sawyers

I should start a power company?

I understand what you're saying.

I think it's less about this: You know about quizlet and choose to use it at $5/mo

And more about this: The average person doesn't know about quizlet and asks chatgpt to build them a flashcard app. They may pay $20/mo to have chatgpt build it.

Or this: If there's a blue ocean space where an app like quizlet doesn't exist, the competition is now 10x what it used to be. And the advertising cost is higher because there's more competition there.

That tiny slice is gigantic.

Interesting. You don't have to give away any secrets, but when you're talking about tiny details/sub features, what sorts of issues are you describing?

I agree. I think people generally want a mix of good enough, easy, and something they already know.

The competition I see is from two separate directions, 1) AI companies training on the prompts you send them 2) users building their own a la carte solutions.

I don't think it entirely erases Saas, but it does take a huge bite out of it. Building a Saas product seems somewhat trivial at this point.

The larger hurdle now looks like having startup capital (free time to completely fail, or money to pay multiple founders to do that.) That's the risk, and the reward is income generated over time.

There also don't seem to be tons of SaaS paradigms at scale that differentiate companies other than entrenchment. It's somewhat realistic to assume that a handful of companies are going to pop up that connect simple applications to SaaS backends, which lowers even more the amount of income you can generate from a SaaS and would open up the level of competition to folks who can vibe code.

Yes. The point isn't whether it's true. It's currently the reality that's being sold by most large AI firms.

Xerox Parc is one of my favorite anecdotes. However it's not for UI, it's for how major companies like Xerox kill innovation by trying to make it fit to the form factor of their business.

A mouse and screen with a folder system was a way of humanizing the command line. The funny thing is as a developer, if I know what I want to do on the CLI it's faster than using a mouse and keyboard, because it's essentially shortening the length of time it takes me to communicate a complex idea to a computer and have it execute that.

The chat interface sucks, but it is pretty close to the ideal way of interacting with a computer. Talk to it. It shows you something. Talk to it again. That paradigm is pretty close to how we interact with humans. Talking and showing.

The reason why the UI sucks for AI right now is because AI sucks.

You shouldn't have to manage it as much as you do. But we have to manage it delivers about 90% of what it promises with the missing 10% being critically important.

It's extremely hard to create human bonds with a dementia patient. It's hard to hire an engineer that can't do math.

Solving memory for AI as well as non-stochastic output will leapfrog all of the problems most AI engineers are dealing with right now.

I generally build stuff with AI for 3 reasons: It solves a real problem right now, it's adding to some fundamental problem around the discipline, it's fun.

AI harnesses are pretty big right now, but they will likely get leapfrogged by a better algorithm. At the end of the day the best "harness" for AI is just trust.

Do we really want a complex harness for AI to manage it in a more time consuming way, or do we want to just trust that it can follow instructions and manage complexity on it's own.

The competitive issue around this is that everyone is working on AI right now, so it's realistic to expect a business landscape where harnesses and fundamental shifts in AI capability take turns leapfrogging each other. Temporary solve to current limitations. Paradigm shift in model behavior. It's behaving similarly to moore's law, but on a much faster scale that is harder to measure discretely.

In the spirit of Xerox Parc, I think the bigger innovation isn't reinventing a few things that we already have such as an OS and a chat interface and file management. But rather looking at things the same way those engineers did, which is what does the future of human interactions with machines look like.

If my computer actually had a brain, I would just talk to it, and it would show me things. It might 3D print something so I could try it in the real world. It might show me some things I could have shipped to my house. It might design a UI for me, pull some data etc. I wouldn't have to manage it because it would have access to a lot of fundamental business problems and solutions.

The issue with that way of interacting with computers is that's centralizing knowledge inside of a computer. Doing that erodes competitive business advantage. The two edges of the political spectrum where that works is monopolistic business practices and communism.

And that's actually what you're seeing a gigantic war over right now in AI. China pushing open weight models for free to undercut US AI dominance which requires an insane capital expenditure to keep afloat.

Realistically, I don't think the answer to a lot of these issues is to build a business. I think a lot of businesses built around AI will become irrelevant in months. Open claw is something that 10 years ago would have become a unicorn company. But it got eclipsed by a flood of agent harnesses. And Open claw itself was a leap frog of cursor which was less than a year old. Cursor itself now a part of SpaceX's trillion dollar play.

I just don't see software as a service being anywhere close to as lucrative as it used to be.

It's way more realistic to assume that China is going to undercut US AI prices until they find a way to run complex models on small amounts of compute, eventually wiping a significant amount of value from the US market. At the same time, a lot of the models like OpenAI and Deepseek will be using user input as training data to develop future projects.

It's hard to say when that will happen, but there's a realistic future where AI just cobbles together scalable performant SaaS in rust while running on a micro PC.

The bigger use problem at that point is that most people are really bad at making products. They're really bad at identifying problems, solutions, and use cases for things. Most people end up building one off solutions for temporary problems. Which is fair, because most people aren't engineers or product designers.

I suppose the biggest question in AI dev right now is something like: how can you in any way, quickly tell what you just did with an AI agent in a way that's visual and easy to understand. People call AI stuff slop because it spits out a bunch of output and people can't easily tell what the output is or if it does what it's supposed to. That's a pretty big problem.

It looks like you're building for folks who don't want to dive super deep into AI? In that case I'd gear your product more towards a "thing doer" rather than a complex thing you can crack open and get under the hood.

You generally solve that problem by doing the Amazon method. Start by selling books. Move to selling everything.

