How can I do it without capital, straight out of college, with only around 2 years of real-world experience and no network? Honest question.
The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.
From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.
Find a good local problem that you have connections with people who'd buy it.
Doesn't need to be a software, many small businesses start as sole proprietor working for himself and slowly growing the company by hiring help.
No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.
Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.
Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.
There are many local problems that require local knowledge and serving local customers.
I have a friend with a business for California vehicle compliance reports. Some stupid paperwork that needs to be updated yearly when the rules change. It's super local and he has 10 employees supporting clients remote and on site. It grew very slowly but it's in 11th year now and revenue is not bad at all. Nothing to compete globally, knowledge is local, clients need local services.
What all indie hackers are doing is getting support and resources from an equivalent of venture capital investment. Which is Cathedral approved education that effectively reduces to attaching an epistemology onto yourself that limits you and prevents you from functioning outside the cramped divisions of civilization-approved entrepreneurship.
The education offered by civilization includes logic that's crafted by a pedagogy that's biased toward vulgarity and social skills that don't perform well when it comes to building anything that would help a man get away from a forced commitment to anything more than maximizing viewer impressions on provocative Internet-uploaded content. The average tech entrepreneur isn't any better than a McDonald's hamburger grill operator or a female OnlyFans model or a delivery app driver, once you remove your civilly trained bias toward low resolution videos on socioeconomic dynamics.
To use a great illustration, even a billionaire techno-commercialist like Elon Musk can never hope to achieve independent wealth acquisition. Because his education, personal origin, and development are not really deviant and an instance of someone that can perform beyond the abstract black box that is knowledge given by civilization's life experiences which the life offers to every man. He will always come up short, whenever it's a question of exiting from the liberal-democratic regime and its permanent ironic anti-libertarianism stance. The question is: How to build a business that's not required to conform with all expectations, social and physical/ontological? Leading up to aerospace technology and acquiring science for Earth-to-Mars orbit transfers ain't it. Even having a business starting capital of one hundred dollars in the style of the $100 Startup comes with a history whose financial system component is tied to having a certain social obligation. A certain physical requirement commonly called life.
> When I hear that most code is trivial, I think of this as a language design or a framework related issue making things harder than they should be.
This was one of my thoughts too. If the pain of using bad frameworks and clunky languages can be mitigated by AI, it seems like the popular but ugly/verbose languages will win out since there's almost no point to better designed languages/framework. I would rather a good language/framework/etc where it is just as easy to just write the code directly. Similar time in implementation to a LLM prompt, but more deterministic.
If people don't feel the pain of AI slop why move to greener pastures? It almost encourages things to not improve at the code level.
I'm writing software independently, with an extremely barebones framework (just handles routing pretty much) and very lean architecture. Maybe I should re-phrase it, "a lot of characters in the code base are trivial". Imports, function declarations, variable declarations. Is this stuff code/logic? Barely, but it's completely unavoidable. It all takes time and it's now time I rarely have to spend.
Just as an example, I have "service" functions. They're incredibly simple, a higher order function where I can inject the DB handler, user permissions, config, etc. Every time I write one of these I have to import the ServiceDependencies type and declare which dependencies I need to write the service. I now spend close to zero time doing that and all my time focusing on the service logic. I don't see a downside to this.
Most of my business logic is done in raw SQL, which can be complex, but the autocomplete often helps there too. It's not helping me figure out the logic, it's simply cutting down on my typing. I don't know how anyone could be offered "do you want to have type significantly less characters on your keyboard to get the same thing done?" and say "no thanks". The AI is almost NEVER coding for me, it's just typing for me and it's awesome.
I don't care how lean your system is, there will at least be repetition in how you declare things. There will be imports, there will be dependencies. You can remove 90% of this repetitive work for almost no cost...
I've tried to use ChatGPT to "code for me", and I agree with you that it's not a good option if you're trying to do anything remotely complex and want to avoid bugs. I never do this. But integrated code suggestions (with Supermaven, NOT CoPilot) are incredibly beneficial and maybe you should just try it instead of trying to come up with theoretical arguments. I was also a non-believer once.
