Things are always changing, new gaps forming. Is a lot of the low hanging fruit gone? Yea, but still a lot of opportunity out there.
Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
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Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#12Startup philosophies become outdated fast.
Early 2000s it was: just put it online and it will sell, at a time when online businesses were still new.
Paul Graham's Y Combinator was: create a good product and it will sell, at a time when online businesses were these half-assed 2000s era products.
AirBnB/Uber's generation is: get a fuck ton of funding and do mildly illegal shit fast, and then use your funding and lawyers to rewrite the law. So called "disruption".
(I am not going to mention OpenAI and other AI startups because they are a class of their own.)
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#13There are gaps everywhere , especially in science/research. Consider looking into a Ph.D. if you’re hungry to find, master, and close a gap. Not being sarcastic, btw. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know and how many gaps there are in your field.
Brain research
I watched a lecture series on the brain and my take away was that we really don't know "how the brain works"
Surprised me how much is unknown compared to say fields like physics/chemistry
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#14There are gaps everywhere , especially in science/research. Consider looking into a Ph.D. if you’re hungry to find, master, and close a gap. Not being sarcastic, btw. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know and how many gaps there are in your field.
Do not do this. This is a trap. Research and higher academics are in effect a scam in modern day. At one point they were useful, but now everything done is overwhelmingly private R&D. In academia you will scrounge for scraps and never pay off the loans.
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#15Perhaps the low hanging fruits in this era of technology/software landscape have been poached. However, I can find hundreds of problems just in the realm of software architecture and infrastructure management that need to be addressed and improved.
Spend a decade in any industry and you will see the gaps more clearly.
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#16OK - a big problem for starters - how to get people off of their screens and focus on something else - like life in general? Given the way digital infrastructure exists as is today, this is a freakishly difficult problem. In other words - how'd you make digital systems all around you "attention-enhancing" rather than "attention-diluting"
Isn't life in general effectively a solved problem by now? What more focus does it need?
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#17> The gaps seem very teeny-tiny
That's how all markets start. Every product or startup needs to start off as a very targeted application because otherwise you will drown in complexity and lack of strategy, but with a forward facing vision on how to expand into adjacent problem spaces.
$TECHNOLOGICAL_APPLICATION for $SPECIFIC_INDUSTRY is always the best method to start building out a product, and expanding from there.
> Is finding gaps just hard now
No.
You might just not be looking hard enough. Try and find specific problems in a domain you are very experienced in.
Also be open to pivot if needed. For example, Slack started off as a chat-app within a failed videogame.
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#18Kinda weird to ask when we're at the dawn of AI. There's relatively low hanging fruit everywhere right now thanks to LLMs, the industry will be digesting use cases of just the tech we have today for the next decade or more. It's not even that hard to get caught up with the research and start kicking out research ideas. Two weeks ago I was telling my father that the next step in transformer efficiency would be an algorithm that worked more like diffusion models, in which many tokens are predicted simultaneously with the model incrementally pushing them towards the correct answer. Just a day or two ago, CLLMs are announced and do exactly that. My maths isn't good enough to write that sort of paper but the idea was so low hanging that even a dabbler could work out what to do.
And that's ignoring all the bits of tech we use every day that could just be a lot better. JVM build systems are a mess, there is a serious need for competition there, to pick just one example that bothers me regularly.
Once you get into the swing of it the problem is not gonna be finding ideas. The problem will be finding ideas that other people will pay for. That's the hardest constraint.
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#19There are gaps everywhere , especially in science/research. Consider looking into a Ph.D. if you’re hungry to find, master, and close a gap. Not being sarcastic, btw. The more you know, the more you realize how little you know and how many gaps there are in your field.
Do not do this. This is a trap. Research and higher academics are in effect a scam in modern day. At one point they were useful, but now everything done is overwhelmingly private R&D. In academia you will scrounge for scraps and never pay off the loans.
FWIW, I did my PhD in neuroscience and am now working in R&D in biopharma. It would be very difficult to have landed my current position without a PhD. Lastly, most STEM PhD programs pay a stipend (a small one, mine was 30k/year), so you’re not going into debt to get one.
I agree with your sentiment. Academia as a career path isn’t viable (or even feasible) for the majority of people who get a PhD
Re: Is finding gaps just hard now? As a 24 yo, everything seems to be done already
#20Let's see: maybe try writing sentences that starts with "I wish I could".