You are not late (2014)
kk.org
kk.org
I started programming in 1985 and thought I was very likely too late. I was the same age as Chris Espinosa, who was Apple's head of documentation at age 14. At that time it was still not perfectly clear that PCs would be regarded as essential to business. I had no one to talk to about computers and programming. I was in a very rough spot in my life and had to teach myself everything, while not being sure I'd have a job in 5 years.
A decade later in 1996 I started at Microsoft, which virtually all of my peers thought had run its course. They were selling stock like crazy. By the time I left 4 years later the stock had gone up 1300%. Last I checked it's gone up yet another 2500% or so--I kept my 1,000 ESPP shares mostly out of nostalgia and thanks to a company that was so good to me.
I bought a website after the first dot com bust of 2001, monetized it by hiring well, and it provided a very good living for well over two decades after that.
This is an incredible time to start a web-based business because there's a surfeit of free and almost free tools for development all the way to deployment.
Give up.
Don’t chase a dream.
Just go find some drudgery for a paycheck. Don’t bother saving. You won’t need it.
You never had a shot anyway. Your ideas are stupid. Any time you think of a thing, someone else has thought of it first.
There’s no point in trying to make anything better. It’s all as good as it can possibly be.
Such a perfect world doesn’t need your contribution; can’t be changed by the likes of you; won’t care, even if you do manage to come up with something novel.
You’re too young to be taken seriously, and too late for everything, so why bother?
So get out there and fulfill your failure, and don’t worry about dreaming.
All the dreamers woke up ages ago.
I doubt that people 50 years ago were all rich.
That era represented the collapse of 8 bit microcomputers. They were huge, then nothing. Silicon Valley had boomed, then gone bust. No one had much use for computers except brave financial analysts willing to use the toylike Apple ][ for primitive spreadsheets. No one took the Mac seriously until Postscript and laser printers happened.
In October 1987 Black Monday hit, causing the worst market crash since the Depression. I hit up a bunch of angel investors—a term that didn’t even exist—to raise money for a batch file compiler. A compiler! That supported me and several employees for years.
Point is that you can always make opportunities happen even in hard times.
To me if you’re living in alignment with your values and aren’t too much of a drain on society most of the time, you’re successful.
Just because people though once that situation A was the case while it was actually situation B, and now it seems again that situation A is the case doesn't mean it is necessarily again situation B, only that it might be situation B. It also actually might be situation A. But if it is actually situation B, extrapolating from the past is not a good argument. Doesn't mean that there are no other good arguments.
No regrets at all.
Always?
I work harder than anybody I know personally. I am constantly learning new things. People ask me all the time how I "know this stuff", and that has been true since I was a kid in a desert town in the middle of nowhere that only had a library to learn from.
I have tried many, many ideas and failed. I'm halfway through life now. I've missed many opportunities in hindsight, likely due to my narrow fixation on details. This is an aspect of HFA, which is something I've only recently learned about myself.
I think what you've said is factually correct. But not everyone is equipped to exploit the opportunities that may exist, and may struggle to be aware of their limitations. Furthermore, life doesnt guarantee you anything - luck is always an element.
> Leaves more for people willing to work and to learn things.
> I upvoted your comment out of pity.
Even the hardest working people can luck out and become frustrated. That doesn't change the fact that their best stategy is probably not to give up, but maybe be a bit more empathetic?
I was sure lucky, but I put myself in luck’s way as often as possible. That’s after I got away from home in my teens after years of neglect, beatings, depression, suicidal ideation, and sexual abuse.
Be more empathetic to someone being snide after I made a sincere post trying to offer up some hope in hard times? Fuck that noise.
Things obviously change over time. It's not non sequitur to claim that opportunities have shrunk over time. Bringing up counter-examples of opportunities that existed 40 years ago is not an argument.
I don't know why you think opportunity must be constant. I don't think you would have had much success with your .com startup mentality in 300BC.
> I don't think you would have had much success with your .com startup mentality in 300BC.