I got screwed over by this for SongKong from JThink. They sold lifetime prices at higher costs. Then it came out that they guy didn't want to honor it anymore and switched to a yearly license. In the yearly he claims "oh i'll give the lifetimers 1 year free and perpetual for the license year you bought when you renew".
Turns out after he doesn't even honor that. I bought a year, and then he won't archive the older versions. Have a broken copy because his api key internally broke? Didn't download all versions during that year.. yea you're shit out of luck.
So I'm getting these emails from the KamalaHarris campaign. They're signed by the domain as well. I've never given money to the organiation, I'm not connected with their party, I've never signed up for the campaign, or interacted with them. However, I'm constantly being put on their mailing list soliciting for donations.
I've seen how the campaigns pass around email addresses without consent. (Mostly from ActBlue) So I'm concerned about validating an email address via unsubscribe.
I've reported this to abuse at sendgrid, and now sparkpostmail. They're shopping for email services.
Unfortunately political parties have more of a free pass on this as Republicans sued providers for their emails getting caught up in spam filters around 2022 (Who would've thought continuosly emailing people who click unsubscribe on your emails who then start reporting as spam would get you put on spam lists). Now political parties (and some bulk providers) have special tools to bypass rejection with some providers as a compromise.
This is incorrect to my knowledge. The free pass to spam political email was an explicit carve out in the can spam act, which lets them not comply with the same regulations everyone else has to. What you’re talking about is something much more recent, about what Google does on the receiving side of email with their spam filters. That was about Google’s compliance with an order from the federal election commission because their spam filters had biases that act like campaign financing. Google’s solution had bipartisan support among the commissioners as I recall.
I don't think anything I said is in conflict with what you've said, I'm pointing out one of the reasons the poster might still be getting spam from a mail he's reported as spam. The can spam act was more about senders requirements than email platform providers requirements for recieving (i.e. spam filtering). Yes the republicans were more affected by the spam filters but both researchers and internal communication indicated it wasn't because of any deliberate bias (just that republican emails were more likely to be like spam as far as an algorithmic interpratation goes (pure uncharitable conjecture: perhaps because one party was more likely to include a unsubscribe button even if it wasn't required by the can spam act and thus weren't reported as spam as much). Because of this they sued and google reportedly made more tools available or atleast publicised existing tools to both republicans and democrats to exclude their email campaigns from getting caught in the spam filters (tools that have also been made available to some of the larger more legitimate bulk email providers).
I'm actually amazed at this because it seems to be the first time he Democrats are actually taking advantage of all the loopholes the Republicans made, rather than trying to take the high road.
It's not the first time, you're just patronizing the news outlets that tell you when the Republicans do something untoward but not when the Democrats do instead of the ones that do the opposite.
Also, as a general rule politicians will carve themselves an exemption to any rules they put on everyone else. For example, CAN SPAM applies to commercial email.
No, from Super PACS (they were the Citizens United in _Citizens United_) to gerrymandering the Republicans do it first and worst. It's not even close. It's nice to think "both sides" but it's misinformed.
You may have misread "first and worst". Democrats eventually follow suit, but the cherry picked example of CA doesn't account for the partisan overrepresention of Republicans in gerrymandrered congressional districts. It's not even close on a national level.
For Super PACs: again this is from Citizens United which was pushed by Republicans and confirmed by an activist Republican Supreme Court. They own that 100 percent now and forevermore.
Sorry, again I know people want to be "ackshually bothsides" but it doesn't apply here.
This is a thread about “the first time Democrats used a loophole”. That’s clearly wrong and for some reason you’re comparing them to republicans as if ratios change absolutes.
California by itself accounts for more than 10% of the electorate and it's not a cherry picked example, it's what generally happens when a state is under one-party control. I provided links for California and New York because they're the two largest blue states by population.
> overrepresention of Republicans
That is what tends to happen in ungerrymandered districts because of the population distribution. Urban areas lean heavily for Democrats whereas suburban areas have a small Republican advantage, so if you draw ordinary natural district boundaries you end up with a smaller number of safe Democratic urban districts and a larger number of tight suburban districts that lean slightly red. To get something else you have to draw meandering lines that try to rope slices of the urban population into the same districts as the suburbs.
