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.
Where is the evidence of saturation of need? Most of the big problems remain unsolved in medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Even if we got to the point of 99% of the world population living in a rich, stable liberal democracy, economy, and climate, we would still have more problems to solve.
Your last paragraph loses me. Agree that "infinite ideas" is as flippant as "everything is already done". Context is vital. But for every thing that turns toxic and unwanted doesn't that create the opportunity space for corrective measures? We're fucking up our climate and I am not uber accelerationist but the problem very much creates opportunity-space to contribute to the solution.
> When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
Are you proposing stasis? Anti-growth? The problem with that is that growth is life. I don't see any realistic way that slowing growth makes sense. Not when our reality is biology.
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.
Much of human innovation arises out of leisure interests where no immediate demand or need exists. Mathematics for example initially arised out of people with leisure time who found some hobby to do.
Think about it. Math is a hobby, practically useless. But it benefited humanity with side effects like engineering and computers.
Now to your point. Because math is initially a pretty useless endeavor it can only arise as a leisure hobby. A leisure hobby can only arise in people who have tons of leisure time and have no need to fight for survival. Thats why peace time is important.
But do those outnumber the "Einstein being bored as patent clerk" type situations? How many bright minds people died as children or soldiers in those wars? Does war spur inventions, or does it concentrate forces and effort to put things into production that were invented by minds that had to have some peace, sleep and food, at some point, to come up with the kernels of what the war machinery turns into weapons and supplies?
It's probably a bit of both, IMO. I don't doubt that pressure and threats to survival can also make people snap out of ruts they have been in, and look for something beyond what they already know. But I still would say you can have inventions without war, but you cannot have them when there is nothing but war. And my argument would be that the extreme of that would be someone who gets screamed at and beaten from the moment they were born, and lives in constant state of war. They will not be able to find the rest and perspective to invent things, they may not even survive.
There’s also huge demand for creating unneeded solutions and making those solutions viable.
The only way to make unneeded solutions viable is to make them needed, so there is huge effort and industries in manufacturing need where need previously never existed. That is modern society for you today.
> 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 are talking about a period in history when children were worked to death in mines. When working people in city lived in unimaginably horrible conditions, barely any education, lack of hygiene, 12- to 16-hour work days, flats without windows. A period with horrible wars. A period when Europe build its wealth through the blood and suffering of the global south, by colonization.
It is absolutely crazy that you talk about it as a peaceful time. No, the vast majority had vastly less time than they had in the "dark" medieval times. And it was much, much bloodier.
So what happened? The Industrial Revolution and with it a new economic order: free market capitalism
If you pay people by the hour, you are interested in them working efficiently. You will come up with technical means to increase their productivity.
You can gain a competitive advantage by technological innovation in a free market that has competition.
That is why science exploded. Out for necessity. There was a need. There was a profit to be made.
This is also why progress is now stagnating in the age of big monopoly capitalism. And no, we can't ever go back to free market capitalism. Certain industries simply need a certain scale that makes it not compatible with it. You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model.
We will see a lot of progress once we move beyond our current economic system.
I think the issue with slowing discovery comes partially if not largely due to the decay in aristocratic pursuits of disinterested knowledge, plus the decay in human capital over the last 150-200 years
> Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Which in turn lead to more discoveries.
A lot of great ideas just need the right prerequisites to become possible.
Makes me wonder if LLMs lowering the bar for implementing new ideas mean that future ideas that depend on said implementations will finally come into their own. Not sure what those would be, but there have to be ideas that depend on prerequisites that didn't occur because there wasn't a technical guy/team interested in implementing those prerequisites.
What would be nice too is if it lowers the bar for entry, then people closer to the real problem can work on it. There are a lot of mediocre or overpriced products due to the fact a team of software engineers don't understand the problem well
I was surprised when I heard Tristan Buckmaster, an expert on fluid dynamics, say that we still don't understand basic things from first principles like how airplanes generate lift.
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 a dime a dozen, they've never been the interesting or limiting part of creating a real product.
