Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024?

29 pointsglowingvoices40 comments

- Use lists instead of long paragraphs.

- One prediction per list item.

Historical:

2023: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125628

2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746236

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988

2017: none?

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370

2013: none?

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970023

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681

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1. Election year, so massive BLM or similar riots in the USA.

2. The economic gap between Western/Northern European countries and the USA is increasingly acknowledged. It becomes evident that the two regions are on divergent paths. The EU promises more regulation.

3. Surveillance and control throughout society continues to increase thanks to technology. Employers over employees, states over citizens.

Re 1: Could be BLM. Could be MAGA. Could be both, in different places. Could even be an armed clash between them.

Re 2: I don't know about "acknowledged". I might go with "obvious", but "acknowledged" requires people admitting it. I think it's going to be a while before that happens.

My most pessimistic outlook is another 9/11 incident close to elections. It's the perfect moment - Americans are pissed with what's happening in the Middle East. They're pissed about their own quality of life and poverty. They're pissed about the poor handling of COVID and lockdowns. America's enemies may use it to provoke American policy to be more isolationist, much like it was pre-Pearl Harbor, because doubling down on the war on terror sounds like a bad idea.

It's also quite common for terrorists/rebels/etc to make moves close to elections because they expect it to be a time when govs are too tied down with campaigning to act decisively.

I predict that there will be a post at the end of the year asking for predictions of the next year!

I will up this to multiple posts.

My predictions:

1. state-space models make transformer based models obsolete

2. Cuda killer gets set loose by AMD

3. The world's first successful head transplant takes place

4. Children of Dune gets greenlit

5. Lex Friedman retires from interviewing

There's no such thing as a "head transplant". The person receiving the transplant is the one whose head it is. The transplant they receive is the rest of the body. Therefore, "full body transplant" is a more accurate term.

Respectfully, I don't think you or anyone else alive right now actually knows how this would go down. The amount of interactions between organs, central nervous system, endocrine system, and brain means I'm not sure anybody involved would remain "them"

Why do you think Lex will retire? Did he indicate something?

State space?

See https://srush.github.io/annotated-s4.

I also think state-space models will make a comeback.

Which Lex? Friedman or Fridman? They both do podcasts and interviews.

> state-space models make transformer based models obsolete

We will see whether they work on a large scale pretty soon. I hope they will, but they might not be. There're models which might outperform more advanced models on the smaller scale, and I haven't heard how Mamba performs on GPT scale.

Physics is falsified by experimental evidence as Barry-1 pushes itself into a 100 km higher orbit, despite a lack of propellant. Quantized inertia makes it to the cover of Nature.

We fail to adopt Capability Based Security, and continue to suffer through security incident after incident.

Bitcoin reaches a peak of $120,000, and subsequently drops back 50%

BitGrid comes out of left field as the high performance replacement for the Turing machine in academic lessons. The fact that it turns out to be faster, yet simpler than all existing AI hardware stuns many.

* Apple rumoured to be working on sunglasses similar to Meta Ray-bans

* Regulation is passed specifically to limit what artificial partners can do. Possible limitations: alignment required, limits in ERP, limits on session time. Best bet is China.

* Stronger regulation is passed to limit unauthorised cloning of people’s voices in one of the major economies. This beyond current weak IP and privacy laws.

* AI becomes a scapegoat in several major elections.

What I got right last year:

- text and image generating AI is hugely disruptive to education and content generation

This was pretty obvious

- Inflation eases, stock market recovers

Less obvious at the time but still likely

- A Twitter alternative breaks through.

Who woulda thunk that it would be Meta with Threads

- One of the big tech companies joins the fediverse (Microsoft most likely)

Once again, Meta for the win with Threads joining the fediverse

Now, nobody look back at all the predictions I made that didn’t happen.

Also, fairly gutted that Reddit hobbling its API was my 2022 prediction. I’m clearly prognosticating too far into the future.

- AI startups crash and burn. OpenAI raises prices dramatically. ChatGPT and Bard start subtly adding product ads into their responses.

- Quality of life in the US continues to decline. Shantytowns start springing up in California. Rule of law shows cracks and gang-controlled zones expand.

- Entrepreneurs stop immigrating from China/India and prefer to stay there and build.

- Israel declares victory in Gaza and most people forget about the whole thing.

- Russia stops advancing, digs in. Ukraine continues sending drones in, but human casualties essentially stop. Turkey, Poland, and Scandinavian countries become more friendly with Russia.

- TSMC continues moving its operations from Taiwan to mainland China.

- Oil and gas production boom in the US, many tech workers end up working on the pipelines.

