monero-xmr

Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me

There’s a major difference between having insurance cover something (socialized cost, immediately drives up provider fees for bizarre reasons) and letting the market allow people to buy it themselves (individual cost, the market drives the cost down fast and hard). Notice the pattern with LASIK and GLP1 where lack of insurance coverage has counterintuitively made it cheaper and more accessible.

Let everyone who wants to pay get their scans! But don’t make me pay for you

Totally understand. The existential risk is the main issue. I will say it’s never been easier for software generalists to become competent Devops, treat it like another piece of software you engineer

If it works fine and cash flows then sales force would sell it before shutting it down. PE would love to acquire and milk it (and you).

Honestly though it isn’t that hard to go k8s anymore and self host with Argo etc. You can use ChatGPT to figure it all out. Just go bare minimum commodity VPS and use agnostic code as infrastructure like terraform. Then you can just win from the race to the bottom of cost

In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.

The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West

I own (cofounded) a medium-sized saas business with hundreds of employees. I maintain final decision of everything technical and still code every day because it’s important. All of the engineers use LLM tools, you’d be stupid not to. But I need good engineers, I replace good engineers when someone leaves, and the business itself is so much larger than just programming. The system is just so huge and complex, and I am the benevolent dictator that architected it and maintains the core design decisions, that the LLM does not replace the need for engineers nor my own expertise.

Furthermore if we were truly in the utopia the author describes, why do all the LLM companies employ (and pay top dollar) for so many engineers? Why does OpenAI pay for slack when they could just vibe code a chat app in an hour?

The challenge of building a real, valuable software business (or any business) is so much harder than using LLM to prompt “build me a successful software business”

Now you have an entire in-house product to manage and build features on. It could potentially work but so much of what my company pays for is about much more than the software itself. One example would be BrowserStack for very specific browser and mobile app testing edge cases. Can’t vibe code this. Another would be a VPN service with the maximum number of locations to test how our system behaves when accessing from those locations. Another would be hosted git. Another is google suite and all of its apps. How can we vibe code Google Docs and Sheets and Drive and all of the integrations and tooling? It simply isn’t going to happen.

Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything

The network effects. The strong get stronger and grow larger, creating a fly wheel. On X.com there are citizen journalists publishing and reposting tons of hyper local news, and I assume it also hits FB but I don’t use that. We don’t need as many proper media companies as we did decades ago. The Tier 3 media outlets died long ago, now WaPo tried to be tier 1 but it failed, and will die as a has-been slowly. Probably should switch to Washington DC gossip and scoops as its forte.

Parent posted a list of excuses for why people didn’t vote. Doesn’t change an election

I mean you can make up all the excuses you want for losing an election but you still lost. Doesn’t make the result illegitimate

When democracy votes for something you don’t like just call it populism

First you must accept that engineering elegance != market value. Only certain applications and business models need the crème de le crème of engineers.

LLM has been hollowing out the mid and lower end of engineering. But has not eroded highest end. Otherwise all the LLM companies wouldn’t pay for talent, they’d just use their own LLM.

Wind is the worst of all, otherwise the UK would have the cheapest energy in the West, instead of the highest

They are 100% not viable without tax dollars

Poor people are using their public car company to buy their private space company?

The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.

Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free.

There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with.

But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy

Lexapro saved my life

The problem is not coding (for me). The problem is thinking for a long time about what to code, then the execution is merely the side effect of my thinking. The LLM has helped me execute faster. Is not a silver bullet, and I do review the outputs carefully. But I won’t pretend it hasn’t made me much more productive.

I don’t code C much, is my passion side language. LLM improves my ability to be productive and quickly. Is not a silver bullet, but is an assist

I am old but C is similarly improved by LLM. Build system, boilerplate, syscalls, potential memory leaks. It will be OK when the Linux graybeards die because new people can come up to speed much more quickly

Technology is just a lever for humanity. Really would like an AI butler, but I guess that's too hard (?). So many things AI could do to make my life better, but instead the world is supposedly over because it can summarize articles, write passable essays, and generate some amount of source code. In truth we haven't even scratched the surface, there is infinite new work to be done, infinite new businesses, infinite existing and new desires to satisfy.

When people say the protests are organized and operated by paid groups backed by the richest Democrats in the country, it’s 100% true. I pointed out how it’s false to deny it. It’s inconvenient to mention but it’s no use lying about, trivial to fact check the validity

Well at least be honest that these things are organized professionally and funded with tens of millions of dollars. When major news sources easily refute statements like “the right believes it’s all funded and fake” and then literally they are funded it’s not a small step to believing it’s fake

Doesn’t Musk own the “Nazi social media” website now? Shocking that people literally destroyed Tesla dealerships out of anger and now no one even bothers to show up anymore

Are you planning on going to a Tesla dealership again to protest? This was top of my Reddit algorithm for several months, no one even mentions it anymore

It’s true that large leftist groups fund protests. 100% true. Here’s a recent ABC News report on the No Kings protests https://abc6onyourside.com/news/nation-world/no-kings-protes...

Also they completely stopped once the new anti-ICE thing became popular. Where are all the new organic No Kings protests? Everyone wrote about it in all the major publications and now we forgot(?) and the Tesla dealership protests? No normal person engages in this stuff, it’s hyper activists part of organized groups with real financing

There’s the former darling Northvolt. Took a lot of state money and then imploded https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/mar/12/ev-battery-...

I mean where are all the factories making batteries in Europe? It’s not like the US is purposefully preventing battery tech. It’s why all of the government-funded solar companies imploded as well. The manufacturers do not compete