Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2023?

Yeah it's been hitting even central Europe (Germany, France, Benelux AT/CH etc) for the last few years.

It's harder to notice from afar because it's not deserty (yet) but the temperatures are going up all year and with it the obvious problems and also new and "exciting" fauna and flora is arriving.

Many places in that area are historically very water rich that's why the consequences to everyday life are often not yet that severe.

Economy:

- Commodities will begin a new boom, aided by the war in Ukraine and the drought in South America

- Apple will collapse in the same way Tesla and Meta collapsed this year

- Europe will enter a deep recession. Lagarde will be too late to stop inflation by raising rates so the hard landing will be extra hard. The US is in a better position for a not-so-hard landing, but...

- China will start using their financial leverage to increase prices in the West and force further hikes/delay pivots

- Green energy sources fail to deliver in Europe and the US but they keep course with de-nuclearization. The non-Western-alligned take the opposite approach and begin investing in nuclear in bulk (Japan, India, South America)

- This is more longer term but the US market becomes a trading market for the next 10 years or so. Like after 2000 or after 1970.

Politics:

- Labor movements will begin gaining steam due to the cost-of-living crisis in the West.

- Neoliberalism and globalism breathe their breaths as the world goes back to blocks. This exacerbates the aformentioned cost-of-living crisis with not just price increases but shortages

- Left-wing parties in Europe manage to either win their scheduled elections (Spain, Finland, Greece) or win snap elections (UK, Ireland), turning Europe totally red. The new EU pressures Ukraine to capitulate and give up on the separatist provinces (both because they sympathyse with Russia since always and because this helps ease cost of energy)

- China doesn't invade Taiwan. They never even planned to do that.

- CBDC are introduced in Canada and Europe. The first right-wing individuals get locked out due to them.

- Trump is condemned for January 6th.

- A very serious and morally outrageous scandal is revealed about the United States and its politicians by someone who sells it to an American enemy to publish

Tech:

- Layoffs continue and get worse. Google layoffs a lot

- There is one "big" IPO from one of the remaining unicorns that ends up as bad as WeWork

- The AI-mounted-over-an-LLM startup becomes the new Web3 startup, nothing useful comes out of it

- The FOMO with AI becomes the the new FOMO for crypto/metaverse

- Politics will delay further research into AI in the West due to misunderstanding of what things like GPTChat and Stable Diffusion do

- Private equity tech companies will see their valuations cut at at least 60%. Many new startups will close even when they are "well-funded".

- Salaries will collapse. Not at the "teacher in rural Guatemala"-level but the days of the $500k senior salary are gone.

- As a consequence of that: "geoarbitrage" becomes the new thing. Developers moving to LCOL countries with low taxes to work remotely for companies in the US, Europe or wherever, keeping costs low but their savings rates high. Tech people with great resumes will flock to Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, Cyprus, Thailand, Malaysia and work as contractors.

- This in turn will bring an even bigger push for unionization of tech workers in the US. And protests (sometimes violent) in third-world countries against these economic nomads (my first guess will be either Portugal or Mexico, where people are already being priced out of their family neighborhoods)

- Linux notebooks begins to eat Macbook's share

- At least one of those "frontend" companies that spend too much time promoting conferences and meetups goes belly up ugly, like Polly did this year

- Due to the ever advancing power of LLM and the open-source nature of Linux and friends - the list of open issues across all variants will decrease and create a dangerous competitor to mainstream operating systems and increase overall Linux adoption perpetuating above.

- Fusion technology will make leaps on leaps further fuelling A.I capabilities and enabling adoption of fusion powered space exploration.

- The continued growth and expansion of the gig economy and the rise of remote work will change the way we work and interact with each other, potentially leading to new forms of employment and ways of organizing work.

- The continued evolution of virtual and augmented reality technologies will create new opportunities for entertainment, education, and training, and may also have applications in fields such as healthcare and military training.

- Facebook as a product becomes devoid of users to the point of being pivoted to a simple social / event tracking application.

- Google fails to keep up with industry leaders in A.I. technology and falters in the market leading to the eventual disbandment of Alphabet.

To be fair though, a completely random bet that Russia invades a country within a particular year has a respectable chance of being accurate. Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine. Short memories...

> devs being too afraid to suggest something else

What is the "something else" to React that you allude to? Vue? NextJS? Preact? Angular? Heh, PHP?

I've tried almost every big-name web app framework under the sun, React for 7 years, Angular an age ago for a year or two. Vue for a few months. Etc. In my experience, everythig either trends away from React (Vue, Angular, ...) and fails ("fail" -> never gains widespread adoption, zero job market, or just less popular than React, etc.), or sticks close to React (Preact, ...) and still fails because they have no real unique offering/large benefit over React, particularly in "enterprise" setting (which is what predominantly matters).

> and because "everyone else" is doing it

That's tautological. {thing} isn't popular for no reason. There is always some unique value-add that {thing} offers over {competing things}.

One of the life lessons I always remember for myself, particularly in software development: There better be a very good reason why you're betting against the mass. They are many and a good proportion of them smarter than you.