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Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

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Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#181

Post by dredmorbius »

crones wrote: post #179
dredmorbius wrote: post #42

Some time in (I think) the past few months, someone posted a link to an AT&T or Bell Labs executive talking to a team of his engineers about the state of innovation at the phone company. The context was the 1970s, and a number of innovations -- direct dialing and touch-tone dialing were I believe two of them. It transpired that these had been. developed decades before deployment -- direct dialing being a 19th century…

I am pretty sure you are referring to Russ Ackoff's lecture about his time at Bell Labs: https://vimeo.com/148192220 (If you haven't already read it and are interested in Bell Labs, 'The Idea Factory' by Jon Gertner is worth checking out.)

Bingo! That's it, thanks so much!

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#182

Post by juststeve »

Hypx wrote: post #117
moosey wrote: 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…

> 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…

preach

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#183

Post by taphangum »

I actually wrote a post about coming up with ideas, and the difficulty of doing so before:

https://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/how-to-consis...

There are two things you need for ideas:

1. The raw material from which to generate them: Other older ideas.

2. A mind that is able to synthesize ideas appropriately.

Ideas becoming 'harder' to 'find', is simply a function of one of these two things not being fully optimized.

I personally don't think that we have less of either of the two.

So no, I don't think Ideas are getting harder to find.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#184

Post by FowlSoft2013 »

eagsalazar2 wrote: post #133
Hypx wrote: 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…

Agreed, I joined a consulting company earlier in the year for this exact purpose. I believe technologist have to be more willing to get out of their comfort zone in order to apply their skills to underserved industries. It's a risk and a great outcome isn't guaranteed but they have to be taken at some point.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#185

Post by mattlutze »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #147
adrianN wrote: post #144

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 are many, many things that these sectors need that are not yet invented. And quite frankly, while an existing solution might work in for their cases, unless it works in the confines of the regulatory environment of medical and government, then it’s not an actual solution.

Those peculiarities are part of the yet-to-be-discovered solutions, not just annoying barriers to adopting existing products.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#186

Post by haihaibye »

szczepano wrote: post #175
haihaibye wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countepoint: Covid-19 vaccine

What's your point because if it will start mutate too fast at this point you need to produce vaccine for every mutation that is deadly. For example flu vaccine is produced twice a year and not for every strain only for those that are most dangerous. Maybe there is need to develop new protection techniques instead of injecting dead virus into human body. Over the years it might become true that only way for human to s…

The point is, there's a need for the covid-19 vaccine before they invent it

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#187

Post by pacala »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #168
wolco wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Unity licease works. I think any licease that takes 50% of revenue would be fair to both parties with a minimum for the small user.

50% of revenue might make sense for Unity, where Unity provides clear value. But it absolutely would not make sense for some small library that gets used for a few operations. It also would not make sense for high profit work. Personally I’m seeking an end where everyone shares basically everything they do and no one extracts anything out of the duplication and re use of information.

That end is incredibly sad. We still have to pay our mortgage and our dentists, but can't ask for a fair pay for our highly skilled work. I guess we deserve the ad-based monetization model that has taken over the world. Brave new world, let's shill for megacorps with all the clickbait we can possibly muster.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#188

Post by [deleted] »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #152
pacala wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

[deleted]

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#190

Post by nicbou »

Nevermark wrote: post #156
nicbou wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nov…

Some problems just aren't that valuable to solve. I use tons of neat little tools like jsondiff.com that just aren't really worth paying for. Monetising those products would make them less pleasant to use, and I'd move to something else.

Some things can just remain simple and free, and that's fine.

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