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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?

#831

Post by hoseja »

Gatsky wrote: post #773
emehex wrote: post #347

I'm not sure enough people are talking about Demographics and population decline, especially with respect to China. Some experts [1] predict that China's population in 2050 will be HALF of what it is today! [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/china-xi-jinping-economics-...

Definitely. Unprecedented in human history. Wide-ranging social, cultural and economic impacts.

What's unprecedented is the insane population explosion of the last ~100 years. It's only good to have major reduction to saner levels.

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

#832

Post by wyager »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #767
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery's DO NOT scale like you claim. A desiel semi is much lighter than an Electric Semi is. That's why Tesla Semi hasn't launched yet. They are currently trying to change the regulation for maximum allowances on US Roads from 10k to 14k. The Delta-V on an electric vehicle has the problem that the battery scales more proportionately to weight and range than a desiel equivelent. Desiel gas has a tremendous amount of…

You have to compare the compact stored energy of liquid fuels after it gets converted to useful forward motion via a heavy, noisy, inefficient, costly to maintain and fuel engines. It's basically a thought terminating cliche at this point.

ICE cars are way lighter than EV cars with a reasonable range. It's not a cliche, it's a true constraint of reality, which EV enthusiasts decoupled from reality frequently seem to forget.

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

#833

Post by davnicwil »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #101

I wonder what the future holds for WebAssembly. If it doesn’t really catch on and just ends up being mostly (ab)used for nefarious purposes, I can imagine the major browsers dropping support in a few years. They did with technologies like Flash and Java applets before, and those had had much wider adoption previously. On the other hand, if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applica…

> if someone comes up with a good programming language for modern Web-style applications

I posit this has already happened and the language is Typescript.

I don't see how a different language could meaningfully disrupt TS at this point. I don't actually even see what there is to disrupt, to be honest. TS is great and really productive, and scales to large teams well. What language has the potential to be 10x better than it?

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

#834

Post by wyager »

sweetheart wrote: post #797
esel2k wrote: post #779

Agricultural revolution. I believe things like food, health and safety will become things not taken for granted anymore. Prices of all of these things will go up and take a major part of the household budgets. I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary)…

We should eat what requires the fewest resources (water, land), and is completely nutritious for all stages of life: plants, and plants only. It’s mind boggling how tight the Venn diagram is between People Who Are Fearful of Climate Crisis and People Who Refuse to Stop Eating Animals.

When you consider arability constraints and nutritional efficiency, meat is more efficient and less destructive than plants in many cases. Soy production, for example, sufficient to meet global demand requires destroying the Amazon; meat production is much less destructive to land, taking place either on non-arable scrubland or via consuming human-inedible surplus feedstock. (Or on land already depleted by plant farming, like in the Amazon.)

And then in the end you're left with foods with inferior nutrition. I'm not going to stop eating the foods I've evolved to eat (ruminants especially) until I can safely do so without becoming malnourished, weak, and unhealthy. Right now, this is not technologically possible.

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

#835

Post by ZeroGravitas »

wyager wrote: post #832
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to compare the compact stored energy of liquid fuels after it gets converted to useful forward motion via a heavy, noisy, inefficient, costly to maintain and fuel engines. It's basically a thought terminating cliche at this point.

ICE cars are way lighter than EV cars with a reasonable range. It's not a cliche, it's a true constraint of reality, which EV enthusiasts decoupled from reality frequently seem to forget.

And yet reality tells us EVs are still 4x more efficient.

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

#836

Post by wyager »

kulikalov wrote: post #786
esel2k wrote: post #779

Agricultural revolution. I believe things like food, health and safety will become things not taken for granted anymore. Prices of all of these things will go up and take a major part of the household budgets. I believe one of the first is food, as every nation (rich or poor or sick) will need it and changes in climatic conditions have an impact already today. Next is health industry than defense (this one is scary)…

What do you think about food replacements like US Soylent or EU JimmyJoy? It looks to me like a big deal, but I don’t see much enthusiasm from other people and these products have been around for a while.

We don't know enough about human biology to make a healthy food replacement in a factory. We do know enough about human biology to know that we currently can't.

Everyone who eats these "food replacements" long enough and frequently enough looks weak and sickly; it's not a coincidence.

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

#837

Post by DennisP »

mslupski1 wrote: post #789
DennisP wrote: post #541

Possibly nuclear fusion. Everybody's still conditioned to respond with the "30 years away" meme, but it's getting serious venture funding because all sorts of enabling technologies have made it a lot more feasible. Well-funded net power attempts in the next several years: Zap Energy in 2023, Helion in 2024, CFS in 2025, General Fusion in 2026. Previous net power attempts: zero, unless you credit NIF which ignores all…

John Carmack mentioned that he's shocked by how little interest Big Capital has in nuclear fission (he's more into fission that fusion). He talks a lot about it in a recent Lex Fridman podcast, a good listen if you're into this. It's weird that this isn't the main focus of the whole energy industry.

I've been meaning to check that out.

There are actually a couple dozen fission startups. Fission is definitely an easier technical problem, but more difficult in other ways. Nobody minds if you fuse atoms, but you can't fission them without doing lots of up-front design and spending years getting through regulators.

Some regulators are friendlier to new technology than others. Canada does pretty well, and has at least three molten salt reactor startups. Terrestrial Energy in particular is pretty far along and has high praise for their regulators.

In the US, the NRC is much more difficult, and it's practically impossible to develop anything here besides a light-water reactor.

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

#838

Post by defterGoose »

Olreich wrote: post #782
defterGoose wrote: post #605

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick: not a real hologram. Additionally, it sounds like a massively power intensive way to do volumetric display. I don't know the total conversion efficiency to photons, but it can't be that high. More recent techniques like stacked panels might be a better way forward for this.

So what is the definition of a real hologram? Lots of points of light in 3D outside of the media projecting it seems like exactly what I’d expect for a hologram.

For it to be a hologram, you'd need to be able to reproduce arbitrary wavefronts in real time. This gives you the ability to have features like occlusion, which you don't have with a "points of light" display. I.e., everything will appear translucent.

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

#839

Post by marssaxman »

O__________O wrote: post #627
entropicgravity wrote: post #566

Personal vehicles will be getting both bigger and smaller. What's different from the past is that electric motors scale much better than IC engines. Both the world's smallest vehicles (kid's toys) and the largest vehicles (huge mining trucks) are both electric. First the small. Cities will soon start to ban all but electric vehicles in their downtown cores (already happening in some Chinese cities). The primary reaso…

“Halving” vehicles has been possible for long time, also seen it mentioned numerous times over the years. Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car, odd of person in small car dying are much higher. Basically, something like this will only have a chance in an authoritarian society. As for the RV, you still need parking…

> Unless large & small vehicles never use the same roads, ever, it will never happen; imagine being in a small car and being hit by a large car

There's no need to imagine what that that would be like, because the situation has existed for years already: what you describe is just everyday reality for motorcyclists.

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

#840

Post by blurbleblurble »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #272

Total sensor fusion

If you're talking about what I think you're talking about this is freaky as heck and will hit people out of nowhere

Imagine this: https://youtu.be/NdTxgakQ-VA

(Spatial mm-wave imagery)

...crossed with all the data about you from social media, your phone sensor data, ad tracker data, location data and your gestural fingerprint from the many hours of VR gaming you've put in?

And then imagine this can be synthesized and queried vaguely, generically and qualitatively via some GPT style interface to estimate your whereabouts, your mental state, to anticipate your plans, intentions, deeply personal interests etc.?

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