Distance is usually the wrong measure in space. Something like delta-v will give you a much better scaling as once you manage to get something to orbit the rest is actually a lot closer than it would seem on the ground.
Not to say the effort somehow becomes peanuts, cheap, or easy... but the jump in delta-v needed to go from "100 km vertical ascent" to "hit the moon 350,000 km away" is more like a ~6-7x increase than a 3,500x one. If the moon were instead 700,000 km away the factor would still be ~6-7x.
Everything you've said is correct, but Delta-V scales logarithmicly with fuel load - you need to carry the new fuel. So for purpose of discussing altitude (a valid way to look at getting to the moon) the size of the rocket, and the fuel expended, does in fact grow much closer to linearly.
What I actually started with was comparing Electron to the current bos.space rocket and seeing the relationship was nowhere near linear. The above is the largest component of why I could think of but there is always more than 1 thing going in.
Pronatalist also usually implies a racist/nationalist angle, some of the reason you want more births is because your people are genetically better than immigrants in some way. This isn't universal, but it's often true.
I agree with this approach in general, but in reality this is just thinly veiled layoffs.
If you have thousands of career employees with houses and kids in school and you tell them to move to Ogden Utah or lose their jobs, they're going to react as you'd expect.
For greenfield projects though, or things like the FBI building that mix prime real estate with an outdated campus, spread the love.
Given the teeny tiny endmill the author was using, I suspect they were using a small mill with a very fast spindle. Maybe something like a Taig or a Sherline.
Edit -- I see on another post the author has a Sherline 5400 mini mill.
I just want to second this; a ton of parents I know had kids ready to do it earlier but waited until a major holiday/break when everyone would be home anyway to knock it out.
Related, the longer you wait to do it, the faster they seem to catch on. We waited until each of our kids’ third birthday to potty train and knocked it out in a weekend, no major subsequent accidents.
A lot of parents will tell you they’ve potty trained their kids and also tell you their two-year-old wets the bed evey other week.
Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.
The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.
How does this not fall afoul of states with two party consent laws around recording conversations? Particularly since California is one of the strictest states.
The people behind changes aren't actually as attributable as it sounds though because amendment text gets collaborated on, so showerst might propose an amendment with the key parts of LPisGood's wishlist in it, and then the bill itself will die and then various parts will get cherry picked into an omnibus bill in 6 months anyway.
I've see similar stuff in open source a few times. X post a bug report, Y replies with minimized case, X makes a PR, Z makes a few suggestions, Y add some comments, X updates the PR and W merges it.
This AI boom is just a hyper-version of previous tech booms (web 1.0, VC, crypto, etc). You have an enormous number of people who just want to get in and build something, but the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.
The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
I worked during the digital revolution in film, I've told the story a zillion times on HN but basically, I went through the first pure digital film program in Canada, by the time I graduated 70% had dropped out, as far as I know I'm the only one who made a proper go at it, and even then when my startup was taking off, a new hot shot would show up every month and be gone the next when they got bored or frustrated when nobody thought they were special. Tools are tools.
They often WERE creative geniuses with a digital camera! Brilliant people! In fact they were the ones who came and went the fastest, what makes you useful in industry is very frequently nothing to do with genius or creativity or mastery of the tools. It's things like reliability, stability, team spirit, open mindedness etc.
Creative genius is one game, but it's far from the only, or even, main one.
yeah this is really a part of it. Both founders and investors get spooked by the rapid entries into a market but persistent not just when it’s hard but when it’s boring goes so much farther.
> the products they are pumping out don't serve anyone's need or solve anyone's problem.
This isn't true though.
Yes, there are too many products being build that don't serve anyone's needs or solve anyone's problems.
However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs.
You're right though, to compare this to other booms, which also had the same problem. This is very much a "hyper" version, which is pretty incredible to be in the middle of.
I don't mean that _all_ AI built stuff is useless, just that the number of products where 'marketing budget' is the bottleneck is dwarfed by the number of tools that aren't that special in the first place.
If you have a product that:
1. Solves a real problem people would pay for
2. Is not trivially replicable by your potential customers or competitors
3. Does not have a natural discovery mechanism by potential customers
I think item #2 in your list is the real kicker here. Given that AI can write code the threshold for "trivially replicable" is going down.
Unless your thing has strong network effects or a large capex requirement (ex: GPU infra) its easily replicated and I think that's really what makes things hard.
Ok but pick any category of human endeavor and 80% of it is garbage in the beginning. There were 3000 car companies in the 1920s, and most of them sucked, and so they died. The market over time will sort out who survives and who does not.
