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vet clinics have a moat (exactly as you're implying): the customer relationship. That relationship, plus optimization on the fixed costs, gives an incentive to acquire the practice, maintain the staff as employees, and collect the operating margin. It's not like you really care if your favored pet doctor works for Brand A or Brand B, and -- let's be honest -- you're price sensitive. No matter what you say, there's a…
Also increasingly discoverability. New customers must be able to find you. And how online advertising and SEO is going established player which has resources to waste will beat you.
Anecdotally, all of my friends across multiple friend groups found their vets via word of mouth. The only vet that I’ve visited that wasn’t word of mouth was an emergency vet (googled), although I later discovered that office was the one my vet recommended for after hours anyway.
In my area, the non corporate vets are turning new customers away and recommending other offices.
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I’ve watched multiple vets do exactly that. I’ve seen vets in strip malls, converted houses, purpose built buildings, etc.
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#198> 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 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…
I think this is really insightful. I would add that modern Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok add another dimension in that they try as hard as possible to discourage interactions among friends, by focusing on algorithm-based curation (and push everyone to vertical-video-swipe-mode for all but Twitter). It seems obvious that someone did the math years ago and determined ad dollars are better when people see friend posts nearly 0% of the time, replaced by posts from random mysterious “Pages” you don’t follow, celebrities you don’t follow, and viral public posts by complete strangers. People’s posts are increasingly for nobody to see, because unless they are public and go viral, they’re invisible.
So it’s like most of these “social media” sites are no longer social. They’re more like “targeted media feeds.”
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#199> 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…
The problem I see is that people naturally compartmentalize, and Facebook basically disallows that. I’m sure we all have people we sometimes talk politics with, and people we completely avoid the subject with. If both of those groups see my posts, how is that supposed to work? Well, it doesn’t. The typical outcome seems to be that people mentally compartmentalize, posting stuff intended for a particular group, but ev…
This is pretty true, but funny because it’s maybe the simplest problem to solve at least on Facebook, with the group visibility. People just either don’t care or are too incompetent to select the correct audience when posting.
Re: Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
#200> 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 saying something on Facebook that wasn’t even that inflammatory but had a curse word and my grandma messaged me telling me to delete it. Instead I blocked grandma. Much happier just seeing grandma at holiday gatherings. I don’t think she even noticed honestly.
TIL Kendrick Lamar has a HN (/s)