And yet, in the last decade no party has had more seats in Congress without getting more of the vote.
> this is from Citizens United
That was just the case that made it to the court, and it was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Or worse, tolerate corporate mass media and prohibit anything else, which was effectively the status quo before and the reason you see so much criticism of Citizens United from the legacy media.
Previously if you wanted to convince people of something you had to buy product advertising from a legacy media company to get enough financial leverage to pressure them to emit favorable media coverage, or buy them outright like with Comcast and MSNBC. Now that anyone can buy political advertising directly they have less need to indirectly bribe those media companies anymore and the media companies hate it. Meanwhile the actual effect is that you can now buy a political ad without having enough money to buy the network itself.
> [Citizens United] was pretty clearly correctly decided. The alternative is the government can prohibit you from distributing political speech because it costs money to do it, which would imply that they could ban all private mass media under the argument that there are some people who can't afford a printing press or a radio tower.
Presenting this controversial view that many knowledgeable and intelligent people would disagree with as "pretty clearly correct" and stating an alternative as if it is the only alternative, that is not what many people think the alternative would be, is only going to raise hackles. It's not going to spur any new thought or interesting dicussion.
Unfortunately, many knowledgeable and intelligent people have failed to look into CU from any angle other than the one it is usually presented from: that is is about corporate spending on elections.
Which it is, but as the GP described, it's about a lot more than that.
I happen to think it was incorrectly decided - SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending. It would have left the door open to not-for-profit corporations still being free to spend money on e.g. publishing a book about a candidate within some date of an election, which is precisely what we want not-for-profit civic organizations (which are, you may recall, also corporations).
However, it really is "pretty clearly correct" that had SCOTUS simply ruled that "no corporation can <X>" (for various values of X), we would be an extremely different and probably much worse situation than we were before CU. Whether it would be worse than the one we're in post-CU is hard to say.
> SCOTUS should have differentiated between different categories of corporation (using existing tax code distinctions), and prevented (at least) regular for-profit corporations (of any tax status) from political spending.
It's not obvious how that would have made any difference when a for-profit corporation could just give the money it wants to spend to an aligned non-profit to spend it in the same way. Unless you mean to prevent them from donating money to the non-profit, but then where is a non-profit supposed to derive funding? "All political speech can be funded only by government grants" has a pretty clear conflict of interest, and you would then somehow have to deal with for-profit entities that inherently engage in political speech like newspapers and cable news networks. Why should Comcast/MSNBC or Fox be able to dedicate unlimited airtime to political advocacy but not Intel or Ford?
"Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade. Michigan, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania alone — the three states with the worst gerrymanders in the last redistricting cycle — accounted for 7 to 10 extra Republican seats in the House."
Re: Citizens... I don't even know where to start. Read about the McCain-Feingold Act. It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering. (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).
Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad - in fact, they have to offer them a slightly _below commercial market rate_! Weirdly, though, they are responsible for the _factual content_ of any ad they run. Election law is really interesting.
> "Nationally, extreme partisan bias in congressional maps gave Republicans a net 16 to 17 seat advantage for most of last decade."
The Brennan Center is a left-wing think tank. They're basically describing the thing I already mentioned in partisan terms:
> "Cracking and packing can often result in regularly shaped districts that look appealing to the eye but nonetheless skew heavily in favor of one party."
> "Because of residential segregation, it is much easier for map drawers to pack or crack communities of color to achieve maximum political advantage."
In other words, if the geography is such that there are areas where one party is highly dominant (i.e. urban areas) and other areas where the other party is slightly dominant (suburbs) then if you draw districts in a natural way the second party gets proportionally more seats because they win a larger number of districts by a smaller margin. They're essentially complaining that those states didn't gerrymander the districts to favor the Democrats to offset the natural advantage of Republicans in the existing geographic population distribution.
But Congress isn't intended to use proportional representation and gerrymandering to force the number of party seats to match the popular vote is just disenfranchising people in a different way by ignoring the effect that has on the behavior of individual representatives. For example, what they're proposing would be a de facto ban on majority-black districts because one district which is 60% black and votes 65% for Democrats and another that votes 55% for Republicans would result in fewer seats for Democrats than two districts that are 30% black and both vote 55% for Democrats. And both of the Democrats in the latter districts would have to move to the right because they'd otherwise both be at risk of a Republican picking off enough moderates to flip the district.
