What are emerging/promising areas of tech to get into today?

Computing is ripe for disruption. I think it's high time for computing to end bring the next big field in tech.

The various industries have deeply balkanized the field & expertly extract value with endless apps that primarily capture value for the app maker, while barely creating value for the user. We are in a late-appification stage.

I think the biggest value area of the future are undoing the damage of all this disruption & market capture - of undoing all these apps! - & building strong principled powerful general computing systems.

This is targeted to data scientists far more than general general computing, but I like how broadly this post expands the problem of what data science computing is: The Road to Composable Data Systems: Thoughts on the Last 15 Years and the Future. That unpacking of concerns, understanding & building the general substrate, calls powerfully to me. I think even more general computing forms lie in this direction, that expand how all computing by all users would work, in a way that better augments the user's intellect. https://wesmckinney.com/blog/looking-back-15-years/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367236

Figuring out how to make general progress that's even more accessible, less specialists & more "just how this computer works" in a way that everyone can potentially see & touch is the valuable work that is almost entirely ignored & unworked on now. It's a colossal opportunity.

Nothing that I'm aware of, no. The reason this is on my radar is I'm working part time for a manufacturing company for which the existing MRP solutions don't work.

Do you mind if I bend your ear about what your needs are? If so, send me an email. It's in my profile.

Synthetic food.

I think good synthetic meat etc is still some way in the future, but things like milk, juices, pulps, and animal feed should be easier and make even more sense.

Why grow a whole tree when you just want OJ, a whole cow when you just want it's breast secretions, etc?

I think it’s mainly because of the myriad of rules and laws surrounding budgeting. Like, we’re using BC365 right, but we’re also paying a 3rd party consultant to build some custom APIs into BC365 for us because the laws needed to “manage” Danish companies require more features than BC365 provides. SAP would be able to handle some of those better, but SAP is sort of this thing that takes over the way you do ERP. And it’s still not really build to handle our use case of managing many companies in many different countries.

There is also the issue of how you’d likely want payment systems to integrate with your ERP system in the year 2023. But payment systems are two separate things, one deals with banking and managing bank accounts and one deals with the transfer of payments. You’d think they should all be just one system, I do, but the rules and laws are so complex that they are 3 because you can have an entire enterprise sized company specialise in just one of those areas due to the complexity of the laws. I’ll give you one example, in Italy every “bill” (sorry I don’t know the English word for faktura”) has to pass through a national registry. This is mafia prevention, and frankly a rather good idea. It also means that a budget system in Italy needs functionality to handle the flow of obtaining SDI approval (the Italian thing). And that’s just one small tip of the iceberg of complexity you’re dealing with.

Automation is a whole other topic. That is probably ripe for disruption, but it’s already been sort of disrupted by Robot Process Automation. Which again has its own sets or issues, because some of the actions that you would like to automate can’t be. I forget which EU country made it illegal to approve payments automatically, but ideally you’d like automation on the outgoing payments of the transactions you’ve already got approved on your books. But then you can in most countries and not in others because of the law. Sometimes there is also the need for physical two-factor verification to log into things. In Denmark your systems can’t log into company bank accounts unless you build a robot to press a button and read a number on a little IOT device.

It’s the same classic problem when selling business products; the buyers are usually not the users, so no user-friendly features are created; only features which would look good in a demo to the buyers.

Therefore, no products which only contain features which help users (and save them money) can be a success, since the buyers won’t be impressed by it, and will not pay for it.