I think it's a combination of budgeting, upward price pressure from the SaaS companies themselves, plus bringing things in-house through vibe coding, but there's another factor that I think is harming existing SaaS products. Many of them are becoming legacy solutions with AI bolted on top so they don't really feel that effective or next-level. The underlying tech might even be a generation older too - but the SaaS value-add is providing support, scaling, etc to maintain whatever some old tech that's still a requirement. At some point someone looks at all of these interconnected systems and just says 'start over'.
Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
Philadelphia is blessed by several feet of sub-street layers (stone fill, belgian block, concrete backfill, and terrible asphalt), embedded rail, pipes, and utilities that are all owned and managed by different local, state, and private entities. Oh and fairly wide temperature swings throughout the year, generous precipitation, salt, and let's not forget the drivers themselves. It's a miracle the roads are in as good a shape as they are - but it does have a traffic calming effect :)
I realize dang has already tagged this (and I get it) but I don’t know who is actually benefiting from this. This is deceptive as it doesn’t represent a traveler’s actual/expected experience and just adds more slop to the pile. This is a case where you should pay actual photographers to take verified pictures of the places you are recommending people visit. Why would someone cheapen their brand like this?
If you read the article you'll see it's not about generating AI slop images:
> Take a freeform query (like ‘sfo->jfk’) and turn it into a ‘place’
> Build a database of ‘places’ -> pictures
> Build a software system that can take a ‘place’, look it up in a database and spit out the right picture – even if that ‘place’ isn’t in the database
It seems like there's a big opportunity for someone to hire a bunch of disenfranchised US devs that want to flee the country to build an EU-native cloud platform - but clearly there's enough talent on the continent already, so why hasn't this happened yet?
The sales problem being there isn't anything viable to compete with the established players. Europe has the capability, even without immigration from the US, it just needs a kick to make good enough products.
The EU should also create a new regulation to force everyone on the continent to move away from American companies. That’s one way to give the local startups a market to sell to.
I’d be interested in arguments that EU providers could be equivalent to Azure … is it realistic to move a large university across for email and other cloud services? Might be the right time to start campaigning for institutions to divest from US tech stacks…
(1) Europe has a fragmented market; linguistically, product wise
(2) Silicon Valley is in the United States
(3) The United States has a very large amount of capital to throw at companies
(4) even if you managed to succeed in the EU your shares will most likely be bought out from under you if you raised capital
(5) all of the above re-inforce each other over time
Once you have that kind of an advantage it is very hard to lose it.
It is worth noting that only one of the “big three” clouds is in Silicon Valley - indeed, much of the original development work on what became AWS was done in South Africa!
Here's some anecdata from the B2B SaaS company I work at
- Product team is generating some code with LLMs but everything has to go through human review and developers are expected to "know" what they committed - so it hasn't been a major time saver but we can spin up quicker and explore more edge cases before getting into the real work
- Marketing team is using LLMs to generate initial outlines and drafts - but even low stakes/quick turn around content (like LinkedIn posts and paid ads) still need to be reviewed for accuracy, brand voice, etc. Projects get started quicker but still go through various human review before customers/the public sees it
- Similarly the Sales team can generate outreach messaging slightly faster but they still have to review for accuracy, targeting, personalization, etc. Meeting/call summaries are pretty much 'magic' and accurate-enough when you need to analyze any transcripts. You can still fall back on the actual recording for clarification.
- We're able to spin up demos much faster with 'synthetic' content/sites/visuals that are good-enough for a sales call but would never hold up in production
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All that being said - the value seems to be speeding up discovery of actual work, but someone still needs to actually do the work. We have customers, we built a brand, we're subject to SLAs and other regulatory frameworks so we can't just let some automated workflow do whatever it wants without a ton of guardrails. We're seeing similar feedback from our customers in regard to the LLM features (RAG) that we've added to the product if that helps.
Not parent - but I've noticed those same 'start ups' and they just seem to be today's hustle-bro crypto/drop-ship/mobile-app/ceo-with-no-employees/self-help-book/low-effort grift (bullshit).
I'm sure some of them have managed to shake some change out of the VCs but these wanna-be shovel sellers are just gonna let their domains expire and move on to the next scheme with little overall damage to the economy.
Sorry - had to flag this ad posting. Future tip - just release this stuff under one of your employee's or founder's name so it's not as obvious of an ad for the platform you're launching.
While custom here expects a Show HN tag, there’s no specific prohibition against showing HN something you built for profit, so long as you aren’t doing so excessively, the thing you built is interesting and relevant to HN readers, and you’re not making a habit of drive-by posting without engaging further. I found this content to meet those criteria, much more than either prior posting by OP.
However, I specialize in noticing and reporting spammers to the mods who are trying to disguise their connection to the company posted, so please do not try to disguise or mislead the community as directed here; lying by omission with intent to mislead is completely uncool.
OP, you’ve posted three times in six months and you don’t participate on the site other than posting stuff you made. HN generally has good cause to expect a higher bar of participation than that, and if you continue submitting things without participating in the wider site as a whole, users are going to flag your content without considering it at all. I’m not at my threshold for that yet given your history, but certainly I wouldn’t look fondly on another like this one given the dearth of comments on anyone’s posts besides those you posted or those about your works.
1. using the company name to label an isolated incident
2. providing a link to the company research unit that directs to the main company page, forcing a second click to view the research unit
3. advertising the company's black friday sale
i have to say 1 pisses me off as it trojans an ad into an existing pattern (uniquely naming disclosures/exploits), 2 and 3 are both slimy but id probably be able to forgive the company if they only implemented one of those two points, as is this is a bit much
There's definitely a rush of people trying to upskill/reskill into this technology space despite having no formal training or background beyond basic dev skills. There's other people (such as myself) that came from the big data/NLP space (ads & search) that are trying to add AI to our extensive skillsets but aren't necessarily deep-math experts.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of room at the top and the vast majority of AI implementations at smaller companies are just OpenAI API wrappers. Essentially there's very little lived experience since it's expensive to experiment at home and smaller companies just aren't going to invest in self-hosted models that are expensive to run and quickly fall behind state of the art.
I guess I'm not shocked but this is certainly disappointing. That being said, do you need a native app to provide most of the functionality? It seems like you could do most of this stuff through browser functionality and some kind of distributed hosting. At the very least you could capture basic reporting through simpler mediums like SMS.
Unsaid in this article is that these phones quickly become useless if governments are able to just shut off internet connectivity through cell service and perhaps targeted local outages to reduce wifi alternatives. Without some kind of mesh networking it doesn't really matter that Apple and Google already sold you out.
You're going to have a difficult time pulling a lot of energy out of the back wheel as you're slowing down. The more you decelerate the less weight you've got on your back wheel. Eventually you reach the maximum energy transfer from back wheel contact patch into the motor and lock up the back wheel, and even then you may not have considerably slowed the bike.
Regen on the front wheel would be most effective - but then you've got two motors or a less-than-ideal front motor that adds unsprung weight and has similar traction issues during acceleration as the front unloads.
It's a shame - I think a lot of people want ebikes to work, but they're not as convenient as a pedal bike (especially not in small apartments) and usually they're too heavy to really use in blended pedaling/e-assist mode.
Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
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