It will take a few years for investors to figure this out, but in the meantime, everyone is spreading their bets around like peanut butter in order to be in the game.
> However, many of the AI products do solve problems and serve needs.
Every solution to a problem comes with its own costs. It is entirely possible that most solutions that are rooted in modern computing technology have actual or perceived costs that exceed the value of "solving the problem".
The problems that most people have that they really want to solve are not addressable by AI, or computers, or software.
This seems to me like the few booms I’ve seen before. Absolutely crazy valuations with very little behind them, massive hype, everyone’s unemployed uncle suddenly becoming a shallow expert. It’s probably going to end the same way too, once the upward momentum dissipates and things start to retreat to “fundamentals”, we’ll find out that there were a lot fewer solid points in the market than we were all told to expect, so the fundamentals are actually pretty far down. After 5 to 10 years of regrouping, a more mature and solid version will come about and become such a normal part of life we barely even remember what it was like without it.
We are well on our way to the popping of inflated expectations.
Currently people are taking AI hype too seriously and extrapolating its success out in such a way as to discount the value of other businesses.
Example - last week a bunch of trucking stocks crashed 10-20% because a $6M company that pivoted from Karaoke to AI demoed something.
This is just insane. Sure, if say Waymo is pivoting into commercial trucking.. maybe. But people are basically shorting minutemaid lemonade because their neighbors kids opened up a lemonade stand. Demos are easy, products are hard.
In addition to that, what they don’t mention is that:
1. Other app stores like Google Play and Steam haven’t seen this rapid rise.
2. There are thousands maybe tens of thousands of apps that are just wrappers calling OpenAI APIs or similar low effort AI apps making up a large percentage of this increase.
3. There are billions of dollars pouring into AI startups and many of them launch an iOS app.
Has steam not seen a rapid rise in AI-asset shovelware?
I'm not talking about the AAA or the AA or even the A space (where AI is being incorporated into dev processes with various degrees of both success and low effort slop), I'm talking about the actual bottom of the barrel.
You never needed AI to make shovelware, you have been able to make a shitty game over a weekend ever since RPG maker was made and there are still games made using that.
AI just helps create some assets for games, it doesn't really make it easier or faster to make games but they might look a bit better.
I can’t speak to the quality of all the games released, but in January 2025 there were 1,413 games released on Steam and in January of this year there were 1,448.
> It's like that FT chart claiming that the rapid rise in iOS apps is evidence of an AI-fueled productivity boom.
I mean, there is evidence for some change. Personally, I'm sceptical of what this will amount to, but prior to EOY 2025, there really wasn't any evidence for an app/service boom, and now there's weak evidence, which is better than none.
Because so much technical functionality has been lost/paywalled/dark patterned/enshitified, I've cut the number of apps I use. I've realized building core personal functionality around the whims of corporations eventually just gets weaponized against me, so I might as well start undoing that on my own terms. Who in 2026 is really bringing in a new app/Saas to do much of anything like we naively did a decade ago? No one I know, we've been shown we will be treated as suckers for doing that.
> …it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
Added emphasis to the most crucial part, in my opinion.
If you can manage to deliver a product that's meaningfully better than the competition, you still have an edge, so long as you're competent at marketing.
Nothing gets people searching for alternatives as consistently as frustration, and a product that was lazily built with AI (vibe coded or otherwise) is going to be full of bugs and papercuts that make using it a poor experience.
This is particularly true for software that sits in the hot path of peoples' workflows, where thoughtless design, misbehavior, and poor optimization chip away at time the user can't afford to spare.
In short: yes, competition will be plentiful but it will also be almost entirely awful, and capable SWEs can capitalize on that. It won't take much to stand out amongst the mountains of garbage that will be generated in the coming years.
> The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
This is a very naive take. Any good idea you have can now be cloned trivial in no time at all.
The clones just need to out spend you on marketing even though it is your idea that the LLM cloned.
Which is my point: it seems easy to clone something that seems conceptually simple, but is the result of all kinds of UI, UX, performance, etc optimizations. The reason someone might choose Obsidian over these so called clones is not just marketing, I assure you. The reason people attempt Obsidian clones is that they think creating todo-list management tools, etc is all it takes to implement a PKM, and that that is easy. It is not.
Right now there are kinds of tools I wished existed, that I would pay for, but AI does not automatically provide the insight, good taste, technical excellence, and grit needed to create these products. I could do them, with AI assisting, but do not have the time. It is not a simple matter of saying: Claude, create or clone X, Y, Z.
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.
