1. Deglobalization accelerates as the Bretton woods organisations become increasingly irrelevant and trade moves to being bloc and region based.
2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.
7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)
> The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
You assume that with the new technology the total number of people needed in this sector will be reduced, but I think the industry will simply adjust, and the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people. This is a competitive market (your success is determined by the amount of money you are willing to spend on producing content about your product), so the same people will just get their share for 1000x the work they have been doing in the past.
> the only visible result would be that more content will be produced by the same number of people
That’s not what they predicted; the “we just get more content! People won’t lose their jobs…” argument aside, the market that is willing to spend money on content seems reasonably likely to drop off.
People will continue to want content, yes.
People will continue to buy content, yes.
…however, it seems difficult to believe that as companies that can produce the content significantly cheaper and at higher volumes emerge, traditional providers of eg. stock photography, will manage to convince people to keep paying the same amount for it.
I personally predict a wave of race to the bottom startups that cheaply generate content, driving the costs to consumers down. Yay.
However, companies will accordingly reduce their spend, and move off of traditional providers onto the “super cheap” new comers, resulting in an overall collapse in the total spend on content, even as companies get more for the money they do spend.
There’s plenty of precedent for this.
If the marginal cost of producing X drop to virtually zero, people don’t just consume more of it (well, maybe a bit more), they mostly just spend less money and buy the cheapest product.
"Stock photography" covers a lot of ground. I don't see company art directors shifting to generative AI--at least not yet--for a variety of reasons, including legal concerns. However, you'll probably see a lot of use for people looking for graphics, any graphics to illustrate things. But for content like that, people today are probably mostly using Creative Commons or (more commonly) just grabbing stuff of the Internet.
That's a statement about 2023. I don't pretend to know what will be the case in five years.
A stock photo agency can exist even if the cost of acquiring a particular picture is exactly zero.
Their paid service would be / always has been curation and selection. Customers rarely need a random picture (else they just use unsplash), they need a particular picture conveying a particular idea / mood / style.
I agree with the original premise. It is a repetition of the history of graphic design: around 2000 you would need a graphic designer to create a good website, it took time and several iterations. It worked similarly for years until Twitter Bootstrap appeared and many jumped to use it as is or do small custom changes.
Yeah I think I over egged this slightly. But I imagine if you're in a team of half a dozen copywriters like a friend if mine that by the end of 2023 there's only going to be one left.
I interpret "collapse" to mean "many people doing it full-time lose their jobs and the market price of the outputs drops significantly". In which case I agree with the assertion that collapse is coming soon, although having played with the tools quite a bit I'm not convinced on 2023. Definitely by the end of 2025.
'''3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.'''
That is something that I believe it is already happening. I have the feeling that Senior Developers wages are going up in my country no matter what happens on Twitter or Facebook.
Depends on how they're benchmarked. If you're a non US employee doing senior dev work at a FAANG or FAANG-adjacent company then I think you are probably correct.
> When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
I think this is a definite possibility too. I understand the reasons why US tech comp is higher than the rest of the world, but I don't see why it is _that_ much higher - I'm not sure it's sustainable in the new remote-work world.
I think SV will continue to pay top prices for world class talent to relocate there and work in office. Think AI PhDs, chip designers, systems programmers, graphics experts, and the like. But the days of 100k interns and 300k SWE 4's are over, and that portion of the workforce will devolve to the national average.
Americans work 15-20% more hours, at least compared to Europeans (<2 weeks vacation compared to 4-6, etc.), and have to pay huge amounts for healthcare.
In almost all fields, Americans make more money.
The tech 2X is that historically hiring was done for the Bay Area, where cost of living is crazy, and also just basic supply and demand. If a few dozen engineers can build $100M-1B+ of value, it makes sense to pay them a lot (of investors’ money).
I know, I know. But look at the difference in price worldwide of developers (it's so much more than 10-20%). Think of the 10s of thousands of engineers paid insane starting comp to do feature-work at the tech giants. I don't know, but I think this may well become a thing of the past in the next decade.
Globalization will always be too tempting to ignore when some countries have labor costs that are ten times lower than others. Large companies will continue to have enough political power to veto the laws that would be required to reverse globalization.
Globalization is a bit more than just companies setting up shop where labour is cheapest. It is a rules based order that relies on institutions like the World Bank, IMF, a bunch of treaties and other institutions and a set of norms about how relations between States should be constructed. It also relies on an elite consensus that globalization is good. I think there is a sense however that this consensus is breaking down, hence the turn towards nativism in various polities. The increasing willingness of China and Russia to flex their muscles and (re)build regional power blocks means that while international trade may not decrease it may no longer be "global" in the way it is now.
Globalization then will continue along the lines of cultural and political alliances. EU is one striking example of globalization, of you take a look from a perspective of 100 or even 50 years ago. Advanced chip will still continue to be made in Korea and (hopefully) Taiwan on machines built in Europe for companies that build products in the US and in Japan.
What is going to dwindle or even cease is cooperation with not-exactly-friendly countries, like, well, China and obviously Russia, and maybe not exactly hostile but culturally remote, like Saudi Arabia.
India and Africa will remain important cultural and economical battlegrounds between the West and China. China is investing a huge lot into African countries, and I suppose the more advanced of them, like Nigeria, will become the new "tigers" with explosive economic growth in the coming 15-25 years, like Korea in 1980s.
So I'd recommend checking out Peter Zeihan but he argues globalization isn't a natural economic result but rather globalization came about as the US agreed to allow other countries to participate in the first world market on the condition that they don't ally with the Soviets. Thus arguing globalization was only ever a security not economic policy and now that the security problem it is trying to solve is no longer there globalization is failing.
I came here to say the same and I really like your description of the core idea of his last book. After reading it (and with some caveats and small disagreements such as the cost of dealing with Climate Change) it is clear how the US has been the gluing force of globalization for around 70 years as securing mechanism against the Soviets.
Zeihan is as critical of the United States as anyone. He’s just more critical of China and Russia. While capital may always chase cheap labor, his point is that it may not be able to in a fractured economic and security environment. It’s gonna be a hell of a decade.
> 2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
You forget the emergence of the creator economy, smaller communities and the move to the early, syndicated nature of the early 2000s Internet. That internet has no problems with any of those. All of the issues you list were created by establishment actors for their benefit.
Early internet: As long as there was copper, you generally could exchange {protocol} (i.e. HTTP, FTP, POP3, ...) to {person} in {country}, quite freely.
Current internet: Many egress and ingress connections are banned by {government agency} of {country}.
Future internet: What parent comment was predicting: An increasing number of governments increasingly aggressively ban an increasing number of internet services (i.e. connections).
It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
This is the "fracturing" the parent comment is alluding to.
> It's really not that hard to imagine, look at China or Russia or many other countries (e.g. Middle-East). Very aggresive white/blacklists of internet services.
Part of the problem is people thinking that such countries are creating the fragmentation whereas it were the US companies who literally partitioned internet through algorithms, walled gardens, filters and blacklists. A national firewall can be circumvented by VPN and many do. Its much harder to circumvent whatever limitations such corporations that control large parts of the internet create.
> A national firewall can be circumvented by VPN and many do
FYI, this can be quite difficult for certain countries. Source: I have had friends who live in China and the Middle East, and VPN IP addresses are very quickly found and blacklisted. It's not a one-size-fits-all solution.
And honestly, this is why I'm ok with big tech getting highly regulated.
In many ways they're _ALREADY_ more powerful than state actors. They were pretty open about their attempts at manipulating the last presidential election, and I personally think it was a gigantic mistake for them. It's only going to get worse imo.
