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Comment by rcarr | Hacker News Reader

This 1000%. As an investor, if interest rates aren't zero, why would you put your money in a risky startup when you could park it in a load of other places and still get a decent return? It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been. You're going to have to come up with something extremely original and brilliant or utilising some kind of new tech in order to succeed on a big scale.

It's got very little to do with AI. Other industries are far more affected by AI than software engineering e.g in my opinion, the amount of graphic designers and copy writers are both going to shrink massively.

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> It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been

I think there's plenty of low hanging fruit left, especially when it comes to improving current systems that we assume inherently have to suck simply because they always have.

Plus there's new fruit growing every day. There's potentially huge opportunities in improving social media right now. Who would have guessed 5 years ago we could see legitimate vulnerability in the major platforms?

Improving social media is low hanging fruit? How so?

Threads, ActivityPub, Bluesky, nostr. There's hasn't been this much of a shake up in over a decade. Will it be enough? Who knows. But I'm hopeful we'll come out with something healthier than what we've been doing with algorithmic curation.

IMO the problem wasn't with how social media was implemented, it just coincided with a culture shift to being always online that the world wasn't really ready for.

These alternatives are fine (I'm a fan of mastodon myself) but I feel they don't really address the issues of the frayed social fabric we're currently experiencing in our societies.

In other words: these platforms aren't encouraging dialogue, they simply accepted that we can't get along so they started these small clubs so we can all have our carefully curated echo chambers.

So no, fixing social media isn't a low hanging fruit, not even close.

According to this Kurzgesagt video [1] the problem isn't echo chambers, the problem is the opposite. Encouraging online dialog isn't the solution if he's right. He suggests we go back to smaller online communities and more IRL interaction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0

"Shakeup" is generous.

> It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been

I would say this is somewhat true for "mostly software-contained" ideas, meaning things that don't take external domain knowledge besides software engineering

There is still plenty of things in multi-domain fields (software engineering + something else), like biotech. But being multi domain makes the barrier to entry MUCH higher for the main startup class of people (software engineers coming out of uni or big tech)

Yes but low-hanging fruit that can deliver 1000X returns on capital over a 5-10 year time horizon -- that's something different.

Most investors are tickled with 20x.

If anything I would expect a pop in demand for software engineers from ai. Those who know, know you can’t just ask chat gpt to integrate with the business by wiring a prompt.

Hi, can you please integrate your self into my business and increase my revenue by 20% and cut cost of workforce by 30%. Here are the master passwords to our aws account, jira, and payroll. Thanks! See you when in back from my 3 month vacation!

> Hi, can you please integrate your self into my business and increase my revenue by 20% and cut cost of workforce by 30%.

That's not how computers work...

I guarantee you that is how 99.9% of managers believe AI works, and how 90% of the services selling them on AI tell them it works.

Well . . . AI telling meat robots how to do glue code doesn't seem that far off the mark.

Then again, "telling meat robots how to do glue code" is the manager's job, isn't it?

That's the promise behind AI tho

I doubt it'll affect graphic designers much. Artists, yeah. But i haven't seen any model or tool that is even remotely doing any meaningful graphic design solution or work. Majority of graphic designers have been using stock assets for graphics anyway, so ai will be another better asset generator.

Africa, LATAM, and parts of Asia are still for grabs.

Same reason why people have always invested money into startups - the potential for greater returns than parking them in safer investments.

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