You can't turn a blind eye to the natural saturation of need vs solutions, and derive unlimited optimism from the fact how the people were wrong when they said "everything is already done".
You can't see ideas as some isolated objects that can come into existence on their own. The overall ecosystem breeds the ideas. The forces of demand create the supply chain. Human need funds the solutions. Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions. If Europe has all the science going on in the 17-19th centuries, it is not because only Europe has best minds. Europe has the people with free time, food and riches to afford the science work.
You can't ignore the overall context of the world around you. You can't keep selling infinite ideas. You can't feed infinite amount of sugar to a person. The so-called solutions can turn toxic, dangerous, and unwanted things. Some ideas might be just be a package of problem and solution packed together. When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
It's pretty obvious why peace is a necessary ingredient, firstly the breadth of invention in peace time is wider.
In peace time people invent things for peace and for war, in war time the focus is all on inventing things for war. Screw everything else.
Later on, after the war is over, it may turn out many of the things that were invented for war may also have uses for peace, this however is perhaps not always the case. I don't think the inventions of the first world war that spring first to my mind had a lot of utility beyond war.
The second obvious reason why peace would be a necessary ingredient is the cause of all that inventiveness around creating things for war, it's because in war you are in danger all the time of being killed, which is why when you are not hiding somewhere trying not to be killed you are trying to make things to kill the other guy because if you kill the other guy they can't kill you. If you get killed however, that will be a big dampener on your ingenuity.
Some people might think differently about this state of war, because of historical blindness and the inefficiencies of the English language. If a country is big and powerful enough it can go to war elsewhere, and never have the war touch it.
This is not really war as it has been known in most of the history of humanity, but we call it war. It is really a time of peace in the homeland, and distributed external war.
And in this time of peace in the homeland, people can work peacefully without fear of being killed, and then people who think that this is war say - hey, check it out, peace is not needed for invention and progress at all!
Primarily because war reduces access to certain goods. Certain ideas that could work, need to be tossed due to the war's needs or effects on goods/services.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, they've never been the interesting or limiting part of creating a real product.
Knowing what is the right problem to solve, what the right idea (of many) to apply to it, and then being able to execute, delivering to the right audience, refining as necessary are the actual things that separate success from failure.
I used to believe this line of thought strongly. But like any "rule", it has limits and presumptions.
Genuinely good and new ideas do have a lot of value, they are just very hard to capture by its inventor, because others can just take it for free.
If the law protects ideas, practicality aside, ideas will be more valuable; if the law don't protect implementation, as seen in some countries, then good implementation does not naturally create more value than copycats.
To give a more timely example, a software idea was not valuable because others can take it for free, while taking someone's implementation to redistribute is illegal, so implementation was valuable. But with LLM advancement, there is now a legal and increasingly cheap way to copy implementations, which will greatly its value going forward.
Maybe soon the golden rule will change to "ideas and executions are a dime a dozen, <something else that is hard/illegal to steal> is what separates success from failure"
Ideas are cheap. I remember when I decided to program full-time and get a job in the Bay Area at the beginning of the '99-'02 dotcom boom-bust. I had a good recruiter who got me lots of interviews. I'd sign the NDA and go to the interview only for it to be the same idea as the last company I talked and signed an NDA for. It was interesting to see which of these dupe companies made it and which ones failed. Most failed because only one could succeed in the space.
As an engineer I'm afraid in the age of AI all the easy ideas have been found / lots of companies are working on. It's the hard ones we all know that seem to be intangible. I am still struggling to make things on the side and not feel the weight of my inner thoughts self doubting essentially on "is this juice worth the squeeze if anyone can do it?" but I keep doing it out of the supposed fun I get out of making something. Novel ideas do seem hard to come by though.
There's more than one guy selling hot dogs on the beach. Not joking. This is the most important realization I ever had.
Anyway, on AI, lots of people just don't want to do all the QA and interaction to build the software. And those people are willing to pay to not have to.
Design custom hot dogs (software). That's my advice. It's working very well for me. People hire me for my in depth experience in certain fields (logistics, manufacturing, database stuff generally, chemistry). That they can spend time to learn and discuss it with an LLM doesn't change that one bit. I'm earning more than ever.
People use my software because it's a little cheaper or a little better than some other similar software.
There's room for everyone. You don't need to be the only one in your industry.
Expand the breadth of expertise you can offer. Just as has always been the case, people will rather pay you for it than learn it themselves.
> “Ideas are getting harder to find” is a pretty bleak thing to believe. It says, “Look around the world. This is pretty much as good as it gets; the returns start diminishing from here. All the problems you see are unlikely to be solved anytime soon, so you better get used to them.” Why would anyone agree to such a thing without putting up a fight?
I don't think the first quote implies the second, as claimed. The first is about scientific discovery and the second is about political and social problems.
Ideas are a dime a dozen—tho maybe that's until you blog about one and watch it materialize a month later via Zuckerberg on stage at Meta Connect 2026.