#1 and #3 are contradicting each other. If deglobalization accelerates, why would hiring be anywhere in the world where labor costs are lower ? Shouldn't it be the opposite ?
Also, I disagree with #1 and agree with #3 to some extent. I think Globalization is already here and it will only intensify. It is not a zero sum game and all sides can benefit from it considering they stop thinking of Globalization as a bad thing.
An alternative to globalization is not necessarily isolationism, which I agree is unlikely, but instead the re establishment of distinct blocs that operate largely independently of each other, according to distinct sets of rules, as during the Cold War when you had the (Sino) Soviet bloc, the "West", and a large number of countries that mostly traded with just their immediate neighbours or with former colonial powers. The current, second, period of globalized trade (the first ended in 1914) is built on a rules based international order that is beginning to break down for a variety of reasons, including China's increased economic power, the reemergence of nativism in various polities, Russia's desire to reestablish it's empire (I know that's a simplification but not by that much) and an increasing belief in the EU that the USA is no longer interested in being a guarantor of it's security. A deglobalised world is one where trade still happens, but it is much more likely to be constrained within blocs and be carried out according to different rules and norms depending on where you are.
I suppose that right now the US is doing a colossal job of showing the EU how it's interested in protecting the Europe. The amount of total US aid to Ukraine, which is standing between the newly expansionist Russia and the West, is comparable or exceeds the EU aid, and its military part is significantly larger than EU's.
Globalization is only good for GDP and only on first order thinking.
Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
Concentration of ecological damage (eg smog in China, clear cuts instead of selective foresting etc).
Decreasing the varietals of foods brought to market so they're stable for shipping , easier to grade / machine. Second order cost -- higher risk to crop failures, loss of heirloom / heritage kinds.
IMO much of "Globalization" is really just power and market arbitrage. Things are inherently cheaper or easier there, the people are just poorer and more desperate. As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
> Shipping things that could easily have been made local. Second order cost -- Environmental damage.
One thing I'd like to mention is that sea shipping is actually very efficient, and the things being shipped usually have much more CO2 associated with their production and use than the shipping itself. For shipping cars:
> A cargo ship produces 16.14 grams of CO2 per metric ton of goods shipped per kilometer.
I continue to believe that eating locally sourced meat is just a way for people to feel good while continuing to damage the environment 99% as much.
And one last thing:
> As soon as they have a middle class the "advantage" disappears.
And how do these poor countries acquire a middle class without resources or trade?
This isn't to say that I disagree with your overall point that going full on globalist has hidden costs. National security concerns are often not addressed for one.
If you look at China, it's exactly due to the West's insatiable appetite for cheaper labor that it has become more technically competent, and more well-off, especially the coastal cities. And this is why it now (for some years) ceases to be a pool of cheap labor: the living standards, while not near Western, have risen so much, the Western customers started finding the labor cost too high. Now it's the turn of Vietnam for many industries.
Previous participants of this joyride: Japan, Korea, half of Southern Europe.
Reserves of cheap labor are not endless, and it's great that the capital actively seeks them out and eventually fills them in.
Let's not forget rampant corporate espionage, and deliberate IP infringement whereby designs used contractually to produce something, and then stolen to make knock offs as well.
In practice, in aggregate they are. As you mentioned, there were other countries filling that gap before, and there will be new ones. East Asia got there first because of a combination of factors (cultural, historic, and logistical), but once that area is spent, new frontiers will be opened. In fact, in markets where there are fewer logistical constraints (i.e. software), those new frontiers are already coming online (South America, Africa, etc).
The chief beneficiary of Bretton Woods was the non-West but I think deglobalization will be seen as simply a disengagement with the non-West. There will continue to be brisk trade between Italy and South Korea. There will be less trade between China and the United States.
>5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
Who's going to fight for TikTok? Trump tried to ban it, so GOP will be onboard. If it's a serious attempt, Biden and the Dems will be too. They're almost there anyway. So who'd be for Tiktok? The youth? They don't vote anyway, and will just move on to the next fashionable social network.
I think the argument against TikTok being banned is the inability of US government to regulate tech at all, even if both sides agree in concept. Casey Newton talks about this.
With top notch analysis like this, you should consider claiming a salary from the fifth directorate of the Federal Security Service. This is just the kind of stuff that'll allow them to continue building on their stellar track record of 2022!
I am sure they are also willing to pay big rubles for people sabotaging the ability of western countries to have meaningful debates and discussions. Messing with the reality finding mechanism of your opponent is as good as it gets during wartime. And that is most effective if you overdrive the narratives people already believe.
edit: Case and point, OP is flagged and no longer visible. This is how successful Russian information operations look like. There is nothing the Kremlin can publish that is going to convince any meaningful section of western society, but getting them to put on blinders is incredibly easy. And once they are on, we are screwed. When stuff becomes unthinkable it becomes incredibly easy to exploit. Not to mention that believing your own propaganda targeted at the morale of English speaking Russian soldiers is already really dangerous.
I'm not sure of your motivation either, but we all have our biases; those are powerful predictions, and it's a shame you've been hit with such a downvote attack.
I would not be surprised if people downvote this sort of comment since—no matter the predictions—it seems like an attempt to piggyback off the parent post to make more people see your own post when just posting a top-level comment would have been more appropriate. Not trying to imply intent, though.
I intentionally made predictions that could be verified after a year but would also be minority views on this site, since repeating where I agree with the majority does not add to the debate. Sure, they won't all happen, but say, a 50% chance of happening or better, and made a sufficient number of them that I expect a lot of interesting predictions will take place. With the Turkey/Syria meeting, Erdogan has already been asking for it, and at some point Assad will give in. US troops there are surrounded and having trouble resupplying. For the mutual aid treaty, this is based on some under the radar meetings already taking place. That Ukraine lost 100K was inadvertently leaked by Ursula but really everyone paying attention knew -- for example they announced they needed to do a new mobilization of 100K to replace lost men. 100K is most likely a sever under-estimate. Presence of Polish, Georgian, and other troops in Ukraine is already well known, but they haven't been focused on in the West yet. The arrivals of 1000 dead bodies to Poland is forcing the issue into public debate. Other documents have also been leaked.
But this just goes to show how strong Narrative enforcement is in the west. Downvoting is nothing, you have people denied banking services, getting fired, put on no-fly lists, fined, and in Europe even imprisoned for speech -- for questioning NATO narratives. So HN downvotes is not important, it just reveals the various narrative enforcement mechanisms at work even here, but with a lot less at stake.
If this was a Chinese message board or Russian message board, I could make opposite predictions and be met with much more interesting debate and intellectual curiosity, as their information control mechanisms aren't nearly as sophisticated, and as a society they tend to be much more pragmatic and intellectually curious. The West is unique in being so ideological in the present moment - basically it is going through something similar to the cultural revolution period in China, and of course that was not a time to go against official narratives.
But in any case -- just wait a year. I'll be happy to compare my predictions in Dec 2023 against others'. It would be funny -- and quite appropriate -- if the some of the most interesting and accurate predictions of the last year were flagged on this site. But that's up to HN management, and they most likely have limited capacity to stand up to information warfare policies in the west and the hordes of professionals with hurt feelings flagging everything they disagree with. I don't take it personally at all, it's just a sign of the times.
> If this was a Chinese message board or Russian message board, I could make opposite predictions and be met with much more interesting debate and intellectual curiosity, as their information control mechanisms aren't nearly as sophisticated, and as a society they tend to be much more pragmatic and intellectually curious.
How do you mesh this with the fact that you can and will be arrested in Russia for calling the war in Ukraine a war, or for even protesting with a blank sign?.