So the question would be, what's your Xerox Parc level belief on humans and computers and AI and would would be the first problem you'd solve using that paradigm.

Personally I feel like it's way more efficient to start building social groups right now instead of companies and products, because a lot of what we did on the scale of web 2.0 is just going to be trivial.

What embedded fitness fuctions are you thinking of?

Right. The joke with shakespeares monkeys or borjes library is that you just do that and then filter out the books that match shakespeares works.

If you already know what you want in an infinite library, it is there. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for to the letter, you might not be able to find it.

People often think of tech/business as bottleneck issues ie whats my limiting factor. That's relevant to pre-ai business as humans are relatively self organizing.

The issue with AI is it has no real memory, context, long term reasoning, etc. These are a lot of what we use to determine how well we're doing something as well as why.

The "bottleneck" so to speak with ai is that it will just circularly build junk forever, expand scope infinitely, and just continue building.

At its best it will autobuild your unicorn saas. But on average it's a cancer cluster of ever expanding code with no plan.

The issue with unsupervised AI is that when you increase the throughput you decrease the amount of human supervision. So you have to have some way to deal with that.

If I'm going to give AI a gigantic task that's really complicated and it will probably mess it up 100s of times, how will I compensate for that without constantly looking over it's shoulder?

It shouldn't be prohibitively expensive because the more you break the work into smaller parts, theoretically the smaller a model can be that completes it.

Therefore your agent swarms don't have to be cutting edge API calls, they can be hosted on clusters of tiny cheap computers with small CPU GPU. For orgs you could basically invest in a local server that has 100s of small computers.

You can use engineers and frontier models to plan and do task subdivision. And then shit that out to the local cluster that's basically handling each small task without knowing what it's supposed to do.

The real issue is the middle. Testing, verifying interconnectivity of mid level abstractions, building that amount of tech debt at such a high rate and actually being aware in any way what it is that you've built.

I think for most MBAs, considering the US and a significant amount of global markets only care about short term market upside, and AI is still in the middle of the hype cycle, that's not a serious issue for anyone who is profit oriented.

It's only a real issue for the losers like you and me who care about sustainability and infrastructure that survives longer than one market hurricane season.

What do you mean by tyranny of the specific?

Agreed. Land coverage from space is going to have a larger line of site.

I'm wondering more about unit economics. 10k units for global coverage with ongoing maintenance cost. Or earth bound construction that costs significantly less than a rocket launch.

You could realistically prefab and ship microwave links or base stations. It would be extremely cheap compared to space.

What I'm thinking though is that there's no real estate in space. So you don't have to do any surveying, leasing, etc. You just launch a rocket. Which means if you fund anything in space, you can grow it to scale as long as you have the capital.

You should be able to do the same thing by pointing dishes at each other long distance and having local nodes broadcast 5g. It would be a hell of a lot cheaper than rocket launches and most telecom companies already do it.

It seems like starlink got the jump on infrastructure build out via subsidized government contracts. But a fair amount of telecom companies could slowly expand their reach at a less breakneck pace much cheaper until they catch up and the remaining market cap that starlink doesn't have to fight for would probably be smaller than maybe the cost of a handful of launches per year. It's hard to upkeep a global network with 5 satellites.

The only reason I could see starlink staying up is because it's currently a way for the US government to have a company that provides global internet that they can potentially wrap into PRISM surveillance. The US has spent more on less. But as far as an actual company? I wonder how much longer it will be competetive.

SpaceX cost per launch might be around $100m. Some napkin math if a telecom charges around $50/mo/household. That's $600/y/household. That's roughly 166,667 households/y/launch. You can always tweak the numbers but $50 is competitive.

They're losing about 250-450 satellites per 6 months to a year, which means they might need to launch on average 350 satellites per year lets say?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-sees-big-drop-in-number-of...

So that's around 58,333,334 households per year in maintenance.

According to this article they just hit 12m subcribers in 2026 June via SEC filing, and their network is 10k+ satellites.

https://axis-intelligence.com/starlink-statistics/

This is all just launch cost, which I guess is subsidized by creative accounting via spacex.

When people say house of cards, like imagine telling Verizon to drop $1T over 10-20 years to net 12M subscribers.

Elon usually has some crazy long game like going to Mars to die. There just isn't one on starlink? Sure you could say, everyone in the world will now use Starlink for everything telecom and broadband related, but it's a gigantic security issue that almost no government would sign on to. You'd have to convince a ton of governments to stop building out local infrastructure and pay Elon to keep everything running. It's a crazy proposition, and not the fun kind.

The thing with satellites is you can't really maintain them, at least not with current technology. It's more common practice to let them burn out and then launch a new one. It's also hard to repurpose them for other things because they're launched with specific hardware. You can add new software via a remote connection but it would be so impossible to just convert the current 10k+ satellite infrastructure into something else.

What would make more sense honestly would be to coordinate with governments to piggyback starlink modules onto their standard satellites and share the launch and maintenance, but that is a bureaucratic nightmare that's worse than how telecom companies rent out different sections of the same telephone pole.

I just don't see it. As a ponzi scheme that temporarily benefits a lot of people, sure. But as a long term functional business that runs without a constant subsidy? No way. The company value is probably less tied to the product and revenue and more to the level of subsidy it receives each year.

Am I crazy?

They were bought out by a unilever subsidiary. Most of their ingredients were replaced with cheaper, less healthy, less flavorful additives. It's funny to say the ice cream got less healthy, but it's true.

Any interesting reading on the second paragraph?