> It was in place for a decade when Citizens was decided and the only thing it prevented was billionaires and corporations spending unlimited amounts of money on electioneering.
It required them to spend the money in different ways, which mostly lock out smaller companies, meanwhile conglomerates buying news networks has been a thing the whole time.
> (Media companies love it: they get more spending on ads).
Political ads are ~1% of all ad spending and much of even that money goes to the likes of Google and Facebook. Meanwhile it means non-media companies that want to air a political message can do it directly instead of having to do so indirectly by allocating more of the other 99% of ad spending to traditional media companies to curry favor and provide leverage to get favorable coverage.
It also dilutes the power of media companies, because the media company is not going to air coverage contrary to their own political interests no matter how much you run non-political ads with them, whereas someone who has a contrary interest can now run ads on social media.
> Before and after McCain-Feingold media companies by law aren't allowed to refuse any political ad
But it prohibited most entities that wanted to run those ads from doing it.
Suppose Comcast and AT&T don't like network neutrality and Amazon does. So Comcast buys MSNBC and AT&T buys CNN, gears them even more to viewers in the party that had been advocating it, but suppresses advocacy of the issue they're on the other side of to shut off support. Should Amazon now buy their own network? Is that better than letting them run Facebook ads? What if the EFF or some non-teracorp like Digital Ocean support network neutrality, but can't afford to buy a major network?
I'm pretty sure that most marketeers correlate with the "it's fine to send lots of useless crap to people for $x justifcation" philosphy. You pick a Marketeer(D) or Marketeer(R) and they'll be happy to use whatever legal tools they can use in that vein (Sure there's good ones but they're rarer). I'd classify it as a failing in their world view rather than a moral one, not to say there aren't immoral marketeers.
I received well over 1000 SMS messages in 2020 from the Biden campaign. Replying 'STOP' worked... for that one number but since they were using a huge army of volunteers to SMS out messages, asking them to stop was pointless as there was a seemingly endless number of others sending out messages. Legal or not, it wasn't ethical. It only started after I updated my voter registration because I moved between counties. The online form had telephone number as a mandatory field but I didn't realize that would be released to political campaigns.
Trump and Biden both spammed my physical mailbox with the usual slick mailers, though the Biden campaign had an interesting twist in that I kept getting what appeared to be hand written postcards from people in metro Atlanta where I lived but every single one of those post cards was postmarked San Francisco. I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt and think maybe the postcards were written in bulk by the actual people in the Atlanta area and then sent to some Biden associated organization in SF, who then paid the postage for all the individual postcards to go out.
I have two rules in gmail - one deletes any email containing the word "unsubscribe" and the other any email with the word "democrat". I probably have missed some emails, but life has somehow gone on without them.
My friend group has mostly moved to texting or other messaging apps. Email is kind of like letters in the 90's..
The problem is that voter registration information is public, or at least available to the campaigns, and campaigns in general seem to increasingly abuse the information. I've received far too many political advertisements this year. I've only gotten mailers and text messages, all unsolicited of course. I don't think I put my email address on my voter registration (thankfully!). I have heard that voting early stops the ads if that is an option for you.
Same for me but with text messages. I made the mistake of making a contribution on act blue 8 years ago and now every election season I get hundreds of text messages asking for donations with the most ridiculous content ever. "Act now to unlock the ultra rare 400% match...". There is no way to get off the list. I click unsubscribe, half the time I get no automated response, I now just report it as junk but they just keep coming.
I hope they modernize and come to terms with the reality of the 21st century workforce… definitely needs a fed level revamp on the former part. The clearance part sounds like a good thing though…
The concern about organizations and the governments feelings that it needs to track you is a very valid concern. Why does the government need to make sure your "hand job from a friend" venmo payment to your friend is "legally legit"? (You can get transactions flagged for this and the moderator will shame you)
Are you correct in what's going on? Yes. Are we placed in this with no option to resist? For the most part yes.
Message queues aren't a networking protocol. Anyone can subscribe to consume the events.
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