#122: 70 Moats in the Age of AI, Open-Source Skill for Cancer Patients, Video Games That Teach Real Science

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week we look at how to take the guesswork out of building for customers, video games that teach real science, 70 ways to create a moat in the age of AI, and more.

Let's dive in:

Building Without Predicting

​Derek Sivers shared the story of how he built his dream home in New Zealand, and the idea applies to much more than houses. The maxim he starts from is that all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong. So he deferred every decision and added only what he proved he needed.

The method is simple. Try to do without the thing first. If you cannot, try a cheap portable fix. Only then build the simple flexible solution. He lived in a bare cabin, slept on the floor, and showered outside before deciding what the house actually needed.

The example this all stemmed from was him talking about a park that opened with no walkways. Its designers argued over where to put walkways and ultimately let 'nature' decide. After a year, they noticed where the grass wore away and paved on those areas. It's a great principle to come back to whenever you are tempted to over-plan a project.

70 Moats in the Age of AI

Steph Ango, the CEO of Obsidian, collected 70 different moats that are all still relevant in the age of AI. The list went viral after another X user posted "What the hell is your moat if everything can be generated?". It is a taxonomy of how things win, pulled from biology and business, grouped into categories like accumulation, uniqueness, defense, and speed.

A few that stuck with me:

• Iteration as a moat, the SpaceX model of shortening the cycle time between improvements.
• Antifragility, becoming stronger when exposed to stress.
• Obscurity, survival by remaining unknown, which explains a lot of profitable niche software.

The useful reframe is that moats do not typically consist of one thing. Most winning things combine two or three unusual strategies rather than maxing out one.

Video Games That Teach Real Science

Ben Somers put together a list of games that quietly teach physics, chemistry, and scientific thinking.

​Oxygen Not Included teaches thermodynamics, mostly by letting you accidentally create a hydrogen pocket and blow yourself up.

​Kerbal Space Program teaches rockets and orbital mechanics.

​Factorio is really an industrial engineering game, and particularly good for learning bottleneck theory.

My favorite detail came from a reply. A 10 year old learned about closed systems by playing Oxygen Not Included, reading The Martian, and researching the gaps on YouTube.

Some of the most practical curricula of the future will come from exploring concepts for the first time in games like these, and some of the best learning won't look like traditional school.

Open-Source Skill for Cancer Patients

​Peter Yang open-sourced a skill called fuck-cancer that helps patients and caregivers navigate diagnosis and treatment and advocate for themselves. He built it after sharing his mom's story and hearing the same problems over and over. The volume of doctors, documents, and insurance paperwork gets overwhelming fast.

The skill creates a practical brief with five sections. Patient and care team info, what to do next limited to three actions, what we know separated from what is unclear, medical terms in plain English, and a care log. It builds the brief from your documents and pulls research from the National Cancer Institute and ClinicalTrials.gov.

It works with ChatGPT, Codex, and Claude Code, and saves to Markdown or a shared Google Doc so the whole family works from the same page. Get the free skill on GitHub.

The Chinese Content Printer

​@miwooyork shared that a 3-person AI video team in Shenzhen is doing $200k a week making short form dramas on TikTok for American women 30 to 45. It is the highest margin content business in the world operating right now, and almost nobody in the West is paying attention.

The thread promises a full article on the business model, distribution, and the incumbent players. What struck me is the demographic. One reply noted this is the same group that has always been the primary consumer of whatever the era's easy dopamine is.

Whether or not you build this, the economics are worth understanding. This comes after Runway Co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela shared that video generation represents around 70% of the share of AI token consumption in China.

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