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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably hard to quantify economic motivation over long periods of time with very different cultural environments. Economic motivation seems a strange label for what would have been basic survival for early agricultural societies. I think what feels strange now is that we've had these massive increases in productivity over 150 years, but it hasn't translated to more leisure or less stress. I also think there's a diff…

The last 150 years have absolutely seen huge increases in leisure time. Notice that in the Bible, there is only one day of Sabbath, the rest of the week is work. A 6.5 day work week was standard for millennia. This idea of a relaxed bucolic existence like a Monet painting was always a myth. "Less stress" isn't defined enough to discuss, but I for one will say I don't stress about finding food over winter. My ancestor…

Thats not exactly true, actually our ancestors rested a lot more than we do now.

The same myth is that serfdom is/was worse than 9-7 office work.. when in fact you could work 1 day for someone else and 6 days for yourself. Now you work 5 days for someone else and 2 days for yourself.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#152
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve become extremely interested in this notion lately. When I have discussions about intellectual property with random people the dominant idea is that patent promote innovation. People get angry if I suggest that might not be true, as if they think I want all creative people to go bankrupt or something. But its increasingly questionable to me. Open source software has shown the great wealth of innovation that occur…

How do you solve for 'work for 5 years on open source project, get it to some degree of popularity, watch AWS making a service out of your code without paying you a dime'?

Thank you for your question. I want to challenge your assumptions without sounding combative, and provide what I think is a solution that prevents the conflict from existing in the first place.

First of all I will point out that if one individual creates something useful and then a major service provider picks it up, this can mean very good things for society. If the service is good, hopefully AWS can provide it to many customers and help many people gain access to the utility this creative person has helped realize. There are situations where the big company disturbs the project so much it fails, but I assume you’re actually asking what happens when someone else profits off of your work.

Well in the theoretical I am also imagining that all parties share. This would mean that even if AWS takes on the code and sells cloud services with it, they would only be competing against other cloud providers who could provide an identical service. That is to say there is no one way source code exchange, it should be mutual. In this case, I would argue society only stands to gain from AWS entering the fray. It is a pure positive and not a dilemma directly.

Then there is the question of the individual. This one individual worked hard on something for five years and then a big company swooped in and took the profit they could have made. But if it is open source in my theoretical then anyone could have swooped in at any time, and the creator should have known that was a possibility. They never should have sunk more effort in to the project than they were comfortable with knowing an alternative provider could have taken over the market. That creative person should instead have joined groups of other engineers working on projects that people need. Perhaps they contribute to a project that eventually gets taken up by AWS, but it would not damage their livelihood as they would just shift focus to another.

We play by the rules we’re given. In a society where everyone shares, creative projects do not strictly belong to one individual. We would not make choices that exposed us to risks we did not in some way accept.

Some would say that without this person being willing to sink five years in to something for their own profit, they would never be creative and this would be a loss for society. But I don’t believe that. I’m two and a half years in to a project that I’ve licensed CC0 & BSD. Anyone could swoop in at any time and bring it to production, potentially earning great profit. And I would find it a great honor if someone did that. So you see, the creative drive exists outside of the need for profit.

As far as how people survive - there is a great deal of work that cannot be digitally duplicated. You can pirate a musicians albums but you can’t pirate a live show. In a world where there was no IP restrictions and we all shared, people would find income doing novel work, instead of duplicating something someone had already done. One good hack to this is to automatically provide for everyone. Universal basic services. Then there’s no starving artists.

Sidebar: IP laws are not strictly necessary to enforce this. You are not decent to your neighbor because the law requires it. If society values open source and collaboration and boycotts those who would use IP law selfishly, we can accomplish this all with no change in laws. Some kind of union system can help enforce these boycotts and formalize their terms. Though some laws do need to change to reduce the benefits of playing selfishly.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#153
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. An idea I've been having lately, and one that might be unpopular on this site, is that we've found all the low-hanging in electronics, networking, and software. So the main reason why it seems like there are no new ideas is because we're only looking at place…

There are still millions of ideas. You just need to look around a little more and massive problems (opportunities) are everywhere. In my job (tech leadership consulting, dev, etc) we deep dive on a new company/industry every few weeks when kicking off new projects and it seems like every niche industry or business has like 50 grotesque inefficiencies and incumbent crappy solutions providers just waiting for someone w…

I'm not sure confident those inefficiencies are as easy to solve as you think. I've work on several projects where the goal was to overhaul a really old webapp. The end result usually ends up being at at the same level of performance as the original design. Worse, management often demands a vast increase in features, which makes the product slower, not faster.

