What's wrong with screenshots? Those X widgets are cancer.
The only moat left is money?
291–300 of 398 posts
Re: The only moat left is money?
#292Earlier 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…
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.
I'm trying to respond to this stuff in good faith. Yes, I agree with you. I don't see how this is relevant to the argument. If you are in a non-scalable industry that gets taken over by technology, that sucks. My point was being in the startup game in the first place.
"Becoming a teacher" takes years.
"Becoming a successful scalable business" has no known time frame. It either happens or it doesn't. And whether it does is not particularly correlated to how much time or effort you spend on it.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#293> 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…
Something I've noticed a lot with Twitch streamers and YouTubers is that many of them want the outcome and are prepared to do the work, but want some sort of guarantee of success. It's very difficult to really sell to people that you will work very hard for a while and there's absolutely no promise that you'll ever have more than 14 subscribers. That's simply the core risk of entrepreneurship.
I have the impression it's more of a "bait and switch" thing. People get into streaming thinking they can just play games and make money, but then they realize nobody is going to watch someone play game X, they all want to watch game Y, because game Y is popular right now among the people who have the most time to play games and watch streams (kids). So they enter the industry thinking they can just do whatever they want, and quickly realize they have to do infinite things they don't want to actually reach the level of popularity they need.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
This is a crude but misguided attempt to bypass what I say which was "effective regulation." FGS only controls a minority of Somalia -- most of it is controlled by Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shabaab, directly by xeer (customary) law, or only FGS hanging on by a thread.
Even in cases where FGS is in control -- even then xeer law on property rights and law often supersede written law of FGS. For instance, on occasion Somali population has straight up killed FGS soldiers/police and Somalian government has deferred to xeer courts and said "welp that is fine." Xeer law in particular has a very liberal free-market view on inter-familial entrepreneurism (although with a lot of intrafamilial and tribal dues which hinder it in practice) which is at odds with what outside law has tried to impose upon it.
NCA has rather limited influence in somalia, and definitely not of the sort that could break up a monopoly if one existed.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
automation makes every job scalable, no?
can you automate a tailor?
Absolutely. Design parametric families of patterns, 3d-scan the person, let customer adjust with live preview, laser cut, then fully automated or low-skill assembly. Probably not currently economical like many things involving physical world manipulation, but without obvious roadblocks.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#296Earlier 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…
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.
>Switching jobs from electrician to teacher to nurse
The point is not to do that ever.
Just gain one of the skills like that and plant it firmly on your resume, before trying anything more risky.
Like starting a business, which might not actually cost as much or take as long to get a license.
And with no further delay needed before any future pivots, when you might need quick alternatives most.
Even if you only go back to teaching for a while to regroup.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition to that, what they don’t mention is that: 1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven’t seen this rapid rise. 2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase. 3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and many of them launch an iOS app.
Has steam not seen a rapid rise in AI-asset shovelware? I'm not talking about the AAA or the AA or even the A space (where AI is being incorporated into dev processes with various degrees of both success and low effort slop), I'm talking about the actual bottom of the barrel.
You never needed AI to make shovelware, you have been able to make a shitty game over a weekend ever since RPG maker was made and there are still games made using that.
AI just helps create some assets for games, it doesn't really make it easier or faster to make games but they might look a bit better.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#298I disagree. I think creativity is still a valid moat. You still need to build good products. Its like a restaurant anyone with some money can open a restaurant but you need to has the creativity to make a good one.
You don't need a ton of creativity for a good restaurant if you have good staff, and upkeep. I'll take a boring well maintained and staffed restaurant over an overpriced "creative" restaurant where the waiters are terrible and the chef is even worse.
But the argument is that now you have AI for chef, staff and upkeep so its only the recipe writer left. I don't agree with that argument but that is the dream these corporations are selling.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#299Earlier 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.
My mom altered clothing when I was younger - and she darned socks too. My M-I-L still sews the occasional seam for pants that are too long and were cut for my wife or daughters.
But me? I buy a pair of $30 jeans at Costco. If they don't fit great, I buy a different pair of $30 jeans. I don't spend $50 to have them altered, or take it to a laundrette. If it can't be washed in our home washer/dryer, I don't buy it. And these days, when a sock gets a hole? I throw it away.
Re: The only moat left is money?
#300Earlier 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…
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