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Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

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Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#141

Post by Impossible »

ahelwer wrote: post #5

One idea I've had (heavily influenced by The Diamond Age, I must admit) - a premium video game experience where NPCs you meet are sometimes voiced/acted by actors hired real-time on-demand with face or even body mocap. The NPCs revert back to regular AI versions if an actor is unable to be hired at that time. The player could interact by speaking with their own voice, naturally role-playing the scene. This would of c…

I've seen working demos of this in early stage stealth format. I'm a pretty strong believer that it will happen. It requires some cultural shifts and won't be a big market instantly. We'll probably see a few players try and fail at first

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#142

Post by Impossible »

Guest19023892 wrote: post #104
ahelwer wrote: post #5

One idea I've had (heavily influenced by The Diamond Age, I must admit) - a premium video game experience where NPCs you meet are sometimes voiced/acted by actors hired real-time on-demand with face or even body mocap. The NPCs revert back to regular AI versions if an actor is unable to be hired at that time. The player could interact by speaking with their own voice, naturally role-playing the scene. This would of c…

I don't think this makes sense for a number of reasons. 1. As you said, the costs involved. You'd probably need to charge people something like $10 per interaction with a voice actor, plus $2 per minute. This makes for a very limited market. 2. Actors need to be waiting for a request on a wide range of characters since there would not be enough demand for them to consistently play the same character all the time. So,…

None of this is a problem for immersive theater experiences. I think in this case you build a product that doesn't scale. This way you don't have to think about children playing games because you can enforce 18+. The cost per sessions doesn't matter if you find product market fit with your experiences. I know that SV startup types see games as disposable time wasters to sell microtransactions to whales, but if you think of it at ondemand high quality TTRPG sessions or scalable immersive theater I think there is a profitable business with a good sized market. Matching actors don't matter because you can do short form content and sessions, etc. The last point #5 puts the business in an even better position. If you can eventually automate the product you can scale parts of it much better. Also remember players aren't paying for voice actors to read lines, they're paying for someone that can react and be improvisational. If you play AI Dungeon (which is state of the art), you'll see that AI is still a ways off from this.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#143

Post by d0gbread »

browsergap wrote: post #37
searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

I think one of the issues of nolocode is it doesn't actually help people think like programmers, but the tools are often created with the implicit need to do that, a need which the creators don't see because they are coders. People get spreadsheets and word documents. I don't really know why. But they get them. But while it might seem like the step from doc/xls to nolocode is small or even non-existent, I think it ac…

The tool I use has three user types: Maker, Editor, and Viewer. Only Makers can make the kinds of changes that would be code. Editors can manipulate the underlying data. Viewers, of course, get read only.

The nice thing about this model is that it implies there's a bar to be a Maker and other users can't break your work. You need to be able to reason about concepts like DRY, star schema, cardinality, etc. As a Maker in my org (15-30K people depending on where we are with the pandemic) I can support many no-code apps painlessly in addition to my primary responsibilities, whereas one CRUD app on Heroku had me feeling spread pretty thin.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#144

Post by cryptica »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #136
biolurker1 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN crowd has a lot of crypto deniers. The funny thing is that HN leaders like literally PG, Googl Bosses, Zuck and Marc Andreasen are very bullish on it. So it doesn't take much to realize who is right

Like the rest of SV, they are blinded by hubris and their own blindness to the downsides of tech. Crypto currency is a disaster.

I got into crypto because of all the problems which technology companies and governments created which made it impossible for me to succeed in the mainstream tech industry. Crypto industry is no walk in the park, but I can speak from experience and say that success there is definitely possible. I would think that people like Mark Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg have a pretty good view of what's wrong with the current mainstream tech industry given that they have been directly benefiting from its flaws. Even if they had come into their situations by accident, by now they would have figured out what's going on and that would make them bullish on crypto. I don't think these people have much ego when it comes to business; my experience is that they will switch sides at the flick of a switch and follow the money as soon as it's profitable.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#145

Post by mattmanser »

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

They tried this in the 90s and 00s.

It was such a spectacular failure it's funny to see it recycled.

And for you to claim you wouldn't have to worry about maintenance is especially comical. It was extremely high maintenance and expensive, and it often broke.

Programmers don't just code a problem, they solve the problem. Teasing out the actual business logic is as much a part of the job as anything else, and one that most employees and managers are so clueless and utterly useless at that any no code solution will require a programmer to actually use it any way.

But without any of the flexibility code gives, you end up with tons of dumb, manual, expensive, hacks and a sub-standard product. Eventually the 'no-code' platform adds the ability to use some code and you end up with a really shitty software platform that delivers 80%, but the effort required to get that last 20% is far in excess of just starting again and writing it from scratch in code.

Ask any programmer who remembers workflow software their experience and you will learn from the mistakes of two decades ago.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#146

Post by bitwize »

searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

No code/low code is snake oil that gets sold to us every few years, and always fails to take hold. The reason why is because by the time you get the GUI widgets, hand gestures, whistled tones, or whatever in your low-code solution specific enough to be interpretable by computer, what you've come up with is isomorphic to constructs in some programming language. (And don't say "But AI will solve this problem!": anything intelligent enough to turn vague requirements into working programs outside very well specified constraints is intelligent enough to demand compensation negotiations for continued output.)

So you really haven't made the code go away; you've disguised it as something that isn't code. This actually works well for tricking people into programming when they otherwise wouldn't. And this itself is a viable strategy: consider the secretaries in the 1970s who used Lisp to "customize" Multics Emacs and were never told they were programming it. But it doesn't eliminate the complexity of coding. And most "no-code/low-code" platforms have disadvantages (vendor lock, extremely limited applicability, zero portability) that are almost guaranteed to bite you in the ass later.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#147

Post by bitwize »

catmanjan wrote: post #19
searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

No code = someone else's code, it's been around forever, used to be called cots

In the 80s it used to be called CASE. It flopped then too.

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#148

Post by tdeck »

mattmanser wrote: post #145
searchableguy wrote: post #11

No code/low code. People here underestimate the work it requires to craft a production CRUD app and keep it working. The problem these tools solve are more related to infrastructure rather than one's ability to code. Learning to code might be the easiest part but deploying it, maintaining it, scaling it, securing it and integrating it with thousands of other services remains a huge task even for experienced folks. It…

They tried this in the 90s and 00s. It was such a spectacular failure it's funny to see it recycled. And for you to claim you wouldn't have to worry about maintenance is especially comical. It was extremely high maintenance and expensive, and it often broke. Programmers don't just code a problem, they solve the problem. Teasing out the actual business logic is as much a part of the job as anything else, and one that…

Tried it in the '80s too, here's an ad from around 1981

https://thedailywtf.com/images/ads/All-programs-you-need-sma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_%28software%29

Re: Ask HN: What non-obvious tech/market may take off in the next few years?

#149

Post by RickJWagner »

bitwize wrote: post #147
catmanjan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No code = someone else's code, it's been around forever, used to be called cots

In the 80s it used to be called CASE. It flopped then too.

And 4GLs. About the same time period.
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