Disagree? I’m a survivor. I would have looked around and tried to figure out the best ways not to die and to keep my family safe using what resources I had. Most people are less paranoid than I am and are willing to just get along. My instinct is to get a little ahead so I have a buffer.
In other words, it is always easy to think it is too late when looking back. But it is never too late if we try to look forward and imagine the things that have not invented yet and which will be around in 10-20 years time.
Marc Andreesen said glibly that Windows was nothing more than a poorly debugged set of device drivers. The technical press parroted it without any follow-through. When Microsoft came out with Internet Explorer, new versions of Excel, Word, and IIS, I knew they would win. Because device drivers are hard, nobody wrote them better, and Windows was good enough for millions of customers.
I think Microsofties low-key regarded me as a bit dull, because they believed the media had no agenda. I simply looked at the (public) accomplishments of my much younger coworkers and trusted my own observations.
To me, it's been "obvious" for the last US$2 trillion of market capitalisation growth that Apple's going to face monopoly investigations; it's "obvious" that Facebook is, in a deep fundamental sense, not even capable of being compatible with GDPR; and it was "obvious" to me in 2009 that the first true self-driving car sold to the general public (by the quality standard "doesn't come with a steering wheel and that's fine") would be around 2019 or so.
There's been a few places I've worked with young energetic co-workers (and I have been a young and energetic coder myself), and… in many cases those groups failed to make enough money and disbanded.
One result of a lifetime of not being able to predict the markets is the realisation, a decade ago, that my preferences in many areas are almost anti-correlated with the modal buyer: I like what normal people dislike or even loathe, and dislike or even hate what they prefer.
Predictions of how it will be are always worth writing down, to see how correct they are.
Microsoft and Apple are huge today, but it's entirely conceivable that both are shells of themselves in a decade's time.
EDIT: I will say, it may be a powerful story for anybody experiencing self doubt. Different people need different kinds of motivation.
Actually if everyone just does that, nobody will need to work!
Bitcoin's up 10x in the last 4 years.
Broadcom's up 6x in the last 4 years, 21x in 10 years.
Facebook/META's up 5x in the last 2 years, 20x in 11 years.
Uber's up 3.5x in 2 years.
Tesla was up 11x between 2019 and 2021.
Microsoft's up 10x in the last 9 years.
Amazon's up 11x in the last 10 years.
Apple's up 10x in the last 10 years.
Oracle's up 3x in the last 10 years.
People thought Microsoft had run its course, one year after the release of Windows 95?
Just as MS Word was dominating WordPerfect? And the likes of AutoCAD were dropping support for AIX, Solaris etc? When Photoshop had just released for Windows, and Apple's market share had dropped to about 3% ?
Wow! I know they were kinda late to online stuff, but still - strange how these things turn out, in hindsight!
Not sure if I made this clear, but I am referring to industry publications, and to what seemed to be a vast majority of my colleagues at Microsoft. Experienced business watchers who could read an SEC filing, and who had a mature grasp of business, knew better, but it wasn’t sexy to keep printing opinions like that.
I’m sure Department of Justice problems weren’t helping either. So these kids were exercising stock options like crazy because of the bad press.
These were people in their mid 20s who had entered these amazing jobs just out of college, and who had experienced several years of astonishing growth. They were both internally and externally very good at taking criticism. I think they just overcorrected at the first sign of trouble. I was a decade older, and had been studying business on my own for about 20 years by that point.
I had also worked for many companies that were nowhere near as well put together as Microsoft. Microsoft makes its share of mistakes, but never in ways that jeopardize the company’s existence. That may sound trivial, but if you’ve ever run a company, you’ll understand that it’s a surprisingly rare trait. Just managing not to fuck up too badly is exceedingly rare in the business world, and I think they didn’t quite understand that. Because they were open to criticism, they really couldn’t understand how special the company was at that time. Since they came in fresh from college, they had nothing to compare their jobs to. To them it was what any job should be.
Windows 2000 was really important for MS staying relevant in anything outside consumer. It really set up the next two decades.
Few college kids have experience with really massive enterprise setups and solutions, and so those were just entirely discounted out of hand.
