beachy

We're building an esp-32 based hardware golf product.

Esp32 emulation in the browser is an incredible superpower for hardware manufacturers.

You can put your hardware product, with a pixel perfect display and sound, directly into users (virtual) hands so they can try before they buy.

There's no real cost to you, since their web browser and computer provide all the horse power, you just serve it up as a static web page.

In the age of AI, a moat for hardware companies can be network effects through providing an AI friendly base that your users/players can build on.

For us that takes the form of an open source app store where players can extend their device using AI ("Hey Claude, make me a game like this one, except that a giant bowling ball with our company logo embossed on it should drop and roll down an Indiana Jones styled marble run").

It's hard to overstate how powerful it is to have users trying your device, navigating the menus, extending it's functionality themselves with AI, all on their own computer, creating games for others, all without even buying your device.

With a minimum quantity of 50.

The really sad thing is that the natural instinct for many will be to screenshot the page and upload it with "please create me a home assistant dashboard in this style".

Sounds sensible. In my country (and probably many others), if you and your neighbour own identical houses or apartments and have identical mortgages, and instead of living in your own one you rent the neighbours one and live in that and vice versa, then you can both offset your mortgage interest against the rental income and both be better off than if you lived in your own house.

I have the same memories from many years of working with stored procedures - although you should certainly have been using source control.

But nothing quite matches the satisfaction of someone in a far off engineering group reporting a problem that prevented them from committing data that would have corrupted the database - because your referential integrity constraints protected the database.

In the age of AI and a massive explosion of code touching the database, maybe it makes even more sense to embed logic and constraints inside the database where there's no way to get around them.

You are probably right, but I feel like a gigantic dashboard like that could well use 700W in just its own lighting.

Tesla never turned out to be Apple in this comparison though.

Reminiscent of tank warfare in WW2. The soviet T-34 was not remarkable in any particular way, but the sheer volumes it was produced in made it a very serious enemy to German tanks. As Stalin said "quantity has a quality all of its own".

I'm old enough to remember the arrival of RDBMS, once IBM primed the space with DB2.

There was a pitched battle over features like row-level locking as competitors like Sybase, Ingress and Oracle scrapped it out. New features arrived on a monthly cadence, with immense engineering effort behind them. The winners (Oracle mostly) won a great moat which led to them to where they are today.

The fact that so many AI companies can produce amazing coding tools so quickly shows there is no moat, supporting your theory.

I feel that abandoning your car at an intersection and fleeing the scene in front of armed officers as a presidential drive by was about to arrive - in Dallas of all places - could have had far worse consequences.

Wonderful name. You may know this, but Kai means food in Maori. Many words and many, many place names also embed it, e.g Moana == sea, so Kaimoana is seafood.

In the classic "the mythical man month", Brooks describes 5000 man years effort in delivering OS/360.

I think by any measure that OS/360 would be "high craft".

Not denying that, but if its a full time job for that person to monitor the keycloak machines for a typical SaaS vendor then something's wrong at mill cobber (may have used that wrongly as not English)