When I see people build a "software factory"

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I've tried for weeks now to build my own @ScrapingBee and repeatedly AI has now told me that it can't do it

80% of my scraping is Google SERP results for Hotelist and even with residential IP proxies and solve CAPTCHA services and OpenSERP scraper it won't do it well for thousands of queries, it just gets blocked

So I will keep paying them $99/mo

A good test to see what services might remain now AGI is here

My only remaining SaaS now are:
- Cloudflare Domains
- Cloudflare Email Sending
- Cloudflare R2 Storage (for Photo AI mostly and Litestream DB backups)
- Backblaze B2 for backups
- Hetzner for all my servers for all my sites (VPS)
- xAI for all LLMs for all my sites (so many things like moderation, writing emails, anything)
- Scrapingbee

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🎒After a decade, I have made http://nomads.com free for everyone now!

Well almost free, it's $1 to sign up to avoid getting lots of spam

The reason is
1) I have made enough money (from it)
2) charging for a community artificially limits the size, if you put the price at $299 you get 50 new members per month, at $99 you get 200 people, at $29 you get 400 people, etc.

And this always annoyed me, I don't want to put a limit but I had to, to be able to make money from it, so it's free now

I want it to be it the biggest community for digital nomads, world travelers, sovereign thinkers and network state type people

For years it has has a great sponsor with @SafetyWing and I think that's maybe a better model for the future, get much more people in and then just add more sponsors

Right now for the record it has 43,252 paid members (so about 300/mo for 12 years!), so it will be interesting to see what it can grow too

I think now that AGI is on the horizon (or some say already here), online and offline (IRL) communities will become really important. People are talking more to AI now than to humans, and there was already a loneliness epidemic before AI

Making new friends and dating is not so easy for people now. And with remote work and entrepreneurship, people lack a space like an office where people would usually make friends or meet partners

I made most of the friends I have now through traveling and living around the world for the last 10+ years (and many via my site too), and I also met my girlfriend through those friends! So I think communities can have a real role in that post-AGI

Post-AGI business wise, communities also have a moat where many of my SaaS apps do not. So there is some urgency I feel to make Nomads in to the best community there is for those people. But that's why I have to remove any limitations to its growth now

So in a way after 12 years I am switching to the subsidized VC model a bit, but still 100% bootstrapped, kinda like "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

Having enough money now I can afford to do these things and figure out the business model later, which I think will be more sponsors

Enjoy and please sign up and tell me what to improve!!! 😊

𝕏 @levelsio: https://x.com/levelsio/status/2095953446742462807

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The smartest people I know have strong opinions weakly held and change them when new information arises

The dumbest people I know keep their opinions the same just so they can remain consistent

Time changes too fast try remain consistent, better to sail the waves to wherever they are taking you!

𝕏 @AndrewHart: https://x.com/AndrewHart/status/2096585414546960649

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Congrats!!!

And it's great to see this perpetual ☃️ snowball happening

Back in 2013, I was inspired by @patio11 @yongfook @johnonolan @jenniferdewalt @sivers @Shpigford @dhh @jasonfried and they made me believe I could also make money on the internet

The more people try the better, and especially with AI now I'd say anyone can try, and non-technical people with the best ideas, creativity/taste and understanding of whatever cultural zeitgeist we're in can win

There's an illusion here though that anyone will make it, which I've never portrayed to be true, entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging endeavours, kinda like pro sports

With bootstrapping more can win though because the goalpost can be much lower than for ex VC startups. You can make $5K/mo and be able to quit your 9 to 5 job and have a better life

But you can also go big and even raise VC later to go really big later like $ billions

Anyway it's great to keep the snowball rolling and get more people to try!

𝕏 @marclou: https://x.com/marclou/status/2096911867516252385

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Thanks everyone for recommending me to buy an LG TV two years ago but especially everyone for recommending me to NEVER ever connect it to the internet

But instead to get an Apple TV and connect that with HDMI to the LG TV

I knew LG TVs were full of spyware but it's even worse than everyone thought!

