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Comment by kridsdale3 | Hacker News Reader

12 months ago everyone agreed that Search was doomed, ChatGPT would kill Google, and Bard/Gemini were a joke.

When I went through YC in 2007 a founder whose name you know drunkenly told me at a party that Google Docs and Macbooks would have Microsoft out of business by 2012. Someone here told me in 2018 I was nuts to buy a gas-powered car because in less time than you would drive a car for, everyone will have switched to electric and there will be no gas stations left.

The impending deaths of most things are greatly exaggerated.

People overestimate the rate of change in the short run and underestimate the impact of change in the long run.

- https://www.rip-grep.com/

- https://www.rip-grep.com/microsoft

Huh, funny. I always associated ripgrep with the find/grep replacement written in Rust:

https://github.com/burntsushi/ripgrep

Wonder if it was an intentional pun.

Next: “SWE is largely solved, expect mass unemployment in the next few years”?

That's already half of the threads I see on reddit lately.

Except we're actually seeing a non-trivial reduction in SWE jobs, particularly entry-level roles.

May be short term and turn around at some point, but the current trends definitely feel lower vs. higher.

Are we? Compare to when? How about compared to the 30 year variation, not just the last 6.

In “big tech” or internet services, or also the non-tech companies that employ most engineers?

I wonder how much of that is driven by organic market forces or through anti-competitive practices.

For example, Chinese electric vehicles are selling like hotcakes in Europe but you'd be hard-pressed to find any in the US.

what was ur startup

Search is doomed for people creating content that depends on organic search traffic because Google's AI is providing the content directly to people doing the search.

My decade old tech blog with 500+ posts now gets 10x less traffic than it did a few years ago and I'm actually on the fence on pulling the plug on my 10 year old business because traffic is so low it now costs me more to host video courses that I sell than I make per month from them. In turn this comes with other implications, such as maybe stopping my YouTube channel and no longer contributing to open source because paying bills has priority over hobbies. I enjoy spending time on these things and morally was always ok with giving away almost everything I do and learned for free, but income requirements are very quick to slap you into reality.

You may be right, but that was not the point. There were many voices who claimed that AI would make Google obsolete.

If Google Search hadn't adopted AI it would have quickly been rendered obsolete, so yeah.

Both can be true? You can be doing really well and still have long term risk. Dethroning incumbents takes longer than people think and it’s possible that search growth goes 20%, 10%, -10%, -50%

By everyone, maybe you mean "only people dumb enough to post on hacker news"

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