> Just on HN alone, throughout 2023 - 2025 we were seing like one new TODO app show up on HN weekly!
This response shows you missed my point entirely. I am saying a todo app does not a PKM make! I'm not interested in a vibe-coded todo app, it is useless to me.
> Because money is the moat, and they have it!
You're sidestepping issue and contradicting yourself. I asked: if cloning is so easy, why has no one cloned the JetBrains IDEs, for example?
Remember, I'm not talking about what happens after the cloning. Are you saying no one has cloned Jetbrains because it takes a lot of money to do so? That would contradict your claim that AI makes it easy.
What's the point you are trying to make here? That it is not possible to trivially clone good ideas?
Let's start with my actual claim - "It is now trivially possible for someone to clone your good idea".
I want to clarify your position: Do you think that the bar for cloning someone else's good idea is now:
1. Harder to do with AI,
2. Easier to do with AI,
3. Exactly the same level of difficulty it always was.
Because if you are arguing that #2 is an incorrect answer, there's no real point in continuing the argument, is there? I'm taking #2 as a given, and you appear to be arguing that it is a baseless assumption.
My point is that "easier" is not the same as "trivial".
Yes, for a skilled and determined hacker, judicious use of AI can enable them do more. That is a far cry from "AI makes cloning complex flagship apps trivial".
Furthermore, the value of software is not primarily in the arrangement of bits. It is about the technical, domain, and contextual knowledge you gain as you develop the software, the understanding you gain about your customers, etc. AI cannot give you that on a whim.
> That is a far cry from "AI makes cloning complex flagship apps trivial".
That is not what I claimed, though.
I said "Cloning your good idea", and context in this thread and this story is not, nor was it ever, about producing Windows 11 or a similarly large and non-trivial product.
It was, IIRC, about small teams (the actual story is about a solo founder) executing a good idea, and then seeing someone with a $20 CC account cloning that product in a week.
The discussion here is going sideways, and I blame the underwhelming blog post.
Having money is NOT an economic moat-- i.e., a durable, structural competitive advantage.
He overlooks broader, true definition of moat attributes like labor supply, infrastructure, PP&E, brand, network, natural monopolies, switching costs, regulation. These don't go away with commoditized CRUD apps.
And quoting someone with decades of experience implying that things are hard now and innovation didn't turn over industries in the last 25+ years is a joke.
The more I think about it the more brainrot the article really is. As if all problems are solved and pumping out soulless shovelware companies is worth anything. It really is "just one more app" all over again.
Knowledge ? For b2c it might be more difficult, but in b2b, understanding your customer and their specifics issue and developing something made for them is one of the big challenge. Being able to spit out code for free is useless if you don't know what and who you are making the code for.
You work on niches that have very specific requirements that you can only derive from having a good relationship with customers and so you attend to those needs faster than competitors who are out of the loop.
> The moat isn't money for out-marketing your idea that 750 other people are building, it's having a good idea that solves a problem that nobody else is solving well.
An idea is not a moat. Execution is only a moat if being nimble is part of the ongoing offering.
Historically, during booms like this (for example the industrial revolution), it was, because we had patent protections in order to encourage ideas to be brought to market. I don't see how you can have an AI revolution that doesn't just funnel everything to the top without something similar.
Why invent the cotton gin, find investors, and bring it to market if the steel company with the infinite worker machine can instantly compete with you?
Well, if someone could create a drop-in replacement for Oracle-DB, Adobe Creative or AutoCad in a month of vibe-coding, I think they could prosper without having their own good idea. I would like to see something like this.
But if you're just talking the fairly simple apps that a single very talented programmer could pump out before this, sure, yeah.
Not really. It's money/resources. I had some really useful apps I built for myself. I looked at releasing them, but there were companies whose business model was waiting for people like me to release apps that solve a problem, and then just instantly jump on creating a solution and outcompeting the independent app.
It's trivial for competitors with bigger pockets to outcompete you on your idea, and there are companies whose business model is just that. And with AI customers are trying to do it themselves as well. The only startup I wouldn't be nervous about as a small team without large financial backing would be ones where we start out partnered to multiple companies in the targeted industry so that we can leverage that connection.
Historically this is why we have copyright/patent laws. To make it make sense for people to try to bring their ideas to the world. But with everything changing we are back to everyone just sitting on their concepts/solutions unless they have big money behind them.
No, the moat is having a seemingly good "scalable" idea that solves a problem a few people have and most people think they have. Then getting bought out.
Eh, there's some truth it both. The truth is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Distribution absolutely matters, often times even more than the product. And vice versa
So the jump from the former to the latter is... significant.
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