As a simple example, there was an employee of a TV news station in Moscow that started screaming pro-Ukraine things on the air, on live TV. She was given a 100 ruble fine (for causing a disturbance) and released.
Meanwhile, people in the EU are actually imprisoned for supporting Russia. And of course Ukraine has death squads, and merely being accused of supporting Russia or being accused of speaking Russian is enough to end up in one of the filtration camps.
I’d suggest you find better new sources because I have seen the videos of the people being hauled off by the Russian police for holding a blank sign where as your example does not even exist.
> Around the same time, it's clear that there are more than 200K Ukrainian dead and all Narratives of them winning the war or even maintaining a stalemate are gone, even from western media.
I am curious as to what leads you to make this prediction?
Not him, but from current predictions to 200k isnt that big of a jump. If i recall we are likely at over 100k dead servicemen (matching Russian losses) and something around 40k dead civilians.
Not so sure about such a drastic shift myself, but its a possibility if you think of it in terms of having overdone the whole propaganda aspect and inadvertently triggering a reaction. Especially as having observed it for the better part of the last year, i suspect Russia has been goating western media/commentators/politicians into especially brazen stuff. To give an example for especially brazen instances, there is the propaganda channel "Perun" on youtube who does a great job framing itself as open source intelligence. When it came to the Ukrainian Kherson offensive he however dropped the ball and transparently crossed the line from miss- to dissinformation when he
1) Congratulated the Ukrainian government on "preserving manpower" by banning military age males from leaving the country
2) Stating that the Ukrainian military was made up solely from "volunteers", thus the great fighting spirit
3) Congratulating the Ukrainian government on its willingness to take losses in Kherson with the strategic aim of worsening the Russian supply situation
Add to stuff like this the reports that got brazenly silenced like the Amnesty International report about Ukraine having soldiers positioned in schools and hospitals. The rational being that Russia knew about all prewar military positions in case you wondered.
Its the old problem of exploiting a bogey man too brazenly and overdoing propaganda. Once you overdo it, you might be in for a rude awakening about the extend of stuff that stops working.
edit: Minute 26:06 in the Video from 17th of September (Seven months from Kyiv to Kharkiv), Minute 27:30 and 41:40 of the Kherson video from 20th November. Binge watched them so not sure where he mentioned the volunteer part, but the preserving manpower with ban to leave the country should be mentioned in the Ukrainian mobilization video. But also referenced at around min 13 in the Kyiv to Kharkiv video.
Russia will not have a sudden reversal in capabilities. China is not going to abandon its strategy of hedging its bets to tie itself to a sinking ship all of a sudden. Iran and Saudi Arabia will not have a sudden change of heart to adopt a completely opposite position. Zelensky is already to US liking and Ukraine has shown itself to be capable rather than on the verge of falling apart.
Basically OP was positing a complete reversal of existing realities that all just happen to align with enemies of the US all of a sudden becoming more capable and deciding to band together. In reality political alliances, as well as military and economic capabilities, don't do screaming 180 degree turnarounds.
But Russia is accomplishing their objectives, so there would be no reversal. Ukraine is holding on by pouring tens of billions of dollars worth of Western armaments into the conflict (which are coming slower and slower), not to mention the lives of servicemen.
It's not a very optimistic picture is it? Definitely feels like we're heading in to one of those "things are going to get worse before they get better" periods
As some other has pointed out this sounds way too disruptive to be true (how exactly would 200k deaths change the entire prospect of the war?).
Why would the US need to replace zelensky with a "puppet"? Ukraine wants US boots in Ukraine.
China recovery of their GDP is going to happen how? They got multiple issues systemically destroying their GDP growth (pollution, corruption, housing market collapse, over fishing, bad policies being enforced with no room for negotiation, etc. ).
To be fair, when your survival depends on the military spending of someone else, the lines between "alliance" and "vasalism" starts to blur. It will (understandably) take some balls for Zelensky to ever refuse anything from Biden in the short term ; and in the long term, US will likely not refrain from using the "remember when we saved you from Putin" card (we've heard this in France for, what 50 years ?)
I'm pretty sure Churchill and De Gaulle were called "pupets of the USA" at some point, and they seem to have gone on _fine_.
That being said, it would be foolish from the US to not "destroy the Russian army for less than 5% of its defense budget, without loosing any soldier".
I agree, and of course I expect the US to use their "hey remember that time" card a few times, and I'm sure Ukraine itself (not just Zelenskyy) expects the same.
And for context, the US helping Ukraine to this extent pretty immediately means the US is loved in Ukraine, and the country will be pretty happy to follow the US in whatever for quite a while.
"Puppet" has other implications, though. A puppet, in its most literal form, is an empty face and body where you put your hand; it does your every move, everything you exactly want it to.
The implications of calling Zelenskyy the US's puppet are appalling. It implies Ukraine didn't choose him, rather that the US placed him. It implies Ukraine has no agency, but is just the "United State Border Office for Russia". It implies that Ukraine's biggest problems are whatever the US is concerned about; rather than what currently threatens its existence.
I'm tired tired tired of americans thinking they're so god-damn important in the world, that every other nation is a "puppet state". And they always say it with disdain at their own administration, as if that makes it okay. Not to say the US hasn't had puppet regimes installed, but fuck, it's seriously egocentric.
I think you're more or less spot on, but very far with the last one on UK.
The economy is more resilient than you think, especially the City. I have a feeling the war ironically helped. It prevented the finance from moving out to the continent.
While the city may be resilient ( and I'm a bit dubious about that) I think the economy outside of London is increasingly fragile as the past decade of under investment in infrastructure is really starting to bite. The levels of political instability also make the UK less attractive than it has been in the past and I can't see us getting through 2023 without at least one self inflicted constitutional crisis around either Northern Ireland or Scotland.
The inflation situation in the UK is getting out of hand. With Brexit and post Covid, companies are struggling for staff and the prices being charged for everything are eye watering.
I’m not sure how that plays out, but hyperinflation can’t be good.
There are a few other cities that have done and are continuing to do well such as Manchester, but the North East continues to decline, Liverpool is betting that being a Freeport (again) will save it (it won't), Birmingham is just a bit rubbish, Wales is independent enough from Westminster to be ignored and not independent enough to change its own destiny, and Scotland (or the SNP) desperately wants to leave the UK, rejoin the EU, keep the oil, become a wind, wave, tech and finance powerhouse and also have a rainbow sparkle unicorn pony. It's not a great picture.
- USB 4, Series D will be defined, with 3 possible orientations, one each for display, power and data transfer
- Saudi Arabia will release an ethical standards requirement for each of its Western tech company holdings. The exact definition will be confusingly progressive, which will put everyone on guard.
- Google will cancel the Search product, with a press release that expounds beautifully about the future. They claim to be taking it down to bring it back in Q2 2024 powered by a LLM.
- Someone will fork Rust and C and combine them together into something called Crust. This will become wildly popular.
- James Cameron's Avatar 3 will be leaked early by accident, exposing that the movies aren't actually CGI, and all the money has gone to creating a Jurassic Park-style horrible genetic experiment.
- Twitter will have 4 separate CEOs, and end the year as a public non-profit holding.
This is a joke but maybe it actually is a viable model to deal with geopolitical issues/differences. the “emperor” has overall control and gets paid his “taxes” and the local kings have some autonomy in how to deal with their regions.
But I’m sure this already happens without using medieval metaphors
- Saudi Arabia will release an ethical standards requirement for each of its Western tech company holdings. The exact definition will be confusingly progressive, which will put everyone on guard.
