HN user
My guess is that the amount of total software people use will significantly increase, but the total amount of money made from SaaS will significantly decrease
I've replaced almost all of the App subscriptions with stuff I built for my self. The only subscriptions I pay for are things that are almost impossible to replace like online storage (iCloud) or Spotify
This is what people said about the internet too. Remember the whole "do not ever use Wikipedia as a source". I mean sure, technically correct, but human beings are generally imprecise and having the correct info 95% of the time is fine. You learn to live with the 5% error
It's literally happening lol. When you were a kid China was making shoes and their GDP is 10% of the US. Now they're making drones / evs / high end electornics and it's 80%. This is why people's perception is so unreliable because it's impossible to notice things when they happen over a lifetime
Makes sense. When you restrict hardware, you have to spend all your energy on optimizing software that everyone else ignores
Imagine if they were forced to use IE7 as the only browser. The frontend frameworks would be blazing fast and we would never have bloatware like React or Angular or npm
This is a common "gotcha" comment from people who don't understand LLMs very well. Occasionally if you ask Gemini it'll say this as well. It has everything to do with the fact that ChatGPT is the most talked about AI model rather than data being trained on it
It's kind of crazy that with so many opinions on economics, no one ever mentions the most obvious things.
When elite papers say the "economy is doing well," what they usually mean is "the GDP is going up way higher than other places." What exactly is a GDP? It's literally the total sum of money SPENT by government, consumers, and businesses combined (this is the textbook definition, and how it's calculated).
When prices of stuff go up by 25% because there's a shortage of labor, or shortage of material, or shortage of infrastructural efficiency, by definition the GDP goes up 25%. There isn't any increase in life quality, nor any increase in the amount of stuff produced. This is why people feel like the economy is complete shit, while all the numbers point to the economy is doing well, and all the institutions that rely on these data (think tanks, policymakers, journalists) are baffled why people don't feel the same.
In contrast, in places that produce things very cheaply, if the export goes down, its GDP numbers will go down by definition. This in turn causes an overflow of goods internally, and prices paid by internal consumers even lower, therefore decreasing the GDP numbers even more. This is the opposite of the above scenario, where people are getting better things for cheaper, and their lives are improving without any increase in total compensation. All the while the numbers are telling a different story.
I think GDP might have been one of the biggest red herrings for policymakers. It's distorting their view of what's going well and what isn't.
This is a fundamental philosophical question. IMO you're not responsible for your ancestor's actions. However, your ancestors were partly responsible for your welfare, just as you are partly responsible for your future generation's wellfare.
As much as we push our modern definition of "individualism", societies do not grow in isolation. Social groups that place a premium on improving the next generation do much better. If people want better lives, then start creating better lives for their kids and grandkids