I started coding in the 90's as a teen releasing shareware, with my first gig at Adobe in 2001, where they paid me $14/hr as an intern. Even though this was rough times for tech, me and my CS peers at UW felt a lot of optimism and enthusiasm about what could be built because the framework still supported idealists and we cared less about the economy (and we were definitely naive). Both the researchers and entrepreneurial types were very curious about inventing new paradigms.
When I talk to younger people now in CS, the enthusiasm seems to be split for 'pure researcher' types and 'entrepreneurial/builder types', with the latter having interest concentrated on what is booming (like AI), and more about what can be built but what will be able to raise large sums or attract more users. I'll caveat this with I don't know to what extent the people I talk to do have a bias, but I do wonder if there are less people willing to explore new frontiers now.
One major difference between now and then is that the fraction of US market cap that is tech, and to a lesser extent, tech's importance in the economy. I wonder if this established leader position somehow could make people less optimistic and willing to explore?
In my view the pure research types who land jobs have always been maybe 1%? UW is research heavy, don’t forget. And at the time I was at Microsoft almost no one had plans to quit and start their own company. Before I started there in 1996 I figured about 80% would—-an early indicator of how distorted my view was from press reports and my own biases. It seems to me that these days the vast majority are happy to be drones. Or am I way off?
In my time most of the employees were very smart students who just kind of fell into programming and were hooked in by Microsoft’s pioneering efforts at sending recruiters to colleges (rare at the time) and especially less-obvious choices such as Waterloo and Harvard.
What kind of shareware did you publish?
I interned at Microsoft in 2005, and it felt like most people there were just looking for something stable, with a side of Office Space-esque exit thoughts. The culture and scale was different in ways that seem weird to me today - One example is that Bill Gates invited all of the interns to have dinner at his house, which is something that is probably reserved only for startups nowadays, if even.
Re: shareware, I released a crappy checkers twist game for Mac, which was also very educational, and I was proud to have it on the MacAddict Magazine CD. [1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/5196-checkerwarz
Using "today" prices - something like $25-50 per person for the bus, $20 per for the film, $100 for the dinner, $400 for the Xbox - less than $1k all concerned.
You could argue there was more low-hanging fruit in terms of opportunity, but to anyone who was a product of the age, they weren't primed to see it. So the absolute amount of opportunity wasn't substantially different than it was before. Our mind plays tricks on us when we look into the past: "If I had known X, I could've done that." But, you didn't. And business is rife with survivor bias.
Today one is probably late to
"make a random open source project and see it become a pillar of industry",
- but today is the perfect time for
"start a software business and make great money"
The market seems like a bad fit for pro-humanity technology—researchers at least have that (albeit fading) potential in their back pocket.
Lots of skilled programmers started coding when they were kids. But that does not mean starting to learn coding when you are 30 years old won't make you an excellent programmer: actually, you can learn even faster at that age because concepts like logic, dividing an issue into several small ones, and iterating step by step until the final solution are more intuitive to you than to a kid.
I think Google's attitude of free products (Gmail, Google Maps, Android, and Chrome especially) has won it insane amounts of goodwill, and that's all that's keeping them at the top. Having worked at Google, I find it incredibly hard to believe that they have any sort of fundamental technical advantage when it comes to building a search engine. I didn't work on search and obviously didn't look for the secret sauce, so that assessment is based on company culture and attitude alone.
Realistically, even if it started to happen, the giants would simply swallow it whole, as they've done very effectively in recent times.
Long gone are the times where a small Google could disrupt a field and debunk everything around it.
OpenAI is half owned by Microsoft already. Without those resources they wouldn't be able to realistically compete against Google. So saying they are a "small startup" for me doesn't compute.
In my view this is a bit of wishful thinking. Today we have so many giants with monopolies that realistically competing in their space can only be done with huge amounts of investment. The one resource that has been dried up recently.
I think boutique software producs built in house for non-software businesses could provide immense automation and innovation to small/medium businesses. Not everything needs to be a SaaS, highly boutique software could cater for exactly one business and be a really holistic advantage.