Bold and seemingly contradictory predictions by me:
-The rapid advances in AI slow down. Dalle and GPTchat will be an exception not a rule in the long run. The fraction of hard AI problems that can be solved with raw force of more parameters and training isn't that large.
-Paradoxically, AI will change everything. The advances that are already here haven't caught on yet. Legal documents in particular occupy this sweet niche of having some of the rigidness and strictness of coding but without the exact syntax requirements needed for code. The lawyers haven't yet noticed the machine coming for their job. I'm sure lawyers are not the only ones.
-A great recession isn't coming. The markets just sort of trade sideways for a while. You won't get 9% annual off an index fund like you did in the past, you won't loose your shirt either.
-The big issue on everyone's mind is the war in Ukraine. From what I've seen of just crude projections of when Russia would run out of tanks, APC's, whatever else, Ukraine will win the war outright in the first half of this year.
-China has basically given up on zero covid. I say this as someone who earlier was planning to speculate on China doing another major lockdown: they ain't going back to it.
100% lawyers have noticed. For example: they've been trying to automate discovery for a while now. I'm sure the new LLMs are making waves in those circles.
But also: lawyering is good money, and they're adept at navigating the law. So breaking into that space with some sort of "tech disruption" has a high chance of getting you (metaphorically) dismembered.
Yes, my firm is investing loads into AI and other tech solutions to common legal problems. I first worked with eDiscovery software eight years ago. More recent trends including using machine learning to (partially) automate legal due diligence.
Liability is the issue, as you say. If the software you use fails to flag an obvious issue that you consequently fail to flag to your client, you are in trouble, and the software provider won't be indemnifying you for it.
One of my predictions is that this will lead to an AI arms race. The front line won't be weird melty pictures and code that doesn't work but looks like it might, but increasingly expensive automated suits by legal AIs against other legal AIs.
This will - ironically - create the Singularity. And then we're all either in jail, bankrupt, or legally executed.
Yep. My buddy actually worked at making one practice less paper dependent. If there is a place, where tech did not make a big impact yet ( and some of it for a reason like confidentiality ), this is it. Naturally, doing it well will be hard ( and suddenly finding a lawyer that knows what he/she is doing tech wise will be about as bad as .. any other company on the planet ).
Most of these are pretty good, if not a big stretch.
>First the plague, now the war, next the famine!
I'm noting no predictions on this page regarding the Colorado River and the drought in the US West. Will the drought continue? Get worse? Could it cause a famine? Or just widespread adoption of efficient watering systems?
There's more than a few "oh shit the food supply" stories sizzling in the background. Wheat exports from Ukraine/Russia is an obvious one. Spotted lantern fly eating the crops we like to eat in the American North East is another. Colorado River drought is yet a third. They might all be nothing, but only one of them has to be something.
Drought is hitting Europe and Asia as well. Water will be traded as a commodity if it isn’t already beyond water purification companies.
Food prices in North America will continue to climb as drought worsens agriculture in California and Mexico. California supplies most of the food in Western North America, including the Western half of Canada
Yeah it's been hitting even central Europe (Germany, France, Benelux AT/CH etc) for the last few years.
It's harder to notice from afar because it's not deserty (yet) but the temperatures are going up all year and with it the obvious problems and also new and "exciting" fauna and flora is arriving.
Many places in that area are historically very water rich that's why the consequences to everyday life are often not yet that severe.
No idea about Europe but I think the Colorado River watershed will improve in 2023, ruining any chance of getting meaningful change accomplished - and guaranteeing deadpool by 2030.
Nice prediction but I think that lawyers will be the last to feel the change. You don't pay a lawyer for crafting a document, you pay a lawyer to take responsibility for the document and to foresee any possible problems.
I believe AI will be one of those things where the first 80% is the easiest and the last 20% very difficult.
We probably need at least another doubling of global processing power before we will see any major advancements in AI tech, which will take 3-7 years in my opinion.
I would enjoy being proven wrong, but I fear I am actually overly optimistic.
The real moment of truth will be if any models start to assist massively in research in the hard sciences.
Based on the quality of outputs I get when asking for help with somewhat complex AI research problems, I think it'll likely help accelerate the pace of other research as well, and discovery will be limited by people's speed of running the tests it suggests and feeding it back the results.
For 2023, AI will go nowhere, even if developed further. It will remain a gimmick. Expectations are too high, and AI research can't deliver.
+1 for for the recession, it's not coming, that almost apparent right now. Yes, more will lose their jobs, but only because many of those positions should never have been created in the first place. There are still plenty of jobs, just less attractive ones. I will say: I have zero feel for the US job market, it's simply too weird to comprehend. For Northern Europe, plenty of work all around.
Russia won't run out of APC, but they will run out of tanks, they basically have already. They don't have the inventory to deploy tanks in offensive actions anymore. They won't run out of APCs. The will run out of good one and competent personal to put in them. The last more of a statement of current facts, not a prediction.
I have a friend who has been in china since before covid hit, teaching english to kids.
He just told me today that China has lifted all restrictions surrounding covid and are letting it run its course. As a result, he and his gf have both gotten covid for the first time.
When it first hit they had tanks driving up and down their streets making sure people stayed in their houses, so it's definitely a shift for them.
It's a great almost-specific prediction! Followers of ancient prophets would be proud. It's the kind of thing that has a 1% chance of being accurate--it sounds very specific because it mentions France, but has ample wiggle room:
- It includes "any major world leader" not just French leaders;
- If a world leader of any stripe were to die in a plane crash next March, people would still argue in favor of the prediction being correct, because the line between "not a major world leader" and "a major world leader" is quite fuzzy with room for "reasonable" debate.
- "Part of an attempted coup" is a great specific-but-broad constraint. What is an "attempted coup", exactly? A "successful coup" would be much more strict, but "attempted coup" leaves both the attempted-and-failed as well as the attempted-and-succeeded variants on the table. Also, one could argue that an "attempted coup" has many possibilities that are not immediately identified as a "coup"--for example, would a violent protest count? What does it mean to be "part of" an attempt? For example, suppose a leader is not part of the attempt personally, but is associated with someone who is. In that case, would the leader who left the country be considered "part of" an attempted coup?
For context: I grew up Mormon and grappled through many prophecies that seemed incredibly "specific" and somehow, incredibly, turned out to be true. This proved Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God.
* AI will keep wowing us, but in 2023 actual change will be surprisingly little. Turns out the extra 1% is rather important for serious applications, and less serious applications could do with existing solutions - Third-world click/content-farms are surprisingly competitive economically.
* Website rendering will edge a bit towards WebAssembly+canvas stacks, essentially the second coming of Flash - the need/desire was always there, mobile is getting more powerful, stacks will adjust back.
World:
* The war in Ukraine will continue back and forth. Over the long run leading to a strategic defeat for Russia regardless of tactical results (The West's logistical superiority will win out in the end).
* The Middle East will flare up, since 'pretend the JCPOA is still viable' can't hold past 2023 (the West will worry about sunsets, Iran will look at its economy and double down as the regime always does).
* Add in shocks from China and the Fed, and a recession is guaranteed. For how long I can't say.
* Relative political stability in most of the democratic world, not that voters are pleased, but they'll stick with the current group for 2023.
They will come but unless the quality is better than what we have for image and text generation, the same thing applies. 95% is not good enough for most serious applications, so it’s not going to replace most jobs.
> AI will keep wowing us, but in 2023 actual change will be surprisingly little. Turns out the extra 1% is rather important for serious applications.
When a competent specialist has doubts, they can say "I don't know",but ChatGPT is happy to say some non sense. This makes it very unreliable in a way we're not used to.
