I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections.

Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc.

If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.

Thanks for the comment and ideas. I was thinking through the different types of things that could be sidelines. You hit on many of them. There are some cultural festivals that occur in the downtown that can bring opportunities for some local craftspeople to share retail space before and after the festivals. Also, some branded items that go well with books like totes and bookmarks.

And if there was space for it, hosting board/card games.

You could say the same about software. In both cases someone is looking at a screen typing things. One is used for communicating with other humans, the other is used for communicating with computers. For sure there are software engineers working on projects where its not apparent how it generates value and it may not actually generate value.

In the dot com boom there were companies spending like $100+ on ads per $1 of revenue. The cost of customer acquisition was insanely high because of the hype of ecommerce and it was being subsidized by VC and IPO's.

This AI boom feels similar, a lot of hype and the AI usage costs are being subsidized by private equity/VC so far. IPO's are supposed to happen this fall for OpenAI and Anthropic. They're going to have to face the music of corporate governance, accounting rules, reporting revenue, earnings, etc. Subsidizing users seems unsustainable, they need to either jack up rates or downgrade usage per plans. Then there is the circular investments between all of them and Google, Microsoft, etc. Seems like a house of cards.

The race to invent variants of Gas Towns, Ralph loops, pump out videos, blogs, etc. showing off greenfield development with cleverly named agents running in parallel is another case of engineering people diving head first into Resume Driven Development.

Sure there are industry changing things going on. What if you're working on an app thats a decade old and has had different teams of people, styles, frameworks (thanks to the JS-framework-a-week Resume Driven Development)? Some markdown docs and a loop of agents isn't going to help when humans have trouble understanding what the app does.

I think there's merit in a privacy first, no ads, no global/viral content app/service like this; there have been a lot of threads here on HN with related sentiment. I think the challenge is more a business problem - how do you pull users in when people may be scattered across various platforms? Are you finding that a single user purchasing a $2/mo plan pulls in additional users?

The business side of things might become a challenge, I have some ideas on how to overcome this without affecting the core product, but its definitely going to be a lot of experimentation. As for the scattered users, because its private its useful as a way of directly sending interesting things from other platforms to someone you know, rather than competing with those platforms. As long as there's one other person you know, its closer to a messaging service for links/posts than a traditional social network

Back then your typical management, who frequently followed "you can't go wrong with picking IBM" in their decision making, would question open source software and take actions to stop it from being used (like blocking sites in a corp firewall). Open source software was a counter culture then, now its common and mainstream.

Another difference is large companies using user's data in various ways, some creepy and maybe nefarious. This wasn't done 25 years ago, UI heat maps didn't come about until 20ish years ago, much less collecting data specific to one person.

These days, there's no push back on OSS and companies and individuals might prefer to not have all their usage and data sent to a giant corporation. There could be a turning point for OSS LLM's that can add value and run on personal devices (laptops, phones). Maybe there will be a resurgence of apps (desktop/phone) that have AI features but don't collect your data. Maybe that's the next digital counter culture movement - keeping data private.

Its 10x code generation with .5x quality at best and all other parts of the SDLC are at 1.x or worse.

AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere. Software developers have quite the level of hubris about how important they are to companies. Yes our work is very complex and takes a certain mindset to do it well. It takes a lot of other roles to have a successful business, many of those roles will use AI to help draft slide decks, emails, etc. and that's the limit for them.

Look at recent companies doing layoffs claiming its because of AI, like CloudFlare and Coinbase, do their reported financials paint the picture that they are crushing it with AI? No, its net losses into the $100's of millions.

> AI is not delivering 10x shareholder value, anywhere.

A bit facetious, but I'd expect Nvidia and the like providing the "AI equipment" to have a 10× share value at least…

As always, the real money in a gold rush goes to the people selling shovels.

If you want to look at facts (these come from yahoo finance): 36% of their stock is held by institutions, another ~9% by insiders. Ebay is 95% held by institutions (that sounds insane but I don't follow markets, maybe its normal) and it went up 11% yesterday. That sounds like institutional traders think this is real, right? Ebay is at or near an all time high so why would anyone want to buy at an all time high? Maybe this is a pump and dump on ebay by Wall St? Get retail traders hyped, your stock bumps 10% or more, then dump shares.

I don't understand how a smaller publicly traded company can buy a larger publicly traded company. Don't they need to have a majority of shares or enough to demand a board seat? A deal like that probably needs to have outside investors and/or some leverage of some kind.

Its always been like this, I think some of it is perspective. When you reach your early twenties you are likely exiting a childhood and schooling bubble where your focus has been friends, family and school. Once you emerge from that and start interacting with the workforce you become more attuned to things going on locally/globally where before it wasn't really a concern. Probably more so for your generation because of the internet and social media the speed of information sharing is much faster and more readily available.

My opinion on how things could progress in 5-10 years is it depends on how much the average people push back. It could be pushing back on AI data centers, loss of freedoms, CEO pay ratios, etc. The intensity of the push back could impact events.

That HN is turning into reddit with posts that don't contribute to the startups, tech, engineering, entrepreneurship, or science topics that its contributors used to focus on.