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Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#241

Post by Salgat »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #163

The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustaina…

Are you purposely forgetting the billions in state and federal charger subsidies, and the billions in residential solar subsidies being paid out? Total US energy consumption right now is at the same level it was in 2007.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#242

Post by JasserInicide »

throwaway787544 wrote: post #163

The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustaina…

I'm quite worried about the future of cars, especially EVs. I will never own a Tesla due to their always-on tracking and blatant anti-consumer practices like hiding upgrades on the car behind a paywall. Sadly ICE manufacturers are following suit with more and more useless dogshit like touchscreens everywhere, always-on data connections, and subscriptions for shit like seat warmers. I think this apprehension is partially fueling the skyrocketing prices of used vehicles (in addition to the chip shortage, but that should be assuaged in the coming months).

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#243

Post by natoliniak »

enos_feedler wrote: post #14

I believe the next big thing will be the productization of building a home anywhere, without requiring municipal infrastructure. There is still a ways to go in terms of technology to make it all happen and make it affordable. But at some point, it will really reconfigure where and how we all live.

I really hope that this will happen, but I'm skeptical. The push to cluster around big cities is still accelerating and land scarcity around big metro areas is what is driving out affordability. Utilities connection constitutes a small and almost insignificant cost of total urban residential construction. If a global pandemic couldn't stop this trend, then I don't think we will ever live in an affordable distributed civilization.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#244

Post by JamesSwift »

abledon wrote: post #160
WFHRenaissance wrote: post #145

Prompt engineering. The perfection of "programming as verbal intelligence".

In the case of Dall-E, isn't a hack for that to design _another_ ML system that looks at the training data 'descriptions' and infer a correct prompt strcture for the desired result. so the human uses this secondary system as a 'guide' to constructing prompts to navigate them towards the result (image) they want?

I think in some cases you're right. But generally I think the real answer is more along the lines of near-realtime generation of results. That way you can iterate quickly to get closer to what you are looking for, and experiment with different approaches to see which is more aligned with how the AI model thinks about things.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#245

Post by 656565656565 »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #159
656565656565 wrote: post #135

Population control? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning We will have no choice eventually.

I agree that population control mostly solves our environmental issues. But I don't trust humans to make such collective sacrifices willingly. We're just too lazy, stupid, and selfish. I think the more likely outcome is that reality will control our population for us, via drought, famine, war, and epidemic.

I mostly agree, I added purely based on my opinion of the original posters ask

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#246

Post by 656565656565 »

collegeburner wrote: post #204
656565656565 wrote: post #135

Population control? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_planning We will have no choice eventually.

Uhh fuck that (pun not intended). We are not the problem, America has plenty of space, there is no need. SE Asia is stabilizing. Africa has a lot of birth but also a lot of space left. There will probably be some places with "natural" population control from lack of food or from disease bht that doesn't mean "we" have to do anything. You def can't be pro-choice or anti-fascist then support population control.

I never mentioned pro-choice or my stance on it or population control. For the record I support choice. I added the topic purely in response to the OP ask.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#247

Post by ChadNauseam »

Preimplantation polygenetic testing. The idea is that, when doing IVF, you sequence the genome of all the embryos and implant the ones that you predict will have properties that you like.

This already exists for monogenetic screening (for parents who don't want to pass on heritable diseases for their children, where those diseases are localized to one gene). But the idea here is that, by checking thousands of genes, you can make predictions for things that start to be very relevant to parents, like attractiveness or height or intelligence.

I don't think people understand how important this is going to be. If the process is expensive, it will only be available to rich people. In a generation, maybe they'll have children that are more intelligent or more attractive than average.

If that starts happening, I think it would have pretty negative effects on society, but there's no way to really prevent it (rich people will just go to Singapore if you ban it in the US). So the only reasonable option is to have the government subsidize it and make it affordable to everyone.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#248

Post by mdp2021 »

outsidetheparty wrote: post #229
historytold wrote: post #217

+++ News: +++ Aged Worker remain having social-contacts to colleagues and may have satisfying feelings if their knowledge is in demand. And like any other 'bubble' at least the ultimate goal seem to fleece somebody. Honestly the whole point of this is 'to make things easier'. +++ P-:

I'm having a very difficult time understanding what you're trying to get across here; can you rephrase?

I think the poster assumes that identification of trends reveals basically greed. And makes a plausible point in noting that the purpose of engineering is to alleviate and improve quality of life. Only, the tone is not really appropriate (and less so the assumptions).

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#249

Post by throwaway787544 »

bko wrote: post #213
throwaway787544 wrote: post #163

The stumble over abandonment of ICE vehicles. By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely, and India claims it will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. By 2040 (18 years from now) over half of all new cars sold will be electric, and the UK and France claim they will ban the sale of ICE-only vehicles. However, there's still not a plan that makes all that sustaina…

> By 2030 (8 years from now) at least six manufacturers will have stopped making ICE vehicles entirely. Do you believe this? I know its a stated goal, but is there anything to hold the company's accountable or is this just a promise? I can't imagine them giving up a cash cow and something they've been doing for decades. EV sales in the USU are 5.6% of the market. I just find the claim that these companies will just s…

They are public companies; it will be kinda obvious from their annual reports if they aren't investing/devesting enough to hit those goals, and if they dont announce it to the public that will cause them bigger problems.

They anticipate increased costs for ICE vehicles and increased profit from EV which is why they're moving forward. They don't control the segments of the market they need to make it happen, so it's a risky bet. However, the manufacturers that are switching first are largely luxury brands, so they make a healthy enough profit that even if they stumble they wont be under water.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?

#250

Post by kordlessagain »

WFHRenaissance wrote: post #145

Prompt engineering. The perfection of "programming as verbal intelligence".

I'm working on prompt engineering. I can confirm this is the next big thing that hardly anyone is thinking about.

I'm getting good results from simple approaches to storing and retrieving memories of past conversations and crawled/indexed documents. This is being built at https://mitta.us/

https://openreview.net/pdf?id=Bx-fUfKedZ5

inventive-anteater|> The website discusses an approach for improving the accuracy of the GPT3 language model by providing feedback to the model based on user interactions. The goal is to allow users to interactively teach the model to avoid common mistakes, such as misinterpretations of word meanings. The implementation of this approach is described, and four tasks are used to demonstrate how the model can be substantially improved with user feedback.

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