Not to say we don't find big performance gains here and there. But the trend does seem to be heading towards optimization and not revolutionary improvements.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.

>most of it fairly trivial Medical and government are the 2 examples I would think of as the least trivial places to work in. There is nothing to be discovered or invented in these sections. We all know what they need, its just close to impossible to get over the political hurdles to actually do it.

I meant that the technology needed is fairly trivial. Building something that actually helps is of course a different thing.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#155
post #108
post #83

Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any…

This reminds me of an idea I fell in love with: an app can be a home-cooked meal. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ We can build software that can't scale and won't sell, solely for the enjoyment of those we love. We're not running out of ideas. We're just limiting ourselves to the small subset of problems that are worth solving for money.

While we are at it, I created an app for my 3rd grader. Just her. It has 1 user.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#156
post #108
post #83

Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any…

This reminds me of an idea I fell in love with: an app can be a home-cooked meal. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ We can build software that can't scale and won't sell, solely for the enjoyment of those we love. We're not running out of ideas. We're just limiting ourselves to the small subset of problems that are worth solving for money.

Any unprofitable problem can be redefined from "How to Solve Unprofitable Problem X for Me or Friends, Etc." to "How to Solve Problem X Profitably".

Even small problems may be hidden economic launch pads, given that the ingenuity to make their solutions profitable is likely to provide surprising insights.

Generic approaches to making an unprofitable niche more profitable to serve:

- Generalize the problem in some novel but useful way, so the solution has increased market size

- Generalize to a user customizable solution, to offload costs of complete specialization

- Reduce the costs of creating the solution in some way, such as new specialized tooling

- Divide up the problem/solution into subproblems/solutions whose potential value as a flexible toolkit is greater than a monolithic solution.

- Identify a small market that having adopted a small unprofitable solution will now be easy customers for related products, i.e. amortizing the initial cost across the long term value of customer contacts

Thinking deeply about the specifics of a problem once may result in more novel specific approaches.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.

>most of it fairly trivial Medical and government are the 2 examples I would think of as the least trivial places to work in. There is nothing to be discovered or invented in these sections. We all know what they need, its just close to impossible to get over the political hurdles to actually do it.

There's plenty to invent even there, even in the theoretical mathematical areas! There are all sorts of interesting ideas around provably correct elections implemented via things like zero knowledge proofs or calculations from various sorts of private keys.

Can I give you some sort of receipt when you vote that can't be used to figure out who you voted for but can be used to determine that your vote was tallied correctly? Quite possibly!

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was originally in response to your parent, but gonna attach it to your comment instead, cause you're right. I don't believe we've found the low-hanging fruit at all, it's still all over the place. There are hundreds of pieces of software and hardware that are expensive, or unintuitive, or user-hostile, many are all of the above. HN complains every day about bad software. Is this really the best we've got? There'…

I think its a case of diminishing returns - yes there is sucky legacy software everywhere, but the ROI was much greater when introducing software in a space where there was none, or the incumbent system hasn't met growing needs.

Agreed. We're not finding something as big as the Internet again. Smartphones more or less look like the same across generations now. Innovation seems to be much more gradual than it use to be.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#159
post #108
post #83

Ideas are easy to find, it's just that the bounds that we have been limited to work within, both economically and societally, have become tighter and tighter. Today, the leadership of the vast majority of private institutions have only the goal of increasing their own economic power, and similarly there is constant media production reminding people how important the almighty economy is, causing people to focus on any…

This reminds me of an idea I fell in love with: an app can be a home-cooked meal. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ We can build software that can't scale and won't sell, solely for the enjoyment of those we love. We're not running out of ideas. We're just limiting ourselves to the small subset of problems that are worth solving for money.

If you like this idea checkout suckless software (https://suckless.org/). I've finally had the free time lately to start tweaking their "recipes".

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we're still really far from using the potential of software. Just look how terribly inefficient and error-prone most processes in, for example, hospitals or government agencies still are. There might be no more quicksorts to discover, but there is still plenty of work to do, most of it fairly trivial.

>most of it fairly trivial Medical and government are the 2 examples I would think of as the least trivial places to work in. There is nothing to be discovered or invented in these sections. We all know what they need, its just close to impossible to get over the political hurdles to actually do it.

Clearly there’s at least one major discovery waiting for someone: how to jump those hurdles
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