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Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

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Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#491

Post by garbageoverflow »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #460
defrost wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewable energy has been the cheaper option in remote areas for a while now, solar demand in Pakistan has skyrocted recently. Solar powered water pumps and water purification has been a commodity and charity item since 2023 (that I recall) eg: https://nrsp.org.pk/hand-operated-and-solar-powered-portable... https://www.bondheshams.org/

I read a piece about how abundant solar in rural Afghanistan strengthened the Taliban as poppy and therefore opium production skyrocketed because they were able to install electric wells.

interested in the article. would you like to share a link?

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#492

Post by jasondigitized »

thepuppet33r wrote: post #66
CubsFan1060 wrote: post #11

There are even more restrictions aimed at stopping kids using social media. Restrictions on phone use in schools, who can sign up for social media, etc.. Additionally, that it'll eventually prove to be a wild success, with significant benefit to kids. On the darker side, the same technologies and restrictions will be applied in various ways to adults (similar to the porn verification laws), which will have significan…

I'm still not sure how they plan to enforce this. Even now, I see an age verification popup on both illicit sites and even sites I feel are innocuous. But I can just click that I'm old enough to move on. If the social media companies are only trying to shift blame, this makes sense. They're not liable if the customer lies. But if that loophole is closed, the only way to enforce age approved sites would be a global id…

Apple and Google can make it far easier with better native controls and UX patterns. Screentime can be completely gamified.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#493

Post by wombat-man »

Hawk Tuah girl is charged for crypto rug pull scam

Investment continues in AI, but the tech industry continues to mature. Stable growth and profits, but the lack of rapid expansion is going to feel like decline. It continues to be a stiff job market.

Ukraine fighting still continues, but funding/arms sources for Ukraine shift to be more European.

Trump tax cuts expire. The margins in congress are a lot tighter this time for the Republican party in the house.

TSLA sales continue decline, stock continues to soar. (only kind of joking on this one)

TSLA robotaxi thing does not ship/work.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#494

Post by yunwal »

fnqi8ckfek wrote: post #331
doku wrote: post #271

90% confidence level, Hottest weather in recorded history. Extreme weather in many places not seen before. No one is prepared for this commonplace outlier, Globally common, locally outlier. Huge insurance payout but most not fullfilled. 90% CL: Top search engine results completely inundated by LLM text, we none the wiser. SEO solved. Search engine switches to new algorithm based on LLM. 90% CL: AI with tool use that…

How do those confidence levels work? It looks to me you're just assigning probabilities to outcomes.

I think it's roughly: "I would bet 9$ to your $1 that this happens", although some of these are vague enough that you couldn't objectively determine whether the bet materialized.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#495

Post by wenc »

esperent wrote: post #121
quantisan wrote: post #72

Previous years: 2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38777115 (the rest of this list is copied from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38779963 ) 2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628 2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859 2018:…

There's a second 2024 thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38614465 Reading through the two 2024 threads I'm struck that most predictions a) were completely wrong b) reflected more what people wanted to happen rather than what was likely. Edit: now that I've read through this thread I'll add c) were much more hopeful than this year's predictions.

This is mostly just for fun and will be mostly wrong because none of the people who are making predictions take it seriously. And none of the upvoters take it seriously either.

There is a discipline to making predictions (Phil Tetlock has observed a few traits: avoiding base rate fallacies, working in probabilities not binaries, making falsifiable predictions, and continuously updating).

None of the predictions here do that, so we shouldn’t expect any kind of reasonable hit rate.

It’s just end of year fun.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#496

Post by yunwal »

wombat-man wrote: post #493

Hawk Tuah girl is charged for crypto rug pull scam Investment continues in AI, but the tech industry continues to mature. Stable growth and profits, but the lack of rapid expansion is going to feel like decline. It continues to be a stiff job market. Ukraine fighting still continues, but funding/arms sources for Ukraine shift to be more European. Trump tax cuts expire. The margins in congress are a lot tighter this t…

> Hawk Tuah girl is charged for crypto rug pull scam

What crime could she possibly be charged with? Did she make any statements that weren't true about it? It's still not SEC regulated, so there's no avenue there. Also AFAICT she didn't even have a financial interest in the coin beyond being paid to promote it.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#497

Post by nozzlegear »

alibarber wrote: post #275
nozzlegear wrote: post #74

I predict that I will finally finish making that bird feeder camera that I've been wanting to make for my wife. I've got all the parts for it, I just need to figure out how to put them together and write some code to take a picture of a bird. Can't be too hard, right?

Hmm - but you can't just have it take a picture of the bird! It needs to alert you to the presence of the bird - what's the latest and best practice in notifications nowadays? And ID the bird too - what's a good API for image based AI? Might be expensive, better run it locally, how do we set up a sever for that? No, not server, serverless! What are the legal implications of running an AI based autonomous camera servi…

> What are the legal implications of running an AI based autonomous camera service outside in your locale? Better research that...

Funnily enough, that's something I've put a little bit of thought into! I want to keep my bird camera local and "privacy friendly," with no photos leaving my network sans-human-intervention. I'm even going to paint a tiny little "Birds Under Surveillance" sign (or something like that) to indicate that the camera isn't watching people.

My goal is to have it sync photos to my NAS via some kind of wireless connection and then do species identification on own machine. It's been surprisingly hard to find any sort of open LLM or machine-learning models for identifying birds though, but maybe I'm just not looking in the right place. Luckily my wife is an avid birder and already knows all of our local species, so v1 doesn't need to identify what's pecking at the feeder.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#498

Post by nozzlegear »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #111
nozzlegear wrote: post #74

I predict that I will finally finish making that bird feeder camera that I've been wanting to make for my wife. I've got all the parts for it, I just need to figure out how to put them together and write some code to take a picture of a bird. Can't be too hard, right?

It’d be easier if you’d be OK with a picture of a bird or picture of a squirrel ;) Good luck, sounds like a fun project.

Squirrels are fine too! We have the hardest time keeping them off our bird feeders – even though we have ones set out specifically for squirrels – but they at least look cute for the camera.

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#499

Post by nozzlegear »

wenc wrote: post #92
nozzlegear wrote: post #74

I predict that I will finally finish making that bird feeder camera that I've been wanting to make for my wife. I've got all the parts for it, I just need to figure out how to put them together and write some code to take a picture of a bird. Can't be too hard, right?

Sounds like a great project for learning. However, just FYI, this $25 2K cam (PCMag recommended) can do that sorta (it has motion/pet detection) and more. It also has excellent night vision. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CH45HPZT/ I was like, a $25 camera can't be this good. But I tried it out and it's actually really good.

Interesting, I like that it has local storage. Thanks for the recommendation!

Re: Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?

#500

Post by jasondigitized »

abetusk wrote: post #167
uncomplexity_ wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

banger. on real life image and video intelligence though i think google will take the lead here as they just have monopoly on dataset here given they have google images and youtube. on proprietary general intelligence ai i think openai and anthropic will keep their lead, while on open source mark zuckerberg will be continuously leveling the playing field so the general population can keep up in terms of availability…

> ... i think google will take the lead here as they just have monopoly on dataset ... I think there's plenty of data for people to train substantial models, either drawing directly from the public domain or scraping content. The cost of compute and disk space will continue to drop exponentially fueling the ability of small businesses and amateurs. Compute is still following Moore's law, more or less, when you allow…

Regarding the video generation stuff, I can foresee a Canva style UI that allows you to define the position of your camera, movement, lighting etc. coupled with a prompt. Or a catalog of exiting movie scenes that you can select as a starting point to define the setting, cinematography, etc.
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