> Entrepreneurs stop immigrating from China/India

I don't think this will happen anytime soon. The developer market in India is really bad and it is still the dream of many young Indians to migrate to EU/US/etc. as soon as possible. Brain drain is something that will unfortunately take a long time to fix.

The number of skilled programmers making the leap to US/EU/UAE/etc. only has to change a little bit to make a big difference in the top-end quality of the Indian tech scene.

Why would Poland and Scandinavian countries become friendly with Russia? Poland's massive military build up is specifically to counter Russia.

If I'm right, it'll be hard to measure. Maybe it'll manifest as more people using VK in those countries.

There will be some black swan event that dominates the elections that we have no idea about/hasn't happened yet now.

The US economy continues to roar ahead of the rest of the world, to the shock of everyone.

The April total eclipse is really cool.

1. The 'swipe-based' dating app model (Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, etc) begins to implode. Driven on one hand by the rise of AI partners, and on the other hand by a resurgence of IRL in-person events.

2. The US sees its first domestic terrorist attack by consumer drone

3. A major tech company (Microsoft?) announces an enterprise competitor to the Vision Pro that only functions while tethered to a desktop PC. We see VR devices bifurcate into recreational wireless headsets and tethered enterprise models.

4. Tiktok loses market share

Server-side WASM takes off with the re-implementation of PHP, Ruby/Rails, Python, and others, and a WASM based virtual server (shell, filesystem, web server, etc..) Cost more but has better security for both the host and user.

My prediction for 2025 is that many systems will break because their certificates were set to expire on 31DEC 2024.

Starship gets up.

California quake.

Ukraine gets messier.

President Harris.

Guyana concessions.

Hurricane Gordon and Florida.

Atlanta/Toronto world series.

Carbondale tornado.

I only have one prediction for 2024 with increasing likelihood of happening due to yet another chaotic election year, after reviewing the predictions for 2023 in [0].

* Another war will be started in the east. This time most likely with China invading Taiwan due to the weakness of leadership in the US under Biden. If Biden gets elected again, then it will certainly happen. Otherwise, the invasion will be further delayed.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38828538

From a political and strategic standpoint - It makes no sense for China to attempt an invasion of Taiwan in 2024. If anything, they're better off waiting to see who wins the U.S presidential election in November. Because huge policy difference on involvement there between Biden and Trump.

Edit: One caveat being how badly China's economy does in the first half of 2024.

Which President are you saying is less likely to fight China? The one that started the trade war or the one that publicly announced the US would defend Taiwan and has been actively changing defensive posture to the Pacific and developing new weapons and capabilities aimed at that theater?

I don’t see a big policy difference between the two and I definitely don’t see how Biden has been weak (gp). It would be easy for Trump to sell a war with China to his voters.

Trump's MO is to "make a deal" where we actually lose out but he gains face with his supporter cabal.

Biden has literally said that we would defend Taiwan. China doesn't want to risk defeat. With Trump they know they can make some sort of weird deal to essentially get the win. It's not like the military would operate any differently in a conflict, the Pres barely influences their plans.

Continued war formations.

A small renaissance, rediscovery of innovation and quality in tech.

* Trump will pick a woman for VP. But won't be Haley.

* Russia & Ukraine come to the table. Nothing of substance will be decided or agreed upon.

* Election season here will be chaotic as usual. It's a going to be a long year.

* Disinformation campaigns, now with the use of generative AI will be turned up to the max. Mainly targeting users on Tiktok, WhatsApp and Facebook.

* Biden will lose the election simply because of a divided democratic party. Gen-Z turn out will be lower than expected. Although results of the election won't be certain until well into late December, 2024 or January 2025.

* Venezuela attempts to grab parts of Guyana. The brits get involved. (They've already sent couple of naval ships into the region).

* Expectations ,excitement and investments around LLMs starts to taper off.

* Musk starts renegotiating financing to keep X going. Possibly due to pressure from investors that initially put up the money to buy twitter.

* Basically it's going to 2023, with more brush fires around the world.

* U.S economy will continue to hum along. But growth will slow a bit, due to cost of borrowing.

Writing the Obvious

3nm finally going mainstream. Zen 5 and Zen 5C coming. Resurgence of Mini LED ( or basically LCD ) and is taking more market share in large size TV, not completely dominated by OLED as previously thought. ARM Cortex X5 finally catching up to Apple M2 / M3 in terms of IPC. x86 on Server remains strong, even though AWS is moving to everything Graviton. We may have seen the cheapest NAND and DRAM in the next 2-3 years ( and dare I say next 5 years ) and they will rebound to or at least stay a roughly current price especially NAND.

