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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#281

Post by fuzzfactor »

scoofy wrote: post #256
laffOr wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there are only remnants left. But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years ago, I would have said m…

I mean a tailor who adjusts clothes and occasionally makes something bespoke. Tailors typically operate a launderette and act as middlemen to a local dry cleaner. I’m not talking about a fancy man making clothes for rich people, I’m talking about the talented old lady in you neighborhood who adjusts your clothing for $50 and runs a wash and fold.

>Can some of welding be automated?

Huge amounts have been doing it for decades.

Manual work pays better than ever though.

And plenty of alterations going on all the time after all the automation dust had settled manufacturing most fashions, a lot less manual work is of course being done but it's still everywhere. You do have to be good or you're not going to do half as well as you could though.

The thing is, automation should be expected to slow or stall sooner or later, automation's not suitable for every little bit of welding or sewing that needs to keep going on. Only the most suitable, of course ;)

These are just random examples, if you want to make absolutely sure you won't be automated away by the internet, build a valuable skill that doesn't depend on the internet at all, nor look anywhere near the places where automation is emerging that it wasn't doing before.

If you eventually figure out how to automate that skill it would be something.

Just like the internet though, there can be extra credit for being first :)

One of the most valuable things to be able to build single-handedly is something that can not be mass-produced by any stretch of the imagination.

You might stick with that alone, or pivot to something with more of a financial upside, but you would always have something to fall back on if needed. Plus give you less worry about taking financial risks than you would have been, considering the same resources and/or capital to work with.

And on a regular basis revisit how far you can stretch your imagination to see if your baseline fallback still doesn't look like it will ever be automated in a way that would effect you.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#282

Post by bilbo0s »

Epa095 wrote: post #234
bilbo0s wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cheap new clothes Uh.. I don't mean to be that guy, but tailors aren't even operating in that market. People who use tailors aren't interested in off the rack items. Even when they do purchase off the rack or even secondhand items.. they'll go have some of those items tailored.

> but tailors aren't even operating in that market. Not anymore.

Not any time that most of us have even been alive.

It's been well over half a century since tailors operated in the "cheap clothing" market.

The clothes tailors make have, pretty much, always been expensive relative off the rack department store options.

Probably because tailor made clothing doesn't "scale".

Re: The only moat left is money?

#283

Post by noosphr »

scoofy wrote: post #249
ineedasername wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like reasonable advice until you realize you have no idea what will and will not scale in a few years, and there's only so many tailors/plumbers/welders/etc. What it really comes down to is these options as more work gets automated: 1) New jobs doing different things that weren't done before 2) Same jobs but shorter hours so "full time" with a salary to match starts to look more like 4 days, or 5 hours/day…

The point of doing something non-scalable is that you can enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don't need to be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse. I'm not saying it's easy ! It's hard as hell. It sucks when your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at windmills, and the game can't be…

Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse will take around 3 to 5 years of education or apprenticeship in most countries. It also requires new licenses or certificates if you ever move country.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#284

Post by bigyabai »

mothballed wrote: post #68
exceptione wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A free market is not a zero sum game indeed. Monopolies turn it into a zero sum game. To keep a market free, you have to regulate it. Wealth concentration is dangerous for democracy, the markets and society.

I think you have it backwards. Regulation is what enables monopolies. There is no monopoly for any of the major industries like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia despite almost no effective regulation. There is not even a monopoly of pirates despite them willing to use violence to try and enforce a monopoly. If you look at the history of the US, for instance, railroad regulation was brought forth l…

> There is no monopoly for any of the major industries like cow herding or cellular telephone service in Somalia

Kinda a terrible example, as cellular telephones are highly regulated in Somalia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Communication_Authori...

Re: The only moat left is money?

#285

Post by fuzzfactor »

laffOr wrote: post #247
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…

Being a tailor is scalable, that's way there are way, way more cheap machine produced clothes today than in the past. Surely he did not miss that the textile industry was at the core of industrial revolution. So being a tailor is more like a post-scaling job - the automation has already happened and now there are only remnants left. But how can you be sure a job is peak-automated? A few years ago, I would have said m…

>how can you be sure a job is peak-automated?

Probably the best way is to spend a few years working for a company where you can get a better picture whether it seems that way or not.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#286

Post by kmeisthax »

One thing I've noticed is that there is a very specific set of technologies that attract a very specific set of people. You may have seen these people jump from Bitcoin to altcoins to Ethereum to NFTs; and now to AI. The common thread behind all of these technologies is that they are inherently dehumanizing: as in, they are a means by which ambulatory piles of money can shed the skin they are ordinarily forced to wear and just exist.

AI seems like the odd man out of the group, until you understand the utter horror that is weaponized post-scarcity economics. "The only moat left is money" is the plan. It was always the plan. The goal of AI - or at least, the goal of AI to the cult of people who mindlessly agree with it is to replace humans with pliant digital slaves.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#288

Post by cosmic_cheese »

showerst wrote: post #3

This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem. The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving…

> …it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.

Added emphasis to the most crucial part, in my opinion.

If you can manage to deliver a product that's meaningfully better than the competition, you still have an edge, so long as you're competent at marketing.

Nothing gets people searching for alternatives as consistently as frustration, and a product that was lazily built with AI (vibe coded or otherwise) is going to be full of bugs and papercuts that make using it a poor experience.

This is particularly true for software that sits in the hot path of peoples' workflows, where thoughtless design, misbehavior, and poor optimization chip away at time the user can't afford to spare.

In short: yes, competition will be plentiful but it will also be almost entirely awful, and capable SWEs can capitalize on that. It won't take much to stand out amongst the mountains of garbage that will be generated in the coming years.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#289

Post by fuzzfactor »

pier25 wrote: post #192
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…

> 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.

I like doing things for big companies that they actually could afford easily, but their costs are so high it's a better deal to have me do it.

One of my favorite niches :)

Some clients are good enough at math to figure it out, and you don't actually need that many of them if they are big enough.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#290

Post by scoofy »

XorNot wrote: post #278
scoofy wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of doing something non-scalable is that you can enter and exit the market fairly easily. You don't need to be a tailor your whole life. You can make a living as a barber, electrician, teacher, or nurse. I'm not saying it's easy ! It's hard as hell. It sucks when your job gets automated. I'm just saying that aiming for something non-scalable means you're not always tilting at windmills, and the game can't be…

All of those professions you've listed require about half a decade of dedicated training to be legally allowed to practice. For example an electrician takes like 7 years to become qualified, that's a full time apprenticeship, and it pays badly in the meantime. A fact endlessly annoying to electrical engineers who legally can design their houses power system but not work on it. (I mean I think a barber is quicker, but…

I'm not trying to say 'everything is fine, nothing bad is happening a world of recurring technology and industrial revolutions.' It's not. The way things are set up is bad.

My point is the author writes a column about how GPTs are ruining the ability for people to make scalable products, because when everyone can make one, nobody cares... my point is that that's not the result of GPTs. It's a result of survivorship bias skewing how we look at things.

When your business is a flywheel than needs to be running to provide a benefit to each user, then getting that flywheel running is a huge problem. The vast majority of non-scalable businesses, almost by definition, provide each customer with a benefit regardless of whether anyone else uses it. That is how you create basic, word-of-mouth, free "earned" marketing.

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