The large IT companies are acting in ways that are completely against innovation and self-improvement. I expect them to freeze-up like the old giant corporations that they are.
But the change only started after the US decided to change its free-money-for-rich-people policy, and that was last year.
I think most of these changes didn't affect developed nations so much, it's probably still good old Walmart and Amazon. But they were lifechanging to developing nations. We had some advancements in the rights of factory workers as they had to match gig workers, and crime dropped drastically in some places because it just wasn't worth it anymore when you could climb out of poverty by delivering food.
There were mobile phones before the iphone. Like a whole ecosystem even! They even had screens! and browsers! and internet!
the major innovation the iphone brought was a touch screen (and a decent camera), which sort of existed, but nothing as smooth and crisp as the iphone. please i really hope people out there dont think the iphone was the invention of the cell phone.
It's like differentiating between "the Internet boom" and the invention of networking - nobody is saying the 14k modem was the invention of networking, but there was no "internet boom" before it.
But you can't build a business like Uber on Symbian. The iPhone brought about all these marketplace apps. They stopped being toys, and became more like mini computers.
- some college girl doing CS was talking about how cloud is the future. I asked her what cloud was. She didn't know but mentioned the S3 stuff.
- my aunt, a clerk, was talking about how her job was training her to put documents in the cloud. She didn't know what a cloud was either.
- I got the worst career advice of my life. Someone said I should stop doing Android and learn to make BlackBerry apps instead, because that's what all the British people were using. On the other end, someone said I'd regret not making Windows Phone apps because they were superior in every way to Android.
- we were doing SVN to our own servers because this dude Joel put it as part of a checklist, and then we switched to Git because of the cloud thing.
- Uber (and similar) were just blasting off. In my country, it was MyTeksi (2011), later GrabTaxi (2013), then Grab (2016). They were the first "unicorn" in the region, where we hadn't experienced the dot com bubble, and regional VCs would pressure to raise and burn.
- Tech jobs were not really a thing here. Someone said that with my EE degree, I could get a real job as a KFC manager and keep all the IT stuff as a hobby. But in Malaysia, tech triggered hard around 2014. SMEs became startups. Malaysian entrepreneurs from the US were coming back here, becoming angels and VCs because it was easier to invest here than in the US. And GrabTaxi started pushed a wave of hype.
It's probably different in different places. 2014 was probably a later stage in Silicon Valley, but it was quite early here in SE Asia. There's delays.
It's also why I'm optimistic on things like crypto, web3, AI, because the tech is at a mature enough stage to build things on, but it'll be years before that tech is built and many more years before it's a household product. The story really starts when the tech is used by a billion people.
But it's too late now because the conglomerates made it too cheap to compete with and the bar for affiliate programs is too high.
I'm not even sure if they're "tech companies" anymore. At least half their manpower is in blue collar jobs.
Social media for sure, but the entirety of AR/VR. AI, and not just GPTs. but recommendation, detection, sentiment, data mining are all things that are 'new'. We can also think about things like online banking or healthcare apps that didn't exist. I was still sending checks in 2014, and I certainly wasn't doing video visits with my doctor. As someone that is middle age, when I ask younger people they point out how much opportunity as a counterpoint to the cynicism I'm seeing here HN.
Edit: plus flexbox
Figma comes to mind as an obvious standout example. We didn’t even have the technology to support that level of multiplayer computationally heavy UI in the browser back in 2014. No native apps had collaboration that smooth either.
Collaborative [text] document editing in general is a good example. So mundane these days in all the big web-based work apps that we don’t even notice it anymore.
Games have generally been way ahead of business apps in this sense.
What made those products boom was cheap and qualitative video calls (so, bandwidth) that are totally necessary to work in real time collaboration.
The last 10 years have seen a renaissance of academic painting information and education, and social media, particularly Instagram, has been the fuel.
There is so much now that simply wasn't there then. My life would be so much different and happier if I were coming of age now with those desires instead of a decade ago. Nonetheless, it is still dramatically improved by the advancements I described.