The thing with content farms is a lot of the listicles etc. trade in currency, e.g. the best five blah-blahs of 2023. In general, that's not the sort of thing that generative AI is really set up for today. That will come as will rewriting press releases with some additional context. But, as you say, major impacts are probably later this decade as opposed to 2023 which will still be in the curiosity phase.
The US will see a slowdown in GDP growth, with a rate of 0.2%, while the Eurozone may experience a mild recession, with a rate of -0.1%. Inflation will remain high, particularly in Europe, though it will be lower than in 2022.
90% or more of the population of China will become infected with SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variants during the first quarter. Assuming infection fatality rate of around 0.1%, between 1 and 1.5 million people may die, however the Chinese government will report numbers that are lower by at least an order of magnitude. The supply chain will be impacted, and it is possible that new variants may emerge and spread to the rest of the world.
The Russo-Ukrainian war will continue. A second major offensive against Ukraine is likely. Mobilisation (both military and industrial) will continue, Ukrainian infrastructure and economy will be further damaged. There will be no negotiations. Russian regime won't collapse, Russia will not split, NATO will not become involved in fighting on Ukrainian soil. The risk of a full-scale nuclear war is very low, the use of tactical nuclear weapons is more probable, but still unlikely.
China will not launch an attack on Taiwan in 2023.
There will be many new startups based on the OpenAI API, and this market will become extremely crowded. OpenAI will continue updating their GPT model and release version 4, which will significantly improve the quality and reliability of text output and will be multimodal. There will be at least one major, publicly available, competing LLM, likely from Meta.
Twitter will add the ability to make payments on their platform and will work on developing e-commerce capabilities. Meta will follow suit, most likely on Whatsapp.
While I don't know what IFR to use for China -- I'm not familiar enough with their vaccines nor their rate of vaccination -- remember that in general, there's one IFR for "sick people can go to the hospital" and another, much higher one for "sick people cannot go to the hospital because they are full."
The hospitals will be full, so the IFR will be at the high end of whatever we fear.
You've got a good point there, but we also need to consider the time frame. I'm talking about the first quarter and my predictions may be way too pessimistic. Once the virus infects the urban population (~60%) it will slow down. IHME forecasts 300k deaths in Q1.
The subvariant spreading in China is Omicron BF.7 with basic reproduction number of R0>=10. That means that herd immunity will be reached at 1-1/10 = 90% of population or higher, so by the end of 2023 the death toll may indeed exceed 1 million, depending on the exact IFR which is still uncertain.
- Tesla struggles to compete against old school manufacturers that have a grip on quality and make advances on the EV tech side
- At least one instance of serious grid instability in Europe. Comes close to complete cascading collapse, but few people in mainstream notice/understand how serious it was
- Various real estate markets dive 40%. Canada, UK, Ireland, nordics
- Something in US politics breaks in a serious fashion (think capital riot) cause by the widening left/right split spiralling further out of control
- Russia gets a new leader
- China moves aggressively against Taiwan, but not a full frontal assault. Blockade of some sort. US backs down
- Major oil price drama from strait of hormuz or that general part of the world
- Robots/Drones that are 100% AI controlled and armed with lethal weapons are used for area denial patrol type in corridor fashion
- Revolution in sea unmanned navigation via AI, both underwater and above. Mostly cargo for above, military for under.
- Multiple major humanitarian crisis in Africa, mix environmental and socioeconomic/structural
- Knock-off ChatGPT style bots become a widely available but they are inferior to the openai one. aws/gcp/azure all have a go at it
- The flaws in AI become more evident even as models become more powerful. Basically AI algorithms learn patterns, not abstraction, limiting reasoning in fundamental ways.
- Understanding why AI makes mistakes continues to be a black box.
- AI, despite fears, will enliven culture through DALL-e etc .
- We will be in a golden age of science and tech, not so much in fundamental discoveries but in successfully moving away from carbon based energy. Incremental improvements across a vast array of problems with create powerful synergies.
- The problems with globalization are with us for the foreseeable future, leading to increased trading among allies, less with non-allies.
> Basically AI algorithms learn patterns, not abstraction
I've been playing around with chat GPT and trying to find useful cases.
I asked it to come up with python assignments, such that I could train for a certification, and I provided the syllabus, which includes the datetime and calendar module. Among the many syggestions, one stood out to me: creating a CLI which accepts a date and uses those modules to calculate the following full moon and print it.
Sounded cool, but there's a catch: those modules don't have any information about moon cycles!
I guess it matched some pattern regarding dates and moon cycles to produce this bad answer. It's a creative suggestion, but quite unfeasible!
We cannot use these models as experts who provided answers, but instead as creative, sometimes nonsense assistants, who can give their input but we can clearly filter the good ideas from the nonsense.
We can't move away from carbon-based energy without a very unlikely fundamental discovery. Rather we will keep using more and more carbon-based energy (and that for years, until it becomes more and more expensive and we start having energy problems).
1. We will learn that one or more traditional banks have taken on cryptocurrency exposure and will need to be bailed out to prevent another financial crisis.
2. Politicians will introduce legislation to regulate AI, with the initial focus on copyright protection, but it will be defeated. Court cases are brought against companies for training ML using copyrighted data, setting up an eventual supreme court battle in coming years.
3. AI will drive advancements in medical treatments, especially in pharmaceuticals and personalized medicine. While this has already been happening to some extent, the recent interest in AI will cause an increased investment of money and resources to companies working in this space.
4. Year of Linux desktop!
5. Remote work will end for many, due to the recession making employers feel more powerful to enforce back-to-office, for which which many middle managers will advocate. Companies who have thrived with a remote culture will remain that way, but those who have struggled will "force" employees back to their offices full time.
After buying a chromebook a month ago I am completely convinced this came a few years ago and no one paid any attention as it wasn't the vision they had of the Linux desktop.
I was blown away by how nice ChromeOS is to use, how seamless everything is, and how well Crostini (I think it's called this) works at running Linux programs. ChromeOS is honestly the single best Linux experience I have ever had.
> After buying a chromebook a month ago I am completely convinced this came a few years ago and no one paid any attention as it wasn't the vision they had of the Linux desktop.
I noticed but I don't think this is a satisfactory Linux Desktop. It goes against many stuff Linux Desktop proponents could be fighting for, mainly privacy and controlling one's computing. The main point of the Chromebook is to make your computer a thin client to run your computing on Google's servers. I think computing should go the opposite way. It's fast and has no virus though.
As for the market share, I know nobody with a Chromebook around me, I don't think it's a big thing where I am.
As someone who used ChromeOS for a year or so, I think its kinda cool that mainstream people are using Linux, but
1: They don't know they are using Linux. Most users dont even know what Linux is.
2: Not open source.
3: Not privacy respecting.
Given that Linux mode is a directly supported feature of ChromeOS, I think it gets a little bit murky. A consumer grade device with Debian Buster/10 I can just run Emacs on? True it's not the Ubuntu+Gnome running natively future we wanted in our desktop domination (though Dell and System76 and Framework will sell you one of those these days), but Chromebooks aren't this totally locked down bastardized single-app technicall Linux device with that feature. Chromebooks also now run Android apps too.
If 99% of people don't know what Linux is, and don't use Linux mode, should it really count? Most people just use what is essentially a browser that can also run Android apps.
If 99% of the people using it don't know what a Linux is, I think that means we've totally won because it means that Linux got easy enough for them to use!
Really though, I think it's for you to decide. It's not like there's a standards body with a rigorous criterion on if a given year is "Year of Linux Desktop", which is perhaps OPs point. Personally I think that 2013, when Dell first started selling the XPS 13 with Ubuntu was the Year of the Linux Desktop and I personally think that we've actually lost the plot in subsequent years.
