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Music lessons. There were multiple factors they shared, customer acquisition wasn't the only thing not working but that they brought it up at all is why it stood out. Indeed it is the kind of thing where referrals you would have thought would help, but also macro factors against. Competing against apps whether these guys are digital or not, anyone can start up a rival business at home esp if they have instruments already, and so forth.

I don't know the business well but to me as a buyer it's a bit like a hairstylist. Once you find a good one, or for me at least, I am reluctant to switch.

Decades ago a relative showed me his Amiga. Before putting in the disk (these were on 3.5 inch floppies iirc) with the game I wanted to play on it, he put in another disk.

I asked him with the first disk was, and I remember distinctly he said it was an operating system. I asked him what an operating system was, and he said it was like a program, it was a program technically, that makes it easier to run other programs, just it was a program that didn't do much on its own and you wouldn't use it without another program right afterward. I said it didn't seem easier if you had to load a different disk than the one you wanted to use, and you still had to load the one you wanted afterward. He looked at me disdainfully and patiently explained that all or almost all the software in the future would use operating systems and they whole process would get easier or even invisible but there would always be an operating system in there somewhere at some point in the very near future. I was skeptical, but I nodded along.

I imagined an operating system as a dressed up software library, which was more intuitive to me as a concept.

The flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.

A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.

I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.

I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.

It's a cognitive tax on all the parties involved. It works on buyers (websites that pay for it) much the way that llm's work on their users, by working up to the point at which the buyers can't discern it working.

As a user (bot or flesh) you have to jump through these hoops, and to the website operators they get fewer complaints when users (and bots) are able to contort themselves in predictable ways. Versus you'd perceive as a website operator, if your blocking worked at all, that you'd risk seeing a precipitous dropoff of bots if you did things in bespoke ways, as both bots (true positives, among dd and cf survivors) and people (false positives) get jammed.

The net effect in this model would be that such things as cloudflare and datadome take money from websites in order to block "dumb" bots and enfranchise "smart" bots to the point of creating a market for bot services. People that want to bot have to use AI or go to bot service providers.

For website operators that's a worthwhile exchange for dollars, in that dumb bots can cause a lot of harm in wasted compute. Bots are typically dead end users who won't buy ever anyway, or merely inefficient way of doing business if they scrape excessively. And many do scrape excessively.

"reform school for bots" is a good mental model. For this to work, the "reforms" have to be consistent so that bots can conform to them.

It's a peculiar equilibrium and I am not sure that it's all that stable as an equilibrium. Would be a good subject for a formal treatment, game theory and economics.

Broker or dealer. Per the interwebs, a broker acts on behalf of another party, vs a dealer trades for themselves.

As distinguished from an exchange, where the exchange intermediates and becomes a middle party "simultaneously" to both sides.

The market dynamics are pretty different between broker dealers and exchanges. For instance a /ticker/ as a concept makes sense only with an exchange.

The exchanges basically pick up only the contracts or goods with the most volume and standardized & predictable goods.

To trade more exotic or niche things basically you have to find your own counterparty, versus the exchange acts as an "typical" buyer and seller to each side (assuming there is anyone there at all to participate on each side... giving rise to the concept of market makers who undertake to do just that, i.e., to be ready to trade either side at any time in a certain good).

Not a lawyer but as a citizen I generally understand that the courts expect demands from court parties to be met.

If meeting the court's (or court parties') demands costs you something you are generally entitled to charge them for it, within reason and with justification.

As a hobbyist therefore putting a service offering page together with your preferred rate probably helps establish the nature and parameters of any such service.

Bill rates / piece rates, especially, and setting up bounds of what is reasonable to expect, in proportion to your gig and your intended effort level.

Quantity and price tiers, turnaround times, what will be included in the deliverable, how it will be delivered, SLAs, etc.

Whatever defines your service, esp as it relates to the types of requests you end up getting.

For a long time fixed income trading took place over AOL Instant Messenger and later Yahoo chat rooms.

I am not making this up.

There were custom frontends that would enrich things like cusips.

There are lots of small insurers at least.

Multiple resources on the internet put the startup costs at $500K or less. That's not much more than fast food or other high touch retail startups by comparison.

There are certainly a few steps on the learning curve but it's mostly high school and undergraduate math that is needed. That puts it out of reach for some but the field is pretty flat once you get there, is my perspective having considered and opted against getting into it.

In other words, there's no moat in insurance.

You need a capital base in proportion to the policies you sell in order to pay them out without going bust, to a certain confidence level. The time sequence of premium payments vs when the risk is expected to come due for a payout is factored in.

The 50 states regulate insurance in the US and issue rules about how to do this, some of which affect competition and pricing in heavy handed ways, sometimes it's overtly political.

In general though insurance is an extremely competitive field. Margins for the most part are similar or lower than other industries.

Not sure where the popular impression that it is not competitive comes from. If anything I think the sword cuts both ways, the friction in the process is probably more a symptom of competitiveness more than its absence.

that's nearly a requirement for anti-bot things. turnstile etc.

LLMs, including open ones, are really good at this it turns out. It stands to reason, there is tons of training material out there no doubt they have consumed and are ready to regurgitate.

Yesterday I one-shotted several interactive pages, that Qwen built out of straight HTML and Javascript. I handed it my API (source code, not even a swagger, via an MCP that Qwen wrote for me), asked for a frontend, and it delivered. One page at a time to keep context down, and mightve gotten lucky on the first draw but after the first one I told it to make the next ones like the first.

Can't say I've had that experience with backend languages & frameworks, incl writing that same API, but perhaps I'm off the beaten path with those, or perhaps there's greater breadth of things to do vs a narrower set of acceptance criteria? IDK.

Here I was sweating that I'd have to research and learn a current-day frontend framework. It felt like a magic wand using consumer-grade AI. HTML and plain old Javascript was plenty.

Tangent but apropos of other contemporary threads on HN, it puts a spin on supply chain threats. There's no NPM or anything, except perhaps whatever mysteries are baked into the model.

It happens in the private sector too. I was involved in procurement at a megacorp for several years.

At one point one of my colleagues asked for assistance in getting an order of 500 iphones approved. As "spares".

Fortunately the corp had a policy that phone purchases needed to have a named individual declared.

I declined politely to assist.

It was common to see certain mid level execs churning through 2x - 5x the equipment of IC's (who would never get out-of-lifecycle approvals anyeay) and some quid pro quo stuff. As a fraction of their total comp it was modest ultimately, and for this reason my boss advised me to keep my mouth shut.

CNC milling is typically included in the bans being considered in various states.

While poetically consistent, it enlarges the crater around these bad laws if they are passed and enforced. Basically all new manufacturing setups will need to stop and reprogram to stop and start according to fluctuating rules designed by committee, and will need to be made brittle to prevent circumvention.

It is a debacle.

I don't think I've met an llm that is adversary resistant, and here are counterparties that are actively playing the field, to put it mildly.

The bug bounty service providers did an adequate job of filtering out junk reports. There was a survivorship bias, some of the bogus ones that got through had an uncanny ability to twist words.