World Overview

Hong Kong and Mainland China officially enters into recession, we may see the rest of the world follows either in late 2024 or 2025. For a lot of people, this will be their first taste of recessions. Large part of the world enjoy stable growth since 2008. This one could be ugly.

UK Still trying to figure out whether it has officially Brexited or not. And still haven’t figure out its place on the International market. As they continued to “levelled-down”.

Taiwan will still be safe. Hot War still on-going. ( God I wish I am wrong ).

Full Manufacturing Chain forming just outside of China. South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam. And India. Japanese Manufacturing back in full force. MIJ to become a thing again.

There may be another pandemic coming from China.

Others and Wishful Thinkings

FreeBSD usage picking up.

I can finally register a .web domain name.

We see the Fall of All Big Tech apart from Microsoft. And Windows 12 may be surprisingly well designed.

The world see more appreciation for Nim 2.0, Zig, Ada and Crystal.

Ruby Rails makes a come back.

More frontend moving to Turbo / LiveView like development. Browser makers finally cares more about interactive web page rather than full blown web apps.

JPEG XL gains momentum, and hopefully a video codec based on it.

GPU design that put more focus on Nanite.

x266 releases, along with official VVC decoding in FFMpeg.

The return of AirPort Extreme with WiFi 7. And Time Capsule for iOS.

5Gbps Ethernet becomes the norm replacing 1Gbps AND 2.5Gbps.

We are still no where near Lv 5 AV or AGI but we see continuous improvement with ChatGPT and Generative AI.

Rapid switching to 5G so we are all better off.

The world finally give more respect to Technology outside of Software or Silicon Valley. i.e Technology that is not Software. From BioTech, ArgiTech, FoodTech, Construction Tech.

With the introduction of VisionPro, VR. The whole software industry finally put “latency” on their mind map. Everything right now is painfully slow.

And finally. Find time to work on my project and show it on HN.

I don’t see China officially entering into recession even if they enter into one unofficially. Each time a recession has happened in the past since 1990 or so, it was not acknowledged and the only clue that they realized it at all would be the talk about “economic recovery” afterwards.

What's your reasoning for late 2024/2025 for the recession? That's oddly specific

Bitcoin breaks all time high.

Trump wins 2024 election.

Ukraine has a breakthrough but war not ending.

Hamas destroyed, Israel takes over Gaza’s management and security completely.

China’s economy still in poor shape as more crises require ever more bailouts and censorship of news.

Elon outed as Russian agent

A Russian agent in his position would be bolstering Twitter in effort to foment an "American Arab Spring",

wouldn't they?

A competent Russian agent in his position probably would...

- AI underwhelms in terms of advancements and economic benefits (although we do get marginally better models), but politicians begin to become increasingly concerned by politically and sexuality controversial AI generated content and demand big tech does / regulators do more.

- The public continues to be increasingly gaslight as conspiracy theorists, with this becoming a major theme of the US presidential election where every candidate that isn't Biden is considered a conspiracy theorist in one way or another. Many politicians, judges and big tech CEOs believe we need to do more to prevent "conspiracy theorist" candidates like, Trump, Vivek, RFK, and their European counterparts being elected.

- Sentiment on VR shifts. Many of those previously sceptical about AR/VR acknowledge that it's likely one of the next major tech trends.

- Tensions regarding RU/UA further escalates after path to RU victory becomes clear. Many leaders dislike the the concessions UA will need to make to Russia. After reluctant peace negotiations leaders demand that UA is given long-range offensive weapons to defend themselves from further Russian attacks. European borders become more militarised. Russia continues escalate rhetoric around nuclear conflict.

- China's economy continues to stagnate.

- Economic growth in US remains "surprisingly" robust, especially when contrasted with Europe. Europe continues to blame their economic problems on Russia, the rich not paying enough tax and a lack of regulation.

Random things:

- We make a significant advancement in curing some common age-related disease like cancer or alzheimer's.

- Elon Musk dies leading to wide-spread conspiracies regarding the cause of his death. This causes Joe Rogan and others to ramp up conspiracy content in the run up to the US presidential election and are then deplatformed for spreading harmful "misinformation".

- Racial and cultural tensions in Western Europe escalate significantly. Far-right parties and narratives make significant headway, however the rise of the far-right is met equally by the rise of far-left parties and narratives. This racial and cultural division will largely define the lines of European politics this decade with all parties supporting increasingly authoritarian policies to fix the problems of the other side.

Trump, scarier AI shit.

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