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Good luck! Fintechs targeting SMBs is a go-to-market strategy template that makes sense until you go to market and realize that if you have a better product, there's a better, bigger market and that market is the mid-market...

The thing with startups, like with SMBs is that most times are fragile, not-financially sound institutions. At least for startups, those that don't die, usually grow and need the larger scale features anyways.

Interesting.

Are you generating revenue or, otherwise, what productivity are you measuring?

Without generating revenue (which to be clear is a very good proxy to measure impact) everyone can be indeed very prolific in their hobbies. But labor market is about making money for a living and unless you can directly impact your day-to-day needs from your work, it can't be called productive.

Hahaha. Always cool to find users of the tools/products you build, including the obscure ones, and on HN no less :))

It looks like there's a a bit of reversal in some areas (e.g. ML) and it may make sense to have more geographically distributed (edge) compute so maybe we'll get more diversity in the currently cloud-dominated space.

This said, it was always cool when we could control the entire stack, but the reality was that once we scaled things up, we had to throw things over the fence to IT, DevOps, SRE and whatever name evolutions there were and the reality is AWS/GCE/Azure made things easier than dealing with these teams internally.

This was around when we were trying to get Flash to work on the first iPhone, so we had a hackathon for a week. Since I was a distributed systems "hacker", I ended up doing what was needed :) and there were lots of questions related to the sizing of flash on web pages and what not. That's what started it - I simple python script that I refined during the hackathon to get the embed parameters etc.

But once I started processing the data, it became a thing and we made a small cross-team team to get this going. We eventually expanded the effort in a few different directions and wanted to do a Flash analytics, but ended up with the internal tool only due to privacy concerns.

I built a flash crawler to index all Flash while at Adobe. It started with Alexa top 1M I think then crawled. This was 2008-2010 I think so we had to do a lot of custom stuff, but we basically crawled then ran a headless Firefox with a custom headless Flash player that dumped a ton of data so also analyzed every flash at runtime and indexed all of that.

We built a dedicated cluster in a colocation center in Bucharest to handle all of this. Had issues with max floor weights and what not. Then had to upgrade the RAM on on the cluster. No remote hands. Every operation was a trip to a really cold place.

Used a lot of early stage stuff like Nutch, Hadoop, HBase etc. Everything was then processed and dumped to an SQL database with a nice UI on top. It took a few weeks to set it up, then we passed it to a team of interns that built the SQL database and UI on top. They learned a ton of stuff. Some are now in the Bay Area.

The tool uncovered a ton of security issues.

It was fun building it. I wonder if Adobe kept the data. It could be useful and/or good donation for the Computer History Museum.

This has been a thought theme throughout my career and have a good set of scenarios I never ended up publishing.

It's not just the most "elaborate system". The same thing happens in so many other ways. For example a good/simple solution is one and done. Whereas a complex one will be an interminable cause of indirect issued down the road. With the second engineer being the one fixing them.

Then there's another pattern of the 10x (not the case with all 10x-ers) seeding or asked to "fix" other projects, then moving on to the next, leaving all the debt to the team.

It's really an amazing dynamic that can be studied from a game theoretical perspective. It's perhaps one of the adjacent behaviors that support the Gervais principle.

It's also likely going to be over soon, now that AI is normalizing a lot of this work.

maybe you're overthinking it a little. You could make it of a default setup like the one you use for the sandbox, or some curated fast-loading one

This https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/openai-in-talks-with-pentagon...

Its called “agreeing in principle” - useful for negotiations :)

and everythign ended in "this is the way!"

Gotta love PR embracing the many definitions of "made in"

likely not. Being able to read and understand is a matter of skill though. There are many technical terms there that may make it unreadable for non-technical audience. But you can solve that by having an AI explain it to you.

"there is no moat" usually mean "we have no moat" or "we want you to believe we have no moat". There are always moats, like being directly in front of eyes and thumbs (Apple) or having extensive data (Google) along hardware production capabilities, datacenters, and tons of money.

Code is cheaper. Simple code is cheap. More complex code may not be cheaper.

The reason you pay attention to details is because complexity compounds and the cheapest cleanup is when you write something, not when it breaks.

This last part is still not fully fleshed out.

For now. Is there any reason to not expect things to improve further?

Regardless, a lot of code is cheap now and building products is fun regardless, but I doubt this will translate into more than very short-term benefits. When you lower the bar you get 10x more stuff, 10x more noise, etc. You lower it more you get 100x and so on.

That is a strange (dumb) framing. It does read business as usual when people either get overloaded or get the opportunity to be lazy with things they don’t want to do in the first place but have to in order to earn a wage.

AI is eating the software https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/

I guess they moved fast

Isn’t it delusional to argue about now, while ignoring the trajectory?

I'll guess we'll se a lot of analogies and have to get used to it, although most will be off.

AI can be an exoskeleton. It can be a co-worker and it can also replace you and your whole team.

The "Office Space"-question is what are you particularly within an organization and concretely when you'll become the bottleneck, preventing your "exoskeleton" for efficiently doing its job independently.

There's no other question that's relevant for any practical purposes for your employer and your well being as a person that presumably needs to earn a living based on their utility.

part of the network effects is building the graph. If you reuse the social graph that's already in your FB account you're merely replacing the messaging layer. This lays over on the presumed assumption that there's a problem to begin with

the other problem with the network effects is a business problem. There's is no business problem here though. If you maximize compatibility without caring to own anything several problems disappear.

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 not be enough as a moat. Scarce resources may require more than money— e.g. IP classes or, if you're China, ASML machines.

I think META like many other "service providers" don't yet realize, that it's becoming trivial to roll your own and all we need is a protocol. And arguably there are many. You can then use your existing social graph (anyone remembers this term? lol) to chat. Your mom and granddad won't roll their own, but publishing an open service that uses FB openID and API while delegating to the open protocol is really not that hard. Browser local storage may not be ideal, but it's a good placeholder until something better can be implemented.

Thanks, both! Glad to get the explicit names for the things I'm "gesticulating" at. I haven't done any explicit reading on the topic, except for adjacent stuff like Analogia (Dyson), The coming wave (Suleyman) and saw talk by Terry Winograd that I thought was on point https://www.youtube.com/live/LcvYYXdXF8E. I have and do want to read Superintelligence and will check out both Stiegler and Simondon.

arguably the history of humanity was about automating humanity.

- teeth and nails with knives (in various shapes from bones to steel)

- feet with carriages and bicycles and cars

- hands with mills and factories on steam engines to industrial robots

Literaly every automation was meant to help humans somehow so, this naturally entailed an automation of some human function.

This automation is an automation of the human brain.

While the "definition" of what's human doesn't end here (feelings, etc.) , the utility does.

With loss of utility comes loss of benefits.

Mainly your ability to differentiate as a function of effort (physical or intellectual) gets diminished to 0. This poses some concerns wrt to ability to achieve goals and apsirations - like buying that house at some point or ensuring your childrens future, potentially vanish for large swaths of the population — the "unfortunates" - which are these it's hard to tell, but arguably the level of current resources (assets) becomes a better indicator of the future for generations to come, with work becoming less to none.

By freezing utility based on own effort you arguably freeze the structure of society in time. So yes, every instance sucked for the displaced party, but this one seems to be particularly broader (i.e. wider splash damage)

Plus “different” website (website has a screen recordings taken by phone) plus a link to the “technical white paper” and a demo - only the publicly sale date of the token is missing

Me too! 5th grade. First RTS. Nothing ever got to the same “magic”

AI isn't killing B2B SaaS. It's killing the service economy. Perhaps, the correct term, technically, is just shrinking it to very very small fraction.

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