Given that ChromeOS uses Linux under the hood? I'd argue yes it does count. Even if they don't access Linux mode/Linux VMs they are still using a Linux system.
fair enough, I do think it's arguable that users of ChromeOS would regularly do that, but I get your point.
Also, I had a System76 laptop for work once and absolutely loved it. I tried to buy it when I left, but they weren't happy about my reasons for leaving and refused to do so.
Seriously though, the "Year of the Linux desktop" is when YOU decide that the Linux desktop is good enough and start using it full-time. That was many years ago for me, and for other people maybe it's not ready for them yet. But if you're talking about market share, it's going up slowly but steadily year after year.
I've always been a holdout due to pc games, now I just bought a desktop pc for the first time in 10 years. If steam really manages to pull of Linux gaming, it is gonna be my year of Linux desktop!
Well, proton and wine have made significant advancements. You should check out your Steam library on protondb, that'll show what can run on Linux and what can't.
> 1. We will learn that one or more traditional banks have taken on cryptocurrency exposure and will need to be bailed out to prevent another financial crisis.
Don't know if this will pan out, but if it does it will probably be Deutsche Bank right?
- We'll see a new social network born. My guess is that it will try to carve out a segment from Twitter and Tiktok due to the recent changes from Musk and U.S. government concerns, respectively.
- People will start realizing Vue is just AngularJS all over again and will further converge towards React. There is already many signs of this in Vue3.
- Cryptocurrency regulation will be an ongoing discussion, and nothing will happen until SBF is in jail.
- Influencers who pumped and dumped crypto will be an ongoing target from the SEC. The recently Coffeezilla series on Logan Paul will likely be made an example of.
- We'll see more layoffs
- We will see more millennials quit the 9-5 to pursue some kind of passion. My guess is most will try to be an influencer.
- We'll start seeing more pirating again as people are being laid off and also due to the increase of streaming competitors.
- Meta will likely continue to lose money and their AR strategy will be disrupted by Apple.
“We will see more millennials quit the 9-5 to pursue some kind of passion. My guess is most will try to be an influencer.”
But where do influencers get their money? Endorsements aka advertisements and straight from subscribers. We may already be seeing a contraction of the advertisers from online streaming so this probably has shorter legs than required to impact the 9-5 hegemony.
Otherwise people who left the labor market probably have their finances tied to the stock market and interest rates - whether they realize it or not. The Fed has stated they will raise rates until the labor market moves back towards employers. (They are not a populist group, btw.) They absolutely think raising rates will push people out of retirement regardless of age.
Personally, I think it’s far past time for the labor market to correct towards the supply side than the demand side. Ie workers and worker needs/wants. This did happen after the 1918 Pandemic. But of course that era didn’t have quite the high powered technocratic class pushing things toward the corporates away from market equilibrium. (Economic theory does generally warn against artificial conditions thwarting equilibrium of supply/demand. The hell of rent caps in NYC is an example.)
In short, make jobs more desirable for people to work or see an inefficient outcome until the market does. Let the market do its thing at least, or (better) reinforce workers rights-as the market has already pushed the equilibrium too far towards labor demand and away from supply.
I think this looks like creative solutions around hours/scheduling, workplace conditions, and moving away from toxic environments like hire to fire, “quiet promotions”, or under scheduling people to avoid paying benefits.
I'm not a fan of the whole "the market will deal with it" thing. Here's my analogy (I was talking about this as far back as the late 90's).
1. Assume global warming is happening.
2. Assume that global warming is going to start causing problems for humans.
Humans will start using technology to deal with these problems. And they'll be successful. This is going to have the harmful effect of making global warming worse before humans truly start trying to solve the root issue (because they can continue to live without being affected by it).
There are two lines here. Passing the first line starts affecting humans, and passing the second line ends in catastrophe (humans can no longer exist on earth).
In a well functioning system, as we pass the first line, humans will start taking notice and we will _naturally_ start trying to avoid the second line. The space between these two lines is our buffer.
As we use technology to keep the warming from affecting us, we will push the first line back while avoiding any true behavior changes that would ultimately keep us from the second line. This decreases our buffer and increases the danger. At some point the technology will either fail or completely remove the second line (one can imagine building a bubble around the earth ala space balls so we can very explicitly regulate the environment).
To use technology in this manner is to invite catastrophe and to gamble that technology will never fail us. It may, or it may not.
---
This is how I feel about "the market". In theory, the market should naturally push towards an equilibrium and correct so as to avoid true disaster. Humans are involved, technology is involved, causing the market to be unnatural and affected by forces outside of that market. In the case of markets, catastrophe isn't the extinction of all human life, but it IS untold horrors. People are currently using technology to force the market to be what they want. This will break at some point.
This is why the market needs to be regulated, to control how much of an effect both humans and technology have on it. Not because the market will never self-correct, but because of the untold pain when it does.
And I understand the argument against it, this is not about controlling the market, it's about _PROTECTING_ the market from undue influence by those with more power than others. The alternative to too much regulation isn't "no regulation", it's "less regulation". Of course, you also have the classic problem of "who watches the watchers" and there's no good answer for solving THAT problem, but I don't think the right answer is "fuck it, just let it play out".
When you learn React with JSX, you just need to know JS and everything else is pretty much predictable. Whereas in Vue, you have to learn JS and all the declaration markups of Vue (ex, v-bind, v-for, etc...); it's less predictable and someone who understands JS would still have to learn those things. Ex, if you knew how to write a loop in JS then you can write a loop to output React components. In Vue, you have to learn how to use v-for. When you start talking about filters and other things, it gets overly complicated in Vue (like AngularJS).
Two-way binding was a thing in early AngularJS days similar to Vue, and they both found out through iteration that it's not as great in practice as in theory. I believe Vue3 is only one-way binding now? With the composition API, you're encouraged to use defineEmits as the callback mechanism to parent components similar to React's paradigm. When React came out, it was all one-way binding and it made sense and worked well.
Vue's composition API with the defineProps and defineEmits creates a similar component composition structure to React's effect hooks. However, the general structure of the component still requires Vue syntax (ex, <template>, <script setup>, etc...). In React, you just write a JS function and return what you expect to render.
Vue is also a bit too magical in how their props work especially when you are using <script setup>. It's not obvious that props can be inherited unless you read the documentation. In React, it's just JavaScript and you get the props through the function arguments.
I think the common "strengths" of Vue are often applicable to all frontend frameworks, because it's all JavaScript at the end of the day. This is all just my opinion though.
We've been leaning heavily into Vue3+TSX over at https://radiopaper.com which addresses some of these gripes. It's true there's more "magic" and ceremony around creating components than just a simple function, but not much – you just return what you expect to render from the `setup` component method and all is well. You also get niceties like well-typed props & emitted events, and even runtime prop data validation if desired, built right in.
Vue3 also has `FunctionalComponent` now for the cases where you really want a simple component from a function – and again props work beautifully with Typescript.
In contrast, I'm finding integrating Typescript with the largely-JS React codebase I work with on the day job to be a bit nightmarish – the amount of prop destructuring which seems to happen in every single component makes typing their signatures a repetitive, tedious affair (largely due to TS's handling of destructured arguments). I'm not sure how universal this style is in modern React but I do seem to come across it pretty frequently. To be fair, React's simplicity does make it eminently typeable, this is more of a code-stylistic issue.