I no longer feel so alone. I suspect many people with different niches are enjoying richer lives like I am, due to the last 10 years of internet.
And an IoT world has nearly as many drawbacks as it does benefits, but I think it's hard to argue it hasn't changed the way we interact with the internet in our day to day lives.
Ring is just doorbell cameras. Japan has had these for decades. Smart home is a complete failure, nobody uses Alexa or siri or ok google seriously. EVs are just cars but slightly different. Smart TVs just simplify the process of having to buy a Chromecast or plug in a laptop to your TV.
People, especially tech-types, way over-estimate how much hassle we're willing to put up with day-to-day.
They also just as often underestimate it. It's part of why "data driven development" fails. Regular, non-tech users have long been conditioned to assume computers and tech in general is buggy, finicky, and full of annoyances. They use it anyway, and bear the frustration silently[0], only occasionally begging a techie relative or friend to "fix my computer, it's slow now because it got viruses". Devs and PMs look at their telemetry, see users using a feature, and think they like it. They probably don't. They just suffer through it.
As a techie, I have very little tolerance for hassle. Which for IoT, ironically, means I'm running Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi now, because it's a net save on annoyances - even though it's extra work, it lets me and my family use the "smart" parts of home appliances without frustration.
--
[0] - With who knows how much accumulating "death from thousand papercuts" psychological damage...
Life has changed radically here as compared to 2014.
But lots of people weren't using that, they were still stuck with telephony-based videoconferencing, with polycom devices in the middle of a conference table and dual ISDN lines and stuff, stuff built out in the prior decade.
And then connections and cameras got good enough that Zoom could "just work" without all the hassle of following the rules, etc.
On the backend, Next.js brought us SSR in 2016, MongoDB brought us document databases by winning “fastest growing database engine” in 2013 and 2014, and Docker brought us disposable containers in 2013.
The list is stacked towards older tech but that’s maybe because recent tech hasn’t proven itself yet: svelte in 2020 is still maturing AFAICT, and ive never heard of Vite (2021) or SolidJS (2022). I personally think many exciting non-AI trends are also ramping up now, such as Local First development (formalized in May 2023).
I think that the economy and innovation in general were curtailed due to the climaxing rampant corruption in the US, but the internet is something of an exception IMO.
This is all talking about developer abilities, of course: the constraints of corrupt capitalism mean that many of the actual sites released in the past decade have been terribly bloated and over-featured. But I think that’s partially a consequence of businesses moving everything into mobile-first websites and apps —- you’re gonna see a lot more low-margin websites.
"...constraints of corrupt capitalism" caused websites to be boated?
The second part is referencing the specific problems most HNers see with the modern internet: giant SPAs with huge packet sizes and questionable, non-accessible, hand-rolled functionality. And I think the reason for that is that our system is barely functioning right now: we made stock buybacks legal again for some reason, and executive pay and shareholder dividends were already absurdly high. Big SPAs that supposedly do everything, and the mobile apps that they mimic, have become a way to lower expenses rather than an additive new medium for business. When was the last time you talked to a business on the phone?
Long story short, capitalism makes bad websites by underpaying, underhiring, and overspeccing.
I don't know why anyone would sit around moping about "If only this were thirty years ago!" If it seems like your idea would be "easy" or something -- if only it were thirty years ago -- then most likely it's because we are where we are and you know what you know now that you wouldn't have known then.
It's like all the people who say things like "Youth is wasted on the young" and "I wish I had known what I know now back when I was seventeen." Yeah, you know it at all because you aren't seventeen.
I used to do that sort of thing and then began going "If I value x, why sit around telling myself I can't possibly have that or some piece of that without winning the lottery? Why not do what I can to actually work towards that to some degree, in some fashion?"
So you may get it. That's fine. I don't and that's not commentary on anyone but me and how my mind works.
[1] "X" meaning "variable to be substituted for" rather than "company that made a bizarre naming choice for no apparent reason".
It's like the people who talk about how obvious it was to invest in Apple or Microsoft or BRK or whatever "if they'd been there at that time" and yet by definition the companies that will be referred to like that in 20 years time almost certainly exist today, but - how do you find them?
