That is my point, though. You want something hard, something that requires actual money, effort, infrastructure, and lobbying. That in itself is the moat. As software developers, we have been lulled into this entirely unrealistic mode of thinking that extremely profitable products do not have to be expensive or high effort to bring to market.
That is exactly why vultures like LLM hustlers find their opening. There is a reason you do not see fly-by-night LLM hucksters selling medical insurance or devices, not because they cannot do the job of building the thing itself, but because the surrounding moat is too high for them to clear.
That is what you want. The harder and more difficult the moat, the higher the gate for these bottom-feeder product dumpers to clear. Once you clear that yourself, you would be in the promised land.
It is hard, it is expensive, and there is a lot of work, but anything worth $10M in yearly profit is. You want to avoid any product that a Chinese manufacturer can pump and dump on Amazon almost immediately, if Amazon itself doesn't, or a product an Indian teenager can create in a few hours thanks to LLMs and compete with. You want those paths to be impossible for them to clear.
I am talking about class 2 medical devices. It takes you maybe $200k at the high end to clear FDA and trials. High enough that all these bottom feeder LLM providers will drop out but low enough small burners can thrive.
There are two enemies. Chinese manufacturers who will dump a cheaper alternative the second you find success. With FDA and trials gates, they are out. The second is LLM guys who sit in the middle vulture state. They are ok with violating every law, every established norm except industries that are more powerful than them: healthcare and banking.
By forcing them to invest at minimum $200k-250k per product, they will be a lot more hesitant. It is easier to violate some poor author's copyright, but in this case each time they try to compete with you they have to jump this high gate.
I am not saying this is easy money. There are established corps already looking to expand their business, but $10M-15M won't move the needle for them, and for those it does, you can compete.
My issue with my friend is: why is military work specially objectionable?
I used the example of buying products that are produced by slaves. No doubt some died, yet he has no problem with that, saying it is different without actually explaining why.
Is the issue perception alone? Brand? What the industry advertises itself as? And the totality of their work doesn't matter?
How many degrees of separation need to exist before your culpability drops to nearly zero?
One degree? Two? Three?
Someone cashing a paycheck from Facebook or Google can tout how the company is connecting people, which is like military folks saying they work in defense.
I feel like almost no one working at a for-profit company can truly escape the principle of do no harm.
The fact that I lean into the positive aspects of my work is just natural. Everyone does the same thing, since every product has both good and bad aspects.
Not only gov data, but also custom map I wrote, have you tried Bluetooth beacons ?
You would be surprised how far you can go if you ignore these expensive APIs and build your custom stuff. People are lazy, if any big corp does something, they immeasurably avoid it and start building their 1000th note taker app.
Do you think it takes millions to cover one downtown ? I am mot competing with Google maps, my project isn't customer facing product, it is a business to business or gov product, the map will be fine even if we don't cover the world or entire state.
I will use C and C++ only, Python too slow, Rust ( I despise the community), JS is poorly designed bloated mess, Java way too verbose, Swift is for Apple only which is limiting, I wanted to use objC but I heard Apple is gonna dump it soon.
C and C++ is the only viable languages here since this project is all about graphics.