You're 100% safe though if you never connect it to the internet

𝕏 @levelsio: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1847681865668292760

That's cool but the point is you NEVER connect it ever

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✨ Okay with lots of help from @javilopen and his Spanish scraping friends I've managed to vibe code my own @Scrapingbee alternative and replace my $249/mo Scrapingbee plan with my own $1/mo scraper running on my VPS!

First I tried OpenSERP, an open source project that seems freshly maintained but it didn't work on my VPS IP or laptop IP and got blocked fast

Then I tried to use residential IP proxies from IPRoyal but they were already quite tainted IPs meaning Google already knew they were scrapers and just blocked about 60% of them already, not so great, also didn't work!

Then I discovered OpenSERP uses a vanilla headless Chrome, Google instantly detects that and blocks that, so literally the entire repo is useless cause it won't even work? I don't get why they don't say that in the docs? OpenSERP is even worse than just basic CURL, as my AI said: "plain curl got 7% blocked but OpenSERP's headless browser got 100% blocked"

So then I just built my own with Playwright and a real Google Chrome on my VPS, headful and persistent context, and slow pacing like every 30 seconds or so

And I got some better residential IP recommendations (which I can't tell you because thenhey t stop working!)

Now I'm at about 90% success rate, which is similar or better than Scrapingbee

And it costs me ~$1/mo (measured by GBs, obviously for text scraping I barely use a lot) instead of the $249/mo I paid Scrapingbee!

My only remaining SaaS now are:
- Cloudflare Domains
- Cloudflare Email Sending
- Cloudflare R2 Storage
- Backblaze B2 for backups
- Hetzner for all my servers for all my sites (VPS)
- xAI for all LLMs for all my sites (so many things like moderation, writing emails, anything)

𝕏 @levelsio: https://x.com/levelsio/status/2095950432883368091

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✨ I replaced all these SaaS with my own vibe coded now, so about $25,000/mo savings:

- Weather API -> My own vibe coded weather service using Norway's meteorology API
- Image resizing API -> My own vibe coded image resizing API with NodeJS's Sharp + Redis (saves ~$1,500/mo)
- Google Vision NSFW detection -> My own $0/mo vibe coded NSFW detection service with Python's NudeNET (saves ~$2,500/mo)
- Cloudflare Streaming -> My own $0/mo Nginx VPS video streaming (saves ~$250/mo)
- API Flash -> My own $0/mo screenshot service (for social images) (saves ~$250/mo)
- New Relic + IPHub -> My own $0/mo error monitoring, DDOS blocking and fleet management service (called error2telegram) (saves ~$250/mo)
- Human moderators -> My own moderation on all my sites with @xAI (saves ~$10,000/mo)
- IFTTT -> Telegram bot (saves ~$100/mo)
- Photopea as editor inside Photo AI -> Vibe coded my own photo editor (saves ~$100/mo)
- Mapbox -> Vibecoded my own free replacement with OpenFreeMaps (saves ~$500/mo)
- Uptimerobot -> My own $5/mo Uptime Canary app running on Kuma (saves ~$50/mo)
- Ghost blog -> My own $0/mo blog platform
- Customer support -> @featurebasehq + AI support bot (saves $5,000/mo)
- Scrapingbee/SerpAPI -> My own $1/mo scraper with Patchright (save ~$250/mo)

I think I have reached my final limit of replacing my SaaS services as I have these left, but that'd mean becoming an ICANN registrar (I don't want 😁), managing my own email (I don't want), managing my own hard drives at home in a storage (I don't want) and managing my own servers at home too (I don't want) and running my own GPU rig at home (I don't want):

- Cloudflare Domains
- Cloudflare Email Sending
- Cloudflare R2 Storage
- Backblaze B2 for backups
- Hetzner for all my servers for all my sites (VPS)
- xAI for all LLMs for all my sites (so many things like moderation, writing emails, anything)

𝕏 @levelsio: https://x.com/levelsio/status/2097638309384036705

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I am so confused why people don't understand this, I keep getting these replies

Don't you get it?