But the real revolution is AI. Thinking back to 2014 and peering forward, it’s unfathomable. If there had been a sci-fi movie, I would have thought it unrealistic. I still think I have no idea where this will take is or how much our industry will change. What a great time to be an entrepreneur.
I recall that movie seemed cute but probably technologically impossible. Now it’s reality for many users of AI girlfriends.
Whenever I read about the history of computers and software in the 80s, it feels like there are always mentions of relatively new companies foraging their path, new hardware manufacturers and software developers shaping the brand new home computer industry. Sure, there were some old giants on the playing field, but it almost sounds like anyone with a decent idea could carve out a space for themselves.
2014 though? There were a bunch of opportunities back then, obviously, but it was already deep into the megacorp consolidation era, when large software or web companies owned dozens of unrelated services and had secured an almost endless influx of cash. There were startups, and a few of them became extremely successful, but it feels like most of them were either doomed to fail or be bought out by a larger company. I feel like in this last decade, internet innovation had mostly slowed - the internet of 2004 was extremely different from the internet of 2014, yet 10 more years passed since then and it doesn't feel like as much has changed.
Maybe it's just my imaginary rose-tinted view of the past or something, but it feels like it's harder than ever for a startup to compete with the big players now. The only big exception I can think of is video games - self-publishing anything was probably almost impossible in the 80s, but nowadays we have an endless sea of development and publishing tools for independent developers with fresh new ideas.
Perhaps, there's a completely new field on the horizon that will level the playing field once more, putting everyone back at square one. I think that some industries could get squeezed dry until the next big innovation comes along, or people move onto some other new space.
Boy have we been in a holding/consolidation pattern. The age of massification has been upon us; getting everyone else online has been the effort, the way to rise. Free online services we can connect to from anywhere has been an amazing change, a totally new expectation that totally changes how computing situates itself in our lives.
At much cost to figuring out further places to pioneer, I feel. We need new cycles with new energy, where lots of people are trying stuff out again. Computing & tech should not stay well settled; we should be trying crazy stuff. It feels like a lifetime ago that Tim O'Reilly was preaching "follow the alpha geeks", look for those very capable folks doing excellently for themselves. That ability to trendspot & try lots of things has been somewhat by these huge scales & systems, but I believe a return to personal-ity has to crop up again sometime. We'll find some fertile terrains where new things are a happening again.
2014 was when thing were actually really setting in place, when the pioneering stage was really giving way to some settlers (and town planners, see: https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...). There's a lot of roughness, but tech getting it's mojo back may be not far off. It's a challenge though; the reality of creating ever-connected ever-online systems is hard. We have amazing amounts of server we can fit in a pizza box, at incredibly low $/performance, but we're unpracticed at doing it without pain at smaller scales, by ourselves, anew. Trying to create new generative platforms, that serve as a basis to let more value spring up: it needs a strong foundation, so that it can keep "creating more value than it captures," another O'Reilly-ism.
The future is (with hope) exciting!
We could just as easily produce clients which exchange Lua bytecode. In fact, we do (Games, etc.) .. but we could just as easily build an execution environment (which is what browsers are) that allows a much wider and broader range of application capabilities than the browser.
This, then, is what I have in mind, when I think "I've been on the Internet too long, I've become jaded": actually, the browser is just the lowest common denominator. As soon as some other client application is built which pushes user experience beyond what the browser is capable, the Internet will still be there to host it.
And I find that inspiring, even after 40 years of crud.
The problem is that the browser is so good at being a ubiquitous, open-source, open-standards-based, cross-platform, near-instant-loading secure remote code execution environment. As Brendan Eich says, always bet on JS and WASM. I would extend that to -- always bet on browsers.
With the amount of change that has occurred in browser technology over the last 30 years, I strongly think the future looks like more improvement in browser technology (and perhaps deprecation/removal of old standards) than an entirely new paradigm. I know various early web pioneers want to build a post-Web application delivery system (notably Tim Berners-Lee and Douglas Crockford), but given the accumulated legacy of modern browsers and web apps and the ongoing investments into browser technology, I don't see how any post-Web system could gain any traction within the next 25 years.
