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Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

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Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#431

Post by throw0101d »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #419
throw0101d wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gold will always retain value. After >40 years, gold has only just gotten back to its 1980s inflation-adjusted price: * https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-... Papers have been written on how it does not hedge inflation: * https://www.nber.org/papers/w18706 * https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667789 See also Roy Jastram's The Golden Constant: The English and American Exper…

> After >40 years, gold has only just gotten back to its 1980s inflation-adjusted price If you look at the absolute peak of its price for the last 100 years, it took 40 years to get back to it. Yeah, so? Absolute peaks are like that. If you don't cherry-pick the year, the gold price right now is looking good compared to the past. (Though an honest reading of that chart would lead one to suspect that we might be near…

> If you don't cherry-pick the year, the gold price right now is looking good compared to the past.

Then there's the near-decade drought between 2011 and 2019, and the multi-year drought between 2021 and 2024.

Meanwhile, if instead of having cash tied up in gold one had invested in an index fund (total market or even S&P 500), it'd be getting both price appreciation and dividends. Even the so-called S&P 500 lost decade of the 2000s did pretty well if you had some bonds and rebalanced (or, as a US resident, were internationally diversified):

* http://archive.is/https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2010...

The only time in recent history that gold seems to have been a useful 'investment' was a few years in the late 1970s and between 2000 and 2011. Over the course of decades it seems to have been a money hole.

> But it still might do better than, say, the Zimbabwe dollar, the Continental, or even the ruble over the past decade.

Compared to a diversified portfolio or even bonds (especially TIPS in the US), gold would have been a disaster.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#432

Post by latexr »

exe34 wrote: post #367
latexr wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We’re discussing a literal war, with all the death and destruction that entails, and your claim is “the bigger harm” is not wasting more money on a power hungry subpar parrot that is accelerating the dissemination of disinformation and making it harder to fight climate change with its energy consumption. We’re all doomed. Anyone who believes AI will kill us is delusional, humans are greedy and stupid enough that we’l…

> a power hungry subpar parrot You may yet live to be bitten in the gluteus maximus by said parrot.

If that happens it will not be because it became sentient and decided to cause me harm, but because some developer somewhere decided it was a good idea to tab-tab-tab their code completion without fully understanding the solution and the resulting security hole caused the system to be exploited.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#433

Post by waihtis »

stogot wrote: post #334
rakkhi wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did my top 5 for my field cyber security AI in cyber defence and attack Quantum resistant cryptography Death of the password? Passwordless, passkeys, phishing resistant MFA More suppliers compromised, another major open source project long con Doing more with less: automation and consolidation https://rakkhi.substack.com/p/cyber-security-predictions-for...

Those are generic enough you could argue they already occurred last year or this year?

They have both occured and not occured every year for the past 10 years

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#434

Post by cm2187 »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #392
cm2187 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true but apart from Poland, all large EU countries have anaemic weapon production and diverted all their military spending into social programs decades ago, which they cannot reverse. They are at their budget deficit limits and are all in territory where if they increase tax rates, tax proceeds go down (along with growth and employment). So the reality is that I don't think there is any chance the EU is a subs…

> That's true but apart from Poland, all large EU countries have anaemic weapon production and diverted all their military spending into social programs decades ago, which they cannot reverse. I would say that is a half-truth. You are right that Poland is an outlier in the EU with regards to its military expenditure and preparation. However, the idea that it is because military spending in other countries was "divert…

No the transfer of defense spending to social spending was an explicit policy in the 80s/90s, that was refered at the time as "the peace dividends".

And the fact that it is diverted into social spendings is also significant, because it is a kind of public spending that is politically impossible to cut back. Even Trump doesn't want to touch that third rail in the US.

France's military spending, though not as low as many other european countries, is still a fraction of what it was during the cold war [1] and so is its military capability. It has big shortfalls of amunitions (a couple of weeks worth in a Ukraine-style conflict), and even though it has in theory advanced techs, it has it in numbers that wouldn't help in an intense conflict like a war with Russia (the number of operational tanks, cannons and planes is just too low and it would be overwhelmed). It is a military that has been downsized to basically two missions: nuclear deterence, and small operations in the middle east and africa against terrorist groups and milicia. That military is completely inadequate to face a threat like Russia.

[1] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/mil_spend_gdp/

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#435

Post by JKCalhoun »

oulipo wrote: post #290
dachris wrote: post #264

Industrial civilization will continue to follow along the "Business as Usual" trajectory of the 1972 Limits to Growth publication [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#Compariso...