All that said, appreciated reading your take on the two frameworks – it's extremely difficult to remain objective about the tools we use day in and out and these sorts of comparisons absolutely help. We all want to be moving towards systems we enjoy building with and will continue enjoying for decades - I for one am infinitely grateful to React and its community for bringing JSX/TSX into the world (which I'm sure is still a somewhat controversial stance in 2022- but for me personally, after a 6 or so months with it, the firsthand experience told me all I needed to know). Happy xmas to you!
> Vue3 also has `FunctionalComponent` now for the cases where you really want a simple component from a function – and again props work beautifully with Typescript.
This kind of reinforces my point about having to learn Vue. I personally think it's just unnecessarily building more API to memorize on top of JavaScript.
> In contrast, I'm finding integrating Typescript with the largely-JS React codebase I work with on the day job to be a bit nightmarish – the amount of prop destructuring which seems to happen in every single component makes typing their signatures a repetitive, tedious affair (largely due to TS's handling of destructured arguments).
To be fair, I find issues with this with TypeScript everything. Moreover, I think that is the natural progression for all typed systems or languages. I honestly prefer JS without TypeScript. I may use TypeScript some times for certain areas like having enums.
> All that said, appreciated reading your take on the two frameworks
Fair points. I feel the need to clarify that you don't _need_ to use `FunctionalComponent` in bare JS, it just gives you an opportunity to type your component props (all `FunctionalComponent` is is a TS interface). This works just fine, from a `.tsx` file:
```
const MyComponent = ({ greeting = 'Hello' }) => <p>{greeting} world!</p>;
```
and can be used in TSX or standard-Vue templates as
```
<MyComponent greeting="Hi" />
```
There is certainly more surface-area to learn about than React, though my feeling is that hooks have evened that equation quite a bit (one React component class vs. a whole quirky hooks toolkit; and admittedly Vue has forms of both as well). I'd argue both are far less to learn than Angular – I've had a tiny bit of experience there and recall feeling continually lost. I also think there are tradeoffs that justify extra bits of learning, but that's a subjective matter that (imo) can only be informed through some amount of firsthand experience building something complex with the frameworks.
Typescript is not everyone's cup of tea! Tradeoffs abound there – personally while I agree it can be cumbersome, I have trouble going back at this point (though I will when necessary). Interesting that you enjoy enums – I do as well but have found a distaste for them in the TS community which saddens me.
Prop destructuring isn't necessary. A lot of people changed to accessing the props via property access and this is often a better approach for conciseness. Don't force yourself to do something stylistic if it doesn't fit!
Thanks for weighing in, that's good to know. After wondering if this could be auto-refactored, I came across https://github.com/jsx-eslint/eslint-plugin-react/blob/maste..., will definitely have to give that (with `--fix`) a try in the new year and see if I can get the team on board! – desire for typescript being a compelling factor.
Personally I do like the non-destructured `props.abc` throughout component code, really helps clarify at a glance where something is coming from, whether it's locally or externally defined, etc. Code style is an endless exercise in compromises/opinions though, even _with_ tools like eslint and prettier.
It's just getting started. We're on the verge of seeing the first few billionaire influencers emerge. That will definitely turn heads and drive more money towards that direction. We're also seeing the rise of the children of tech money (I forgot the name to reference this group of people), but they're going to be heavy on influencer lifecycles too.
I disagree. Peak influencer moment was the billionaire status of folks like Kanye, Kardashians, Kylie Jenner, etc. If anything is to be seen from the past year, it's that they're just as vulnerable to the machinations of the mainstream as any one. Moreover, most of their wealth is pure paper - not even publicly traded. With a sure trimming of private valuations, they will definitely be hurt (although their lifestyle won't, but I doubt they are that stupid to showcase their lives during an actual recession year when it happens).
Tldr:- Influencers are correlated to the markets. Market valuations fall, Influencers get hurt.
I think their point is that influencers have always existed, it's the underlying model that has changed.
And I tend to agree. People bought into Logan Pauls scam because they trusted him, the same way that people will buy a product because they trust the spokesperson.
I'm a huge Kate Mulgrew fan even as I don't think Janeway was a great captain. I remember coming across "The Principle" on Amazon, seeing her on it, and purchasing it. I didn't get very far into it before I stopped it and went googling and it turns out she was tricked and didn't fully realize what she was narrating. I think she sued them, but I could be wrong.
You can argue that the scale is different, and you may be right, but I do think the other poster is correct that they've existed for a very long time and many people use them as a proxy for trust when making decisions.
- next year will be a mixture of things continuing to happen as before, and completely unexpexted events (that will actually play out similarly than previous events, but from a while ago.)
- There will be strikes in France,
- coups in south America and / or Africa,
- very few plane crashes, an awful lot of car accidents
- and maybe a rocket malfunction.
- War in Russia will go on. (Apparently, half of all wars last more than a year :/ [1])
- A next wave from Belarus is almost a sure thing. Not sure why it would work better than last one.
- I don't know where it would make sense military wise for Russia to drop a tactical nuke. They will do if they find out.
- The first power cut in a major European country will change the game as far as public support goes.
- But gouvernements don't need public support to send weapons, they need industrial capability, so they will keep doing it.
- Also, famous people will die in January / February. (because babyboom + life expectancy + winter)
- Summer will be on average hotter than summers from the last decade.
- Except during my holidays, where it will rain cats and dogs.
- Finally, the year will end in December (high probability, high confidence)
I was expecting some joke around "there is no war in Russia, it's a special operation, yada yada". Then I reread myself and spotted the obvious mistake.
:facepalm:
(Although, technically, some parts of Ukraine are claimed by Russia, so... No ? Ok, no. Sorry.)
They were wrong on the midterms and Le Pen getting close (Zemmour flopped and Le Pen + Zemmour is 30% of the vote). The alleged economic conditions would have implied a red wave, but Democrats did significantly better than expected.
Early 2022 the fears of Russia invading were real. They were downplayed and not talked about much in the mainstream but come January many already saw what Russia was up to.
Mostly it’s just that many of us, Ukrainians included (I speak from personal experience - I have Ukrainian close relatives), closed our eyes to Russia actually pulling the trigger. It is just unthinkably stupid and so, so disgusting.
Yeah, I think a lot of history of the russo-ukranian war is not known by many americans. Many people didn't even know there was a war until the invasion. I remember tensions building up a few months before the invasion and some people started talking about it (I knew a political dude online who was talking about it a few months before, he was saying something about how things could go down. I wasn't really interested but now I realize he was right (except for him supporting russia tho)).
* Nivenkos predicted that Omicron would create natural immunity to COVID, but I think alkonaut's prediction was more nuanced/accurate: that organized responses end and there are new variants that we live with (although there has been a greater level of immune escape than expected, nothing has run away... so far). Note, that while down dramatically from the peak we are at a steady state for most of the year where 500 people in the US (and about the same number in the EU) die every day from COVID [1], just no one cares now.
* alkonaut's Russia prediction correctly covers Russian annexation of Eastern Ukraine, intense conflict w/ many more Russian casualties than expected, the SWIFT and petroleum price responses and the huge role that UAVs would play in the conflict. What he missed was actually just how well Ukraine would do (no Russian victory in sight) and how successful/effective Ukraine's infowar/strategic game would be. That, the scale of Russian losses, and the huge amount of OSINT has prevented Russia from any of the narrative control people might have expected.
* Republicans by all accounts should have curb-stomped Dems during the mid-terms, but Roe v Wade ended up being a big own-goal that prevented that.
* alkonaut's prediction that "Boris Johnson is ousted as prime minster. He is replaced by a either a man of some charisma or a woman without charisma, as that is the requirement" was also quite insightful.
Wow. alkonaut called it, very specifically in some cases. Boris Johnson's replacement having no charisma was the cherry on top. Where's alkonaut's 2023 predictions?