But yes - your point still stands. If anything better than browsers ever appears, the internet will indeed still be there to host it.
1/ As guest in current browsers acting as hosts, for the zero-install ubiquity of the Web. This would require WebGPU, Wasm, fast JS<=>Wasm calls, and installable PWAs at least. Gatekeepers notably Apple can and will hinder. Once established, this new hosted app could be nativized to drop the browser dependency.
2/ As new obligate not facultative browser-like app in new device, e.g., XR eyewear. The device would have to take off at very large scale, and its maker(s) would want to do things not easily done via (1). The extant Web would be mapped onto in-world surfaces but the new device and its content stack would support things that go way beyond evolutionary improvements to the Web.
I used to think (2) might happen with Oculus being acquired by Meta, or by Apple eyewear, but I'm less optimistic now. The Big Tech players, especially Apple, can build nice h/w, but it won't get to scale quickly enough to subsume the Web.
That sounds promising, except I don't see how the affordance of URLs could be duplicated in that context without introducing competing janky proxies—e.g. https://new-web.com/[insert-new-url-type-here] Or were you thinking that installable PWAs would obviate that?
I wonder if a wasm app framework ("a new way to build web apps without HTML/CSS/JS") would be viable, as it could work seamlessly with existing URLs and people could host apps built in it anywhere.
If that gains traction, introduce a new, "cleaner" build target (sans HTML/CSS/JS linking) and a "faster, more lightweight" client for built apps. Have it use a new URL scheme to match - maybe wasm://. Web-targeted wasm app builds could even check if the URL scheme is available, and switch to it at runtime if it is. Kind of like how web apps sometimes open the ios app if it's installed.
From there, expand into a platform for competing frameworks to target...
But maybe we get a more lightweight Electron.
And if we agree that better solutions are needed then the question becomes “how do we create the market conditions that support those better outcomes?”
I’d really like to see kk reflect on this article with 10 years hindsight and see if he remains optimistic.
At the moment both statements above are true, meaning we (the little guy) are on average fucked. Sugar coating it with platitudes and cheap aphorisms doesn't change the reality that opportunities have dried out for all but the wealthy and connected and even for them it's not easy.
It is only the perception of this innovation that could change as times go on.
Who knows maybe I'll give it a go in a couple of years.
Startups fake shit all the time, cut corners everywhere (even when they shouldn't) and the hustle culture exists primarily to benefit from employee overwork (free labor).
Coming from a developing country I always thought I would never be as good as "first-world developers". The reality is that the bell curve applies the same way everywhere. Most people aren't exceptional and if you're exceptional in your country, you're most likely exceptional everywhere.
If I were to give myself one advice in the past it would be: you're more than good enough.
Of course, YMMV. Good luck either way mate!
The thing about hustling is to only do it for yourself not others.
Some VC firm tried to do it for trucking and exploded recently, but there's still needs there that can be filled.
The key is to fill slowly and grow; for an example (and completely guessing) you could have an app that starts out as just a "tugboat parking availability" or whatever, and then you find what the users using it would also like to see.
We are so used to these big innovations that it feels like they have always been there.
Take mobile and app stores. There are teams and people that build so many innovative and better solutions to deal with apps and app stores, yet they are simply not allowed.
AI does not change this norm. VR and AR perhaps, but they are also dominated by the same companies. Web3 was a good bet to change it but seems like it is not happening, at least the way we thought it should happen.
I am still optimistic about the future but possibilities are realistically rarer.
Ref: Yanis Varoufakis also talks about this in context of a digital feudalistic society.
There is certainly nothing they can do about the timing of their birth and they will have to do the best they can.
You can imagine being born today and it's even better than that because you are ready to take action already, right now!
Specially because, initially, the internet only provided content free of charge - now we actually pay subscriptions to use the top LLMs.