Since the fall of 2023, I’ve used ChatGPT voice while driving for all types of uses. I have been interested in their portable Ai device they are creating only reading it's a puck or something. So, I blogged on August 14th that it should be an Ai keychain assistant (https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
Then on September 23rd, Zuckerberg announced the Muse Charm keychain. Am I crazy to think it's more then a coincidence? I did apply to Scale AI a week after I posted and submitted my blog here on HN.
If the general public tends to believe there's not much left to discover then I wonder if this sentiment itself might be a clue that the opposite is true to a greater extent, or even that we're arguably "behind" in the short term.
Maybe we're about to enter an Economy of Ideas: with everyone and their grandma soon being able to make anything they can think of, it'll come down to who has the better idea (and the vision to polish and continue it)..
I believe that was rather his point. That assertions like “ideas are getting harder to find” or “all the good ideas have already been exploited” proceed from structural misunderstandings about intellectual progress.
For what it’s worth, I felt my time reading this breezy bite-sized essay was time well-spent. I enjoy Mastroianni’s voice as well as his thinking, and I look forward to his forthcoming book on this subject.
You can't see ideas as some isolated objects that can come into existence on their own. The overall ecosystem breeds the ideas. The forces of demand create the supply chain. Human need funds the solutions. Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions. If Europe has all the science going on in the 17-19th centuries, it is not because only Europe has best minds. Europe has the people with free time, food and riches to afford the science work.
You can't ignore the overall context of the world around you. You can't keep selling infinite ideas. You can't feed infinite amount of sugar to a person. The so-called solutions can turn toxic, dangerous, and unwanted things. Some ideas might be just be a package of problem and solution packed together. When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
It's not obvious why peace would be a necessary ingredient. There's plenty of evidence to the contrary from the last few big wars humans engaged in.
In peace time people invent things for peace and for war, in war time the focus is all on inventing things for war. Screw everything else.
Later on, after the war is over, it may turn out many of the things that were invented for war may also have uses for peace, this however is perhaps not always the case. I don't think the inventions of the first world war that spring first to my mind had a lot of utility beyond war.
The second obvious reason why peace would be a necessary ingredient is the cause of all that inventiveness around creating things for war, it's because in war you are in danger all the time of being killed, which is why when you are not hiding somewhere trying not to be killed you are trying to make things to kill the other guy because if you kill the other guy they can't kill you. If you get killed however, that will be a big dampener on your ingenuity.
Some people might think differently about this state of war, because of historical blindness and the inefficiencies of the English language. If a country is big and powerful enough it can go to war elsewhere, and never have the war touch it.
This is not really war as it has been known in most of the history of humanity, but we call it war. It is really a time of peace in the homeland, and distributed external war.
And in this time of peace in the homeland, people can work peacefully without fear of being killed, and then people who think that this is war say - hey, check it out, peace is not needed for invention and progress at all!
Knowing what is the right problem to solve, what the right idea (of many) to apply to it, and then being able to execute, delivering to the right audience, refining as necessary are the actual things that separate success from failure.
Genuinely good and new ideas do have a lot of value, they are just very hard to capture by its inventor, because others can just take it for free.
If the law protects ideas, practicality aside, ideas will be more valuable; if the law don't protect implementation, as seen in some countries, then good implementation does not naturally create more value than copycats.
To give a more timely example, a software idea was not valuable because others can take it for free, while taking someone's implementation to redistribute is illegal, so implementation was valuable. But with LLM advancement, there is now a legal and increasingly cheap way to copy implementations, which will greatly its value going forward.
Maybe soon the golden rule will change to "ideas and executions are a dime a dozen, <something else that is hard/illegal to steal> is what separates success from failure"
Anyway, on AI, lots of people just don't want to do all the QA and interaction to build the software. And those people are willing to pay to not have to.
Design custom hot dogs (software). That's my advice. It's working very well for me. People hire me for my in depth experience in certain fields (logistics, manufacturing, database stuff generally, chemistry). That they can spend time to learn and discuss it with an LLM doesn't change that one bit. I'm earning more than ever.
People use my software because it's a little cheaper or a little better than some other similar software.
There's room for everyone. You don't need to be the only one in your industry.
Expand the breadth of expertise you can offer. Just as has always been the case, people will rather pay you for it than learn it themselves.
I don't think the first quote implies the second, as claimed. The first is about scientific discovery and the second is about political and social problems.
Since the fall of 2023, I’ve used ChatGPT voice while driving for all types of uses. I have been interested in their portable Ai device they are creating only reading it's a puck or something. So, I blogged on August 14th that it should be an Ai keychain assistant (https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...)
Then on September 23rd, Zuckerberg announced the Muse Charm keychain. Am I crazy to think it's more then a coincidence? I did apply to Scale AI a week after I posted and submitted my blog here on HN.
The Idea Guys™ will finally get their day :)
For what it’s worth, I felt my time reading this breezy bite-sized essay was time well-spent. I enjoy Mastroianni’s voice as well as his thinking, and I look forward to his forthcoming book on this subject.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/772441/the-stranges...