Normies don't vibe code, they just ask something like "do my bookkeeping" or "file my tax" or "organize a movie night and send invites" or "generate a flyer for movie night" or "edit my video"

They don't ever see code, vibe code, or do anything with code, their AI chat app just does it for them

Most of the software layer has already disappeared or will completely disappear for normies

Just like building personal homepages permanently disappeared for normies when Facebook launched ~2005

A lot like this picture where functions of individual devices all got replaced with a single device

Same happening with apps now

𝕏 @hustlin_heev: https://x.com/hustlin_heev/status/2098177241368916361

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I think he's right

With regulatory capture we will speedrun to a new feudalist time

Regulatory capture is where you pass regulation, or create government agencies to "protect the people" but in the end it helps protect companies because you stop new companies from being able to enter the market, because the cost of following regulation is too much compete for a startup

Neo feudalism will mean AI companies at the top and the rest of us as serfs paying them to use AI for literally everything

Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words

That's a very dangerous thing because then there will never be new AI frontier companies being able to compete again and with exponential self improving AI that means essentially no competitors in any industry ever again as they will slowly suck up money in all industries

Safety concerns of AI are scary but the neo feudalism of AI with regulatory capture is a way more scary for me

𝕏 @Jason: https://x.com/Jason/status/2098819632178119081

Even @grok agrees with me https://x.com/i/grok/share/201e322e135c458b90baf87eae57ebbf

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He's right

Rockerfeller did it first a century ago

https://x.com/i/grok/share/b1a85dadc4944f67b3b3b046a28b767c

𝕏 @electric_faces: https://x.com/electric_faces/status/2098840332360372267

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𝕏 @beffjezos: https://x.com/beffjezos/status/2098531004583714980

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I just saw this @ycombinator's batch literally only has harness startups or hardware startups

So the proof is in the pudding

In the most early adopting tech pioneering place that's Silicon Valley new startups aren't even building software anymore

And it's debatable if anyone will actually need a custom harness or it won't just be generically offered by the AI frontier companies

So software is mostly dead and hardware it is

𝕏 @daveg: https://x.com/daveg/status/2099093890137575928

𝕏 @goodhartproof: https://x.com/goodhartproof/status/2098523476189745314

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Self driving will be the 4th wave of nomadism I think

𝕏 @AIScottAdams: https://x.com/AIScottAdams/status/2098546906779500949

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🇪🇺 Great data and actually I think we should use this kinds of data to completely turn around Europe's immigration policy:

- We should have super easy inflow for immigrants from countries whose previous immigrants have shown low crime rates

You're from Japan? Just fly here and you can stay forever

- We should then almost completely ban any inflow from countries whose previous immigrants have shown high crime rates with instant deportations

You're on the top of that list? You're not coming in, sorry. We have to keep Europeans safe first!

Then you can add special exceptions for people in those worst rated countries for high quality talent, think AI engineers, neurosurgeons, high IQ people, with no crime records. But that process will take a little bit longer than just flying into Europe

Then every year you check the data and you adjust the policy based on last 5 or 10 years of criminal history of immigrants from those places

I think this is the most common sense policy and it'll make Europe much safer

𝕏 @tomaspueyo: https://x.com/tomaspueyo/status/2099900501680701530

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This is why I never have and never will do calls

𝕏 @apaji_x: https://x.com/apaji_x/status/2100641366195806335

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Same with this article from yesterday

Gay acceptance is now rapidly dropping in the Netherlands

The real reason is Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) immigrants are extremely against homosexuality

But media isn't allowed or won't ever write that

It's ironic that the gay acceptance we fought for for decades in the Netherlands is being destroyed by progressive policies that keep continously importing low quality immigrants from cultures that are completely opposed to us

𝕏 @levelsio: https://x.com/levelsio/status/2101978657254244858

Being gay is illegal in most MENA countries like Morocco

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