Comment by zero_shift | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zero_shift | Hacker News Reader

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> I don’t see any evidence of this happening, but if somebody wants to make this argument, they should be clear about why this time is different

It does seem to be happening - at least in mobile app stores.

There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

In other words, there are now many more apps. But not many (or really any?) more users

Take a look at p40 / figure 12 of "WRITING CODE VS. SHIPPING CODE: PRODUCTIVITY EFFECTS ACROSS GENERATIONS OF AI CODING TOOLS" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35275/w352...)

Their analysis is on pg42-43

> they should be clear about why this time is different to the entire history of the computer industry so far

I can't prove the pie is fixed, but nor can you prove the pie is infinite.

Maybe this comes close to sounding patronising, but I think the key thing people miss, when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start. Who are these people, how much money do they have, and what other costs are you competing against?

> money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing, you need someone who isn't paying for software, to start.

Right now, people pay all sorts of money for real interactions with real people, most notably friendship and dating.

Tiktok has done a good job at starting to disrupt this, but with AI and better VR technology, maybe we can finish the job and disrupt all human relationships, all romantic relationships, all friendships. It's a huge addressable market (all humans), and if even just 5% of all humans buy a $5 virtual coffee (free to produce, pure profit) for their AI partner each day, that would be a massive increase in software spend.

Once we hit "The Matrix", that'll mean software has nowhere left to go.

I’m going to assume this lacks the /s that seems relevant. Because if not:

Do you want to live in this world? Why? Because you envision yourself receiving said money?

You should be ashamed of yourself for writing such a thing.

> when talking about economic growth of software is, money has to come from somewhere. Someone has to give it to you. So it you want to keep growing

I’m not talking about growth here. I’m merely saying that it won’t recede. My argument is that we won’t use the increased productivity to spend less money producing the same amount of software – we’ll use the increased productivity to spend the same amount of money to produce a larger amount of software.

> There's some recent analysis that demonstrates how, despite a huge updraft in the quantity of apps released, the aggregate count of reviews and downloads remains static.

Isn't the likely explanation for this that the updraft is a huge number of sloppy AI-generated apps that nobody wants to use because they're just bad?

You also need to have time to play all those great games, watch all those great shows and read all those books.

There is a lot of software that are constrained by human eyeballs (entertainment or ads monetized)

It's unclear whether mobile apps as a segment has a correlation with the elasticity of software in general

In aggregate software comes out of R&D, operations, and labor spend. Good software increases revenue and decreases costs for companies, which grows the economic pie, and frees up more spend and more companies spin up and start spending

A world where we've saturated out software would seem utopian compared to right now

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