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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#361

Post by literallywho »

gzread wrote: post #334
lelanthran wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which clones? Are you seriously contending that apps that have Obsidians functionality don't exist? Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly! > And why not the others? Because money is the moat, and they have it! That was my entire point - money is the moat .

You have failed to provide a single example of an Obsidian clone.

There are so many of them, aren't there? There's Roam Research (might be the OG one), Logseq (FOSS Obsidian basically), Notion, Emacs' Org-Roam, Anytype, etc. Neovim has like 5 extensions implementing the same idea (such as Neorg), Bram's Vim probably has its own plugins in Vim9script.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#362

Post by tdeck »

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.

How many people visit either kind of business these days? I'm almost 35 and have never once gotten any garment tailored. I think one reason is that clothes are so cheap you can just keep looking and you'll find something that fits, which seems to be what most people do nowadays.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#363

Post by Gud »

voisin wrote: post #342
tuatoru wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> In this case we are the horses. This is assuming the conclusion. The entire question is whether we are the horses or every other example of humans in the past who found other employment that was inconceivable previous to the technological revolution that rendered their old job irrelevant.

But you are ignoring the substantial difference between previous technical revolutions, this time technology not replacing a mechanical operation.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#364

Post by pixelmelt »

silvestrov wrote: post #148
runako wrote: post #106

This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn. Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software. Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money. We still live in a world where most ind…

> as building software gets easier [...] new entrants to displace Bad Old Software This didn't happen for music. It is much easier to create/record music today than in the 70s and 80s, but the music created today is mostly boring AI music and not new exiting/inventing music.

Try finding some small artists you like on soundcloud, see who they follow and who follows them, I'm sure you'll find something interesting

Re: The only moat left is money?

#366

Post by djhn »

tdeck wrote: post #362
scoofy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How many people visit either kind of business these days? I'm almost 35 and have never once gotten any garment tailored. I think one reason is that clothes are so cheap you can just keep looking and you'll find something that fits, which seems to be what most people do nowadays.

Try it. You might be missing out! One of the benefits of getting all your trousers from a tailor made to your size is you never have to waste time trying on trousers, or waste time ordering-returning items.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#367

Post by pixelmelt »

runako wrote: post #106

This is certainly one conclusion that could be drawn. Another conclusion could be that as building software gets easier (like it did for ex in the 90s and again in the 2010s), opportunities are created for new entrants to displace Bad Old Software. Those expensive Enterprise apps that everybody hates? Are absolutely begging to be replaced by something better for half the money. We still live in a world where most ind…

I've been enjoying smashing through those panes of glass with LLMs. Just spin up a browser, go and export all the requests to undocumented user endpoints to curl commands, specify what you want out of it and after a few minutes you have an api endpoint up and running!

Re: The only moat left is money?

#368

Post by cryptonector »

kardashev8 wrote: post #213
nomel wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just complexity, but also anything requiring any actual ingenuity. It's impressive how "junior" it can be, with its (current) statistical shackles. Worse, if you flat tell it what to do, if your approach is too far into the statistical weeds, it'll flounder like crazy.

what is an example?

Just tonight I was trying to get Claude Opus 4.6 to design a lock-less data structure, and it kept failing to solve problems which I kept then solving for it, but once presented with the solutions it was able to check them, and I think correctly so (that's not nothing!).

Re: The only moat left is money?

#369

Post by canxerian »

apsurd wrote: post #111
autoconfig wrote: post #63

> 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…

sounds like the author is discovering business. I didn't read the article, but yes, going from 0-1,1-10 is really hard and really rewarding. And it got easier with the Internet. Going from 10-1k and 1k-1M is a different ball-game. Always was. 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…

In the game of business, quitting = losing.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#370

Post by hintymad »

> The value of human thinking is going down

The value of human repeating other human's know-how through hard work and thinking is going down. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), many types of programming is one human repeating other human's know-how.

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