An encyclopaedia would have cost you thousands of dollars, but you can use the greatest and most up to date compilation of human knowledge for free today (if you can deal with a few donation banners from the Wikimedia foundation around December every year).
It reminds me of an anecdote Tony Robbins tells about a gold miner who just says, “The thing people don’t realised is there’s gold EVERYWHERE”
You still have to watch your break even.
Please don't forget that in the late nineties, CPUs were measured in a few hundred MHz, RAM in tens of MBs, and network speeds were kilobytes per second.
FOSS was a new idea and most software cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. People PAID for compilers! Workstations cost many thousands and servers cost millions. These investments would be literally wiped out every year or two by the leading edge of Moore's law.
In the late nineties, I worked for a company that charged $3 million to a big brand to build a website with user forums. It took a year and more than 30 people to launch. We had to buy ~$1m worth of server hardware and fasten it into racks.
Every time constraints change, new opportunities emerge that either weren't possible or just didn't make sense before.
If you're looking for opportunities, keep an eye on observable, recent changes, especially those that haven't yet been broadly distributed.
Look for changes in constraints that are limiting large amounts of valuable activity.
Some random examples in the last 5-10 years (IMO) are:
- LLMs, obviously
- Shared, cloud infrastructure made it trivially inexpensive to launch new business ideas
- High speed computation has fallen in price so much that most applications don't even need cloud infrastructure anymore (IMO)
- The amount of trust many people have in big tech companies is at a nadir, this could be a great time to carve out a beach head in anything they do. Being perceived as trustworthy and NOT THEM could be enough to build a great business.
- Many people seem to feel that social media is net bad for us, figure out how to solve the same problem set (feeling engaged and connected?), with fewer negative trade offs.
- The electronics hobby market has exploded and made new hardware ideas possible, even if budget is limited.
There are a bunch of these kinds of observations that you're uniquely positioned to observe and dig deep on.
Most of them aren't viable, but the fun is in probing around at the edges of what's possible and learning. That's the thing that brings us closer to whatever will work.
Maybe it's just me, but I've noticed that when I'm waking up frustrated and unhappy most days, it has almost always been because I'm ignoring my conscience, which has been trying to tell me that I'm not pointed in the right direction.
> Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first.
Personally the AI aspect feels like the least compelling aspect of how computing can build in-roads & become genuinely compelling to the world again. Many many many people are on the sprinkle-on-some-AI-and-get-rich path, but it's just incredibly non-contributive to the field, to expanding the frontier to me. Apply deep-learned expert-systems doesn't making computing better on iota, doesn't enhance man machine-symbiosis.
I crave a computing era where we can return to the fundamentals. To me, computing's 90's/aughts boom was because we created a democratized access to all the tech, because OSS helped us all learn and grow together. We never had better leverage to augment intellect (the Douglas Engelbart vision/mission) than that, and that made all the difference. It's hard for me to imagine owned proprietary ML spawning lateral growth & understanding, to me.
The core of this comes down to -- will it scale?
This is what I want to see from the OS/OW AI models (open source / open weights) universe (kudos to Hugging Face for facilitating this).
I suspect the OpenAI model approach, where all infra is hidden and the models are hidden behind services, can't scale to meet the demand of what people want out of AI. Directions like Mamba over hungry compute Transformers, SLM as over expensive LLMs, and so on, will commodify AI services as operational frameworks mature. OpenAI gets that, hence why they are listening to consumer demand, but their moat assumption is faulty.
That said, I am optimistic about the future of this technology and others that are currently being mined for breakthroughs.
I do think scale is important too. But it's a refinement it feels like, one we've already covered pretty well albeit have to keep re-learning/isn't evenly distributed yet. But making computing that is open & explorable? Go watch an Alan Kay talk, any of them; he'll say what I'm saying: we barely have begun to figure out the actual essence of computing where it opens itself up to us & makes us more potent people. We have been grinding on the same target, without pause for thinking about what general computing systems could be like, and it's the wider view that this is all actually on service of, that will help us.
AI to me is mostly creating our own Dark Forest scenario on our own planet that we have to somehow coexist with. More distraction from fundamentals.