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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#321

Post by fuzzfactor »

scoofy wrote: post #307
fuzzfactor wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost typed the same thing in different words at the same time :) Your above point can not be upvoted enough. You do have to wonder what some people are thinking ;) Good message from Taleb too, he may not be the most likeable or agreeable person in the world, but he is quite brilliant at synthesizing logical meaning from the inputs he does have.

People not liking Taleb and then dismissing him because he can be rude has always been one of the strangest things that so many people do. I remember about halfway through Skin in the Game , after being put off by most of what I'd been reading, that the gestalt shift happened and it finally clicked. It's probably one of the best texts I've ever read on a specific type of conservatism. I don't like that I agreed with…

Where would we be without Linus anyway ;)

Re: The only moat left is money?

#322

Post by zabzonk »

ericmcer wrote: post #314
zabzonk wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> things that FAANGs would have paid billions for 10 years ago such as?

I mean literally anything that leverages modern APIs. WYSIWG Site Builders, text Chat bots, audio Transcription, voice synthesis. Yeah building from scratch would take longer, but you can slap a UI, a DB/schema around modern APIs and output something that would be science fiction 10 years ago.

You think people would pay billions for a site builder??? Or that it would have been SF 10 years ago? I take it you were not around much 10 years ago.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#323

Post by Ntrails »

throwaway-11-1 wrote: post #311
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…

I keep hearing about the potential of "new jobs" coming from ai but can anyone actually describe one? My gut says they will be something similar to converting middle class knowledge workers to do DoorDash drivers or trained artists becoming dog groomers. What a cool future, at least my parent's can watch racist ai slop videos on their iPads.

It's simply a case of looking back and deciding this technical revolution is identical to the ones preceding it. Thus jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs, it always happens that way.

Of course past performance is no guarantee of future success...

Re: The only moat left is money?

#324

Post by tuatoru »

Ntrails wrote: post #323
throwaway-11-1 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep hearing about the potential of "new jobs" coming from ai but can anyone actually describe one? My gut says they will be something similar to converting middle class knowledge workers to do DoorDash drivers or trained artists becoming dog groomers. What a cool future, at least my parent's can watch racist ai slop videos on their iPads.

It's simply a case of looking back and deciding this technical revolution is identical to the ones preceding it. Thus jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs, it always happens that way. Of course past performance is no guarantee of future success...

> jobs destroyed will be replaced with new jobs

Not for horses though, or at least not the majority of them. Some were kept as pets or essentially status objects. In this case we are the horses.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#325

Post by iamgopal »

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…

Welding is being heavily targeted for automation, apart from pressure vessels etc, most welding can be automated now a days , very soon ( months? ) every welding can be automated.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#326

Post by sarchertech »

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…

There are a lot of code issues you can run into when actually installing and repairing wiring that your average EE wouldn’t know much about at all. And just because you can design the power system for a building doesn’t mean you have any how to fish romex through a wall.

That’s like saying a mechanical engineer should necessarily be able to work as a machinist. Some of them can for sure, but it’s not something they are required to learn.

Also in many places anyone can do electrical work on their own house.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#327

Post by jppope »

The author of this article is missing whats really going on:

Hard novel things are still hard and valuable, easy things are now super easy and really aren't valuable anymore.

Lets take an easy thing... like a meal planning app or a todo list or something. Its what we would all call a weekend project, but in 2022 it would be hard to develop, get the legal stuff reviewed, do the marketing, and do all the rest of the operations in a few weeks. That stuff is basically a series of prompts now.

Now lets look at a hard thing, such as decreasing the cost of titanium production (courtesy of orca: https://www.orcasciences.com/articles/there-has-to-be-a-bett...)... to be able to scale operations and bring the cost down you are going to have to do some real science and engineering... LLMs can certainly help you, but this challenge is a far cry from something that an LLM can handle.

*Novel things have just become MUCH MUCH more valuable, slop is way way less valuable*

Re: The only moat left is money?

#328

Post by tuatoru »

throwaway150 wrote: post #251
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. Great advice but difficult to action though. I mean 10 years back I'd have thought programming is that thing which is not scalable. I had every reason to believe that. It required skill, experience, ability to stay current, grit for debugging hard stuff. Much of it can be automated now. What can I pick now for a living that is not scalable…

You never wrote any scripts to write code?

Re: The only moat left is money?

#329

Post by rubslopes »

wan23 wrote: post #229
MichaelRo wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The dream of running my own company got me to learn programming. 20 years later I'm an employee at a company still dreaming of running my own company. But now I can realize that reality and dreams are not the same and that's ok. As in, I probably really don't want to run my own company. We'll see =P To me having one own's company was just a means to the end: making enough money to live comfortably without the need…

It's absolutely wild to see how unevenly distributed the future we're living in is.

That's almost that famous quote by William Gibson: "The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

Re: The only moat left is money?

#330

Post by throwawaytea »

iamgopal wrote: post #325
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…

Welding is being heavily targeted for automation, apart from pressure vessels etc, most welding can be automated now a days , very soon ( months? ) every welding can be automated.

You're thinking of factory welding, manufacturing or maybe repetitive pipeline welding and thinks like that.

It'll be a while until a robot disassembles a trailer enough to remove the bent axle, cleans off all the paint and rust, bends the trailer back into shape where needed, cuts a custom support to makeup for some lost strength, welds it in, primers it, paints it, and assembles the trailer.

Same for construction too.

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