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The only moat left is money?

elliotbonneville.com

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Re: The only moat left is money?

#381

Post by fraaancis »

a_better_world wrote: post #237
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…

how good was Taleb at following his own advice? Had he tested it? As I recall he is pretty big on "skin in the game' as his differentiator.

He kind of did. He used leverage to place bets on the market.

Leverage scales in a way, because larger pools of money (corporations, groups of investors) mean larger bets.

But leverage also doesn't scale, because larger pools of money tend to make smaller bets over a larger surface of the market, since being wrong in a big way with leverage can wipe you out.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#382

Post by gverrilla »

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…

stupid advice. only way to solve the problem is collective. even if you become a tailor or a welder, what about other people? it's not a singleplayer game at all.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#383

Post by Gud »

bdcravens wrote: post #150
moregrist wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there in the 90s. I built a few bad static HTML pages. It wasn’t hard. There are lots of stories of non-CS / non-technical people making stuff from the dotcom era. Making a dynamic page was harder. Integrating with a payment system was almost magical; there’s a reason PayPal became big. But what was truly hard, and continues to be hard, is building a page, either static or dynamic, that people actually want to…

Building static pages that worked in both Netscape and IE 4, and could function well with constrained dial up speeds, may not have been "hard", but it did come with a number of challenges.

I was making HTML pages as a 9 year old in the mid 90s.

It was never hard.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#384

Post by insane_dreamer »

If the promise of AI doing most tasks a human can do does become true (and it appears to be on its way, though it's a matter of time), I think this will come as a serious shock to society -- particularly the US and highly developed countries. We are not, nor even trying to be, nor even thinking about trying to be, prepared.

I feel like all players are rowing downstream as fast as they can, in the hopes that they will be one of the lucky few to catch the few ropes while the rest of humanity goes over the waterfall.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#385

Post by insane_dreamer »

scoofy wrote: post #279
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

automation makes every job scalable, no?

If we get AGI and fully autonomous robot assistants, we'll live in a post scarcity world like Star Trek, or somebody in control the robots will use them to enslave all of humanity... so... high variance outcome could go either way.

given the history of humanity, the post-scarcity world of Star Trek seems highly unlikely

Re: The only moat left is money?

#386

Post by insane_dreamer »

pier25 wrote: post #188
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

automation makes every job scalable, no?

can you automate a tailor?

yes but is there enough demand for tailoring that it would make it economically feasibly to create the investment to automate it? probably not.

and in a world where many/most(?) people have lost their jobs to AI, only the wealthy few will be able to afford tailoring anyway

Re: The only moat left is money?

#387

Post by sebstefan »

francisofascii wrote: post #88
sebstefan wrote: post #9

>Every morning a few thousand people wake up and ship something. A tool, a SaaS, a newsletter, an app that does the thing the other app does but slightly differently. They post it on Hacker News. Nobody clicks. >This is not new. What's new is the scale. An AI can wake up (or whatever it does at 3am) and ship twelve of these before breakfast. That's fun, I'm sure if somebody actually checked that and graphed it, you w…

Here is the Show HN Graph. I think it is obvious when AI starts. https://petegoldsmith.com/2026/01/26/2026-01-26-show-hn-tren...

Woah I stand corrected. Not really when AI starts but when it starts getting useful for sure.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#388

Post by senordevnyc »

shimman wrote: post #119
derf_ wrote: post #108

The way to tell if a business has a moat that I once learned was, "If someone gave you a billion dollars, could you go compete with that business and have a reasonable chance of winning." If the answer is yes, then the business has no moat. The numbers are bigger now, but I think the principle remains the same: money cannot be a moat.

I can't think of a single software company that has a moat then. Good rubric to have and makes sense.

Really? I don't think you could come close to beating any of the major software or AI companies head-to-head with only a billion in capital.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#389

Post by senordevnyc »

random3 wrote: post #118
derf_ wrote: post #108

The way to tell if a business has a moat that I once learned was, "If someone gave you a billion dollars, could you go compete with that business and have a reasonable chance of winning." If the answer is yes, then the business has no moat. The numbers are bigger now, but I think the principle remains the same: money cannot be a moat.

A moat is around something that exists, meant to protect it. You're describing something else, not a moat with your example. OP used moat correctly, creative effort around existing earned skill, brand, etc. To answer your question. Yes to a player already in a market with lack of funding, a billion dolars could be the necessary moat to win. Money was, is and likely will be a moat for a while. But as a proxy, it may n…

I think the point is that capital alone is a pretty poor economic moat. If it works, it's probably only because the market opportunity actually isn't that great once you take everything into account. If the opportunity is good enough, the money is out there and your competitive advantage will disappear quickly.

Re: The only moat left is money?

#390

Post by shimman »

senordevnyc wrote: post #388
shimman wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't think of a single software company that has a moat then. Good rubric to have and makes sense.

Really? I don't think you could come close to beating any of the major software or AI companies head-to-head with only a billion in capital.

If you gave someone the exact same budgets and resources as the major AI companies, yes I'm sure most humans on this Earth would come up with comparable (and probably even better) plans. Why are we acting as if business magnates have some special quantity in them? Sam Altman isn't an engineer, he's never worked a real job in his life. There's nothing special about him outside of the ability to lie.

If you can hire top talent, why wouldn't you be able to compete on a software level?

What exactly is the moat here?

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