[flagged]

Not likely. Things have to get much worse.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#436

Post by JKCalhoun »

WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #67

1) Companies will develop many specialized LLMs linked via a router-like app that determines the best LLM to perform your request. This will yield better results without requiring an AGI. It might even be good enough to replace a specialized information tech job. 2) The cost of a line of code will continue to drop. A Moore's like law is coming/here for code. 3) Trade jobs will start to become what code jobs were in t…

Trade jobs are already well paid. Maybe you mean that the rest of us will figure that out.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#437

Post by bruce511 »

thepuppet33r wrote: post #150
bruce511 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a parent-driven approach I'm hearing about more and more. Parents in a school get together and agree on smartphone accessibility. For example "no smart phone till high school, dumb Nokia for comms if required". This is hyper-local but works well because there's no peer pressure- nobody has one etc. The other effective approach in play is "no screens in private areas" - ie no screens in bedrooms and bathrooms.…

Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone. That wouldn't invalidate this and it would still be better, but just FYI. Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

>> my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

one phone shared between a bunch of friends is not the problem. The problem is a phone "owned" by you, and then used to access social media. ie the phone is just a conduit to social media, and social media is the root of the problem.

>> Maybe I was just a bad kid, but if my parents had done something like this, my friends and I would have pooled our cash and bought a used phone.

Cigarettes and alcohol were (and still are) banned from kids, and yes kids certainly got them when I was growing up (and I'm pretty sure still do.) That doesn't mean those things should be accessible to kids, used at the dinner table, or in bedrooms at home.

>>Any parent-driven solution would be seen as the parents being ridiculous and unfair by the kids, at least at first.

This is not a suggestion I am proposing. It's an approach I'm seeing being implemented, and the kids are better off for it. Given the very clear harms we are seeing with children using smart-phones, and social media, for the last 15 years or so, I expect this will gain momentum.

Clearly you can parent your own kids however you like - I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#438

Post by Fluorescence »

pjc50 wrote: post #427
Fluorescence wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying... gun drone?!

There's a flamethrower drone video that circulates, used for clearing debris from power lines. And lots and lots of "DJI phantom with a grenade" videos from the Ukraine war. But not only does the gun drone not work very well, the drones are heavily tracked and dependent on radio links while there are thousands of people making sure that guns, even concealed ones, have a constitutional right to be in as many places as…

> heavily tracked

As in the flights or the hardware?

I've always thought drones would work well as ambush devices i.e. don't make a long flight to a target but stash within a few seconds of flight time.

If it's the hardware then is there not much of a DIY scene anymore? I assumed the tech was mostly in the components e.g. cameras/motors/batteries rather than the integration. I'm not a drone person but when I cast my eye at FPV racing drones, it seemed they were building their own with off-the-shelf components.

> radio links

I see Russia heavily using fibre-optic drones these days and they blew my mind. When I heard of "wire-guided missile" I assumed it was some term-of-art and never conceived they literally laid down wire. I understand you can buy kilometre spools of the stuff for a few bucks so I guess it's in consumer's reach.

Ah, I've just realised the "Ariadne's thread" weakness of using fibre-optic for something covert! Maybe the launch site can hop to another connection though...

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#439

Post by JKCalhoun »

silisili wrote: post #99
madphilosopher wrote: post #68

Auto makers will decide that putting 6 headlights on pickup trucks is no longer competitive. Consequently, they will innovate that the world needs pickup trucks with 8 headlights, starting in 2025. FML.

I don't care if they have 100 lights, I just want us to go back to the soft yellow bulbs, instead of whatever we use now that pierces my retinas.

Best you can probably do is to put mirrors on the perimeter of your vehicle.

I've noticed that I am quicker to drop my high beams when I approach an 18-wheeler at night with chrome mud-flaps.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#440

Post by rapsey »

throw0101d wrote: post #431
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After >40 years, gold has only just gotten back to its 1980s inflation-adjusted price If you look at the absolute peak of its price for the last 100 years, it took 40 years to get back to it. Yeah, so? Absolute peaks are like that. If you don't cherry-pick the year, the gold price right now is looking good compared to the past. (Though an honest reading of that chart would lead one to suspect that we might be near…

> If you don't cherry-pick the year, the gold price right now is looking good compared to the past. Then there's the near-decade drought between 2011 and 2019, and the multi-year drought between 2021 and 2024. Meanwhile, if instead of having cash tied up in gold one had invested in an index fund (total market or even S&P 500), it'd be getting both price appreciation and dividends. Even the so-called S&P 500 lost deca…

A well diversified portfolio contains an allocation in gold. If one is not an american it is even more important.
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