Well, game companies have backed away immensely due to backlash, and the PFP NFTs that were all the rage has cooled (but continues on...) but one only has to look at Reddit Collectibles (or the Trump Trading Cards) to see that NFTs aren't dead, just evolving/dropping the branding. Starbucks' Odyssey is another example of this new wave of utility NFTs.
> They were downplayed and not talked about much in the mainstream
The western military intelligence communities were aware and had warned about Russian mobilization for months. They were downplayed only by far-right voices in the west that were invested in building up Putin as an effective authoritarian against the slow-moving "woke" bureaucrats of the EU and the US Democrats.
I think the two biggest news events of this year were Russia and Roe being overturned, but only one prediction for Roe and most for Russia didn't anticipate a hot war
If 2022 is anything to go by, the opposite of what we see on HN can be predicted. So many poor or completely wrong predictions.
"Red tsunami in 2022 mid-terms, Democrats trounced in both the House and Senate. Biden becomes a lame duck." "Russia invades Ukraine with no push back." Hahahahahaha!
"- Elon says something so incredibly stupid that this time it affects his company's performance." Well, this one finally came true. Maybe.
- Starship makes a successful orbital flight.
- Russia won't start any overt military operations in Donbass, let alone Ukraine proper.
- Modern GPU prices are still ridiculous.
- Europe's opinion on nuclear energy will become a tad more favorable.
- Ethereum won't shift to Proof of Stake.
- No major AI breakthroughs.
- James Cameron's Avatar 2 won't bring anything groundbreaking to the table.
- Apple won't release a VR headset.
- Russian-Ukraine war loses its momentum on the eastern front, hot war continues.
- Azerbaijan is launching full-scale invasion to Nagorno-Karabakh, taking it over in a Blitzkrieg with the support of Turkey.
- Russia is forcing Armenia to join Russian Union State, massive protests in Yerevan.
- Pro-Russian government is replacing Belorus president who is forced to resign, massibe protests in Minsk.
- China is preparing for a full scale invasion to Taiwan in 2024.
- Crypto industry crumbles into dust under heavy regulation.
- Meta is stepping back from the Metaverse, moving this research to a separate entity. Meta stocks are all-time low.
- First AI-generated celebrities.
The only thing sillier than technical analysis is using technical analysis on make-believe money. Looking for a pattern is human nature. Your “sample size” of 3 is by no means indicative of anything. “Historical precedence” - they teach you to never use these words when working in finance. Bitcoin going to $5k is absolutely in play this year when the scammy house of cards that is Tether finally collapses.
There is no analytical justification for Bitcoin's price drops solely based on historical price movements. The biggest drops were directly associated with the unprecedented (by most) failure of crypto projects like Terra Luna and Celsius.
- At least 2 rounds of hard layoffs at Amazon, plus gentleman layoffs. No more Bezos billion dollar Prime Video projects. Shedding at least 10-12% of white collar work force to signal to the market they’re trying to prop the stock
- The economic hard landing
- Disney stock will fare much better under Iger
- Additional rate hikes from the Fed, at least 100bps but maybe 150
- Twitter won’t have the demise the media has been predicting. Musk probably continues making changes and shortly doing about face turn on them.
- Russia continues getting backed into a corner with Ukraine faring better and better thanks to US and Western support. Don’t know if it will happen but increasing probability Russia uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine. Doubt it comes down to WW3, we’ll try to immediately broker a peace deal, rather than getting ourselves (US) in a thermonuclear endgame with Russians
- Streaming recession with new shows put on hold
- More advances in AI like openai. Within big tech companies? Not so much.
- Big tech culture shift, cleaning house and going back to roots or at least trying to find that soul. Focus on bottom line metrics. Oat milk lattes, no so much.
It's more commonly (but still not very commonly) called a "gentlemen's layoff", but confusingly seems to (also?) mean pretty much the opposite of what curtisblaine said: "Elon Musk and Jason Calacanis messaged about how return-to-office mandates could be used as a ‘gentlemen’s layoff’ to get workers to voluntarily quit" - https://archive.ph/tC9H4. No idea which sense birdymcbird intended.
"but increasing probability Russia uses a tactical nuke in Ukraine."
Not likely. They would have nothing to gain from it. In their narrative, they are protecting the ukrainians ( which are actually russians, whether they want or not) from the fascist ukrainians. Nuking russian soil does not go together with this and Putin struggles already to not loose his base. And any military advantage this would gain, would be offset by massive upscaling of international aid. Also the russian army is in no shape anymore, to fight in fallout areas.
I expect a stalemate at the current frontlines, with not much changes in the long term.
I agree it is not likely but their made up reasons have nothing to do with it. The narratives shift weekly and at no point they've been internally consistent.
Hm, I surely did not follow every speech of Putin or RT news in general, but as far as I did, the narrative that the Ukrainian needs to be liberated as Russians, did not change and has been pretty consistent.
What did change, were the various threats towards the west and stated goals of what to achieve and back and forth with mobilisation and such.
Putins goal is clear, he wants a Eurasian Empire. But he is apparently not clear on how to achieve it.
(For example he would like Belarussia to join russia and join the war, but so far he was not able to enforce it )
No, the narrative is anywhere from "we're defending Russia proper from invasion" to "we're going after every Ukrainian and their children" between different (and sometimes the same) TV hosts and public figures.
Like I said, I am not really a follower of russian TV, I mainly just read various Speeches Putin gave. And there was never anything close of "we're going after every Ukrainian and their children", that I remember.
It was variations of "the NATO is coming closer to us everyday and we have to fight back". If you know more and different, pls share.
You must have missed the speech when Putin officially annexed the territory he grabbed thus far. The imperial irredentism has little to do with the NATO narrative. But as I said the consistency in Russian propaganda is never sought after, neither by the propagandists nor the willing recipients.
But... how else are we going to keep up the image that we're on the side of the good guys?
People have been saying this shit for months, about how Russia will invade the rest of Europe, or drops nukes, or go crazy, and low and behold, they so far only did exactly what they said they were going to do, nothing more.
If you cant support the war given those facts, and need to make up stories about nukes and total conquest, then maybe war isnt good no matter which side youre on.
…exactly what they said? They were saying they are not going to invade as late as February 20, 2022. Then they said their objectives are total conquest on February 24, 2022 in a public TV address. They threatened nukes (everyone from Putin himself to TV pundits) for months until Xi publicly chided him.
But I am impressed how one can take perhaps the most morally unambiguous conflict in the century so far and still make it an uncertainty.
>how else are we going to keep up the image that we're on the side of the good guys?
Everything we are seeing and hearing from the people in the liberated areas seems to be working pretty well. I guess they bought into the narrative too.
I'd guess it's more the stories of the Russians raping and torturing them that is making it so obviously unambiguous that the Ukrainians are the good guys.
2. The web continues to fracture into separate Euro, Sino, Russo and Americano nets due to increasingly different views in privacy, surveillance, freedom of speech etc. SV companies are slow to pick up on this.
3. Tech layoffs in the Bay Area intensify. When hiring begins again a large number of the new hires are either remote or are in other geographical areas where labour costs are lower.
4. The market for stock photography and grunt level copy writing collapses entirely.
5. Serious attempts are made to have TikTok banned in the USA. This becomes a hot button cultural issue.
6. There is another crypto mini boom lasting at least a couple of months that sees Bitcoin double in price. This ends when it turns out that yet another exchange was being used as a personal piggy bank.
7. The UK continues its long, slow slide into economic ruin, driven by the general incompetence of its political class. (admittedly you could have made this prediction most years since 1945 and been right,but still)