rozumem

We have more food surplus now than ever before. But we also have more distractions than ever before.

Buddha: he survived without a safety net, that's my point.

Having kids and dependents makes it harder, but not impossible. You may have to leave them. Again, OP never said it would be easy.

> the acting part requires you to have capital/social safety net

Not really. If you go back in history, many figures did not have the capital / social safety net to follow their principles. Diogenes comes to mind. Buddha shunned his princely life. Epicurus. The OP did not say it would be easy.

Does something need to?

I run a site which gets around 60k real MAUs per month and have had to deal with this in some shape or form. I haven't given it as much attention as you have though, because it started to feel like whack-a-mole like you describe and other things took priority. I've concluded that the most viable long term solution is to move most pages behind a login wall. And only keep a page public if I see the ROI from the page being scraped by AI bots, Google, etc... for you this could be only the really high-profile donor pages, but not the long tail pages. Once pages are behind a login wall, we can track anomalous activity at a behavioral / account level and automatically suspend those accounts. For example, an account visiting every donor page will be easy to detect.

Made me chuckle. I say have winnable goals

Depends on the company. Some companies have done a great job with their AI chat bots and I've been very impressed with the quality of service, even for queries which I consider quite complex.

For most users, link navigation for single page apps is far better than making round trips to servers which the 'traditional' browser would do.

Nice. I run a site that depends on user submitted content, and it's really interesting to observe how some people try to get around the guardrails. Not sure if your tool does this, but I would perform some additional checks for comments that have links in them.

I fell into the same trap of "build, and they will come" multiple times. Reading The Mom Test changed my perspective on things. I cannot recommend that book enough. Good luck. It's possible. I started my SaaS 8 yrs ago and it more than pays for my lifestyle.

> It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys.

You're conflating two different things. Thanks to software, it's easier today than it's ever been to make money as a small business / solopreneur. It's also harder to compete with the big boys, possibly for the same reason and due to economies of scale.

That's why I don't bother entering the same markets the big boys are in. There are plenty of niche markets which they don't bother touching where a small business can thrive.

Thanks for the tips and catching the typo (fixed).

Is 40k tranasactional emails a month enough to keep a dedicated IP warm? That's my main concern for not using a dedicated IP for transactional emails.

What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?

Curious how you're thinking about getting around anti-bot protection. I scrape a lot and I've noticed many highly trafficked sites investing in anti-bot measures recently, with the rise of AI browsers and such. Still, cool idea, congrats on the launch.

Many people have mentioned gym. I second that wholeheartedly. Running, especially has improved my mental health considerably. Also, writing. Maybe start by writing about all the times you wished you were alone and how that will now be possible :)

I can relate to this. Coding satisifies my urge to build and ship and have an impact on the world. But it doesn't make me think hard. Two things which I've recently gravitated to outside of coding which make me think: blogging and playing chess.

Maybe I subconsciously picked these up because my Thinker side was starved for attention. Nice post.

Reminded me of one of Paul Graham's maxims: "do things that don't scale"

I agree it's a bullshit category. Even my lawyer said so. But it allowed me to live in Poland legally past three months while my application was being processed. The "hack" was worth it for me. Just wished I could've left Poland and re-entered without issues. AFAIK that limitation and the long wait applied even for those applying for TRC for other more legit reasons. Refugees from Ukraine war had put a lot of stress on the system overall.

Regarding lawyer, noted. The language doesn't scare me as much as the long wait times and inefficient bureaucracy I've heard about Spain. Maybe that's improving.

> What was the visa you applied for

Not a visa technically, but a temporary residency permit based on taking a one year Polish language course. Non-refugee citizenship (don't wish to make my exact citizenship public).

> if you are in the Schengen space

Traveling within Schengen would be more doable I suppose, but I was prevented from traveling outside of Schengen without risking my TRC application being voided. So I was told by multiple gov't people + my lawyer.

> Beckham regime in Spain

Thanks, sounds worth exploring. But my brief 5 minute research on this indicates that freelancers / self employed individuals cannot take advantage of this unless they have a DN visa. Paperwork + wait for Spain to give me DN visa. Then more paperwork for this haha.

Didn't look into Cyprus at all, but it's on my radar now.

Curious what your sources are for zero income tax on business income in Spain and Portugal. When I researched them a while back, I didn't see anything of that nature. Anyways, all my income would be foreign income so not sure if what you're saying would even apply to me. But, I'm all ears.

> you file your paperwork and enjoy the rights of the permit you are applying for, from get go, and it's their problem how long it takes to get done

I've experienced this in Poland. I was not allowed to leave the country while my paperwork was being processed (which took over a year) or I would not be allowed re-entry. Not sure how other countries operate.

I wholeheartedly agree EU is much better for settling long term, integrating, feeling part of a community, etc... I've had a great time in Poland and EU generally and I'd love to settle there at some point.

But presently I want a place to bunker down for one year and focus. And I found that to be difficult in EU where I'd have to keep moving every 3 months or deal with bureaucracy for a DN visa.

So far, I find Dubai to be a good fit for that time horizon. Zero income tax is a nice perk but wasn't my primary motivation. I also considered the Baltic countries, but shied away from the paperwork, language gap, and lack of a quick turnaround.

I've come across many people who live here, like it, and don't fall into the buckets you described. As for why I moved here, I briefly cover it in an earlier post: https://rozumem.xyz/posts/4