Well... sure, because implementing ideas has always been really hard work. That's not really true any more for software, so I don't think you can blindly assume that ideas will continue to be the easiest part.
Indeed ideas are a dime a dozen—until "maybe," you blog about one and a month later watch Zuckerberg announce it?
Since fall 2023, I’ve used ChatGPT voice while driving (for varied uses), which led me to blog on August 14th about OpenAI's rumored hardware. We dont need another thing to carry but clipping it on our keychains would make the best sense (the idea i proposed).
Then a month later at Meta Connect 2026 I see Zuckerberg announce the Muse Charm keychain. A coincidence.. im thinking. I did later in August apply to Scale AI & submitted my blog post here.
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.
On the contrary, AI has sucked all the air out of the room. There are still a hundred thousand normal consumer apps waiting to be built, but nobody's building (or funding) them anymore, they're all off chasing this new thing.
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.
I've freelanced before and always ended going back to a "real job" because I either couldn't find clients, or when I did, they didn't know what they wanted and weren't prepared to pay what it would actually cost.
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.
> “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.
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 would go further and say they're a sniveling slimy worm, unworthy of anyone's love or affection. This holds true for anyone who disagrees with any of my opinions.
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 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.
Where is the evidence of saturation of need? Most of the big problems remain unsolved in medicine, biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. Even if we got to the point of 99% of the world population living in a rich, stable liberal democracy, economy, and climate, we would still have more problems to solve.
Your last paragraph loses me. Agree that "infinite ideas" is as flippant as "everything is already done". Context is vital. But for every thing that turns toxic and unwanted doesn't that create the opportunity space for corrective measures? We're fucking up our climate and I am not uber accelerationist but the problem very much creates opportunity-space to contribute to the solution.
> When you buy the solution, you receive the problem as well, which didn't exist earlier.
Are you proposing stasis? Anti-growth? The problem with that is that growth is life. I don't see any realistic way that slowing growth makes sense. Not when our reality is biology.
> Peace times, plenty of food give the time and effort needed for inventions.
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.
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.
Much of human innovation arises out of leisure interests where no immediate demand or need exists. Mathematics for example initially arised out of people with leisure time who found some hobby to do.
Think about it. Math is a hobby, practically useless. But it benefited humanity with side effects like engineering and computers.
Now to your point. Because math is initially a pretty useless endeavor it can only arise as a leisure hobby. A leisure hobby can only arise in people who have tons of leisure time and have no need to fight for survival. Thats why peace time is important.
But do those outnumber the "Einstein being bored as patent clerk" type situations? How many bright minds people died as children or soldiers in those wars? Does war spur inventions, or does it concentrate forces and effort to put things into production that were invented by minds that had to have some peace, sleep and food, at some point, to come up with the kernels of what the war machinery turns into weapons and supplies?
It's probably a bit of both, IMO. I don't doubt that pressure and threats to survival can also make people snap out of ruts they have been in, and look for something beyond what they already know. But I still would say you can have inventions without war, but you cannot have them when there is nothing but war. And my argument would be that the extreme of that would be someone who gets screamed at and beaten from the moment they were born, and lives in constant state of war. They will not be able to find the rest and perspective to invent things, they may not even survive.
There’s also huge demand for creating unneeded solutions and making those solutions viable.
The only way to make unneeded solutions viable is to make them needed, so there is huge effort and industries in manufacturing need where need previously never existed. That is modern society for you today.
Take a look at advertising for example.
> 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 are talking about a period in history when children were worked to death in mines. When working people in city lived in unimaginably horrible conditions, barely any education, lack of hygiene, 12- to 16-hour work days, flats without windows. A period with horrible wars. A period when Europe build its wealth through the blood and suffering of the global south, by colonization.
It is absolutely crazy that you talk about it as a peaceful time. No, the vast majority had vastly less time than they had in the "dark" medieval times. And it was much, much bloodier.
So what happened? The Industrial Revolution and with it a new economic order: free market capitalism
If you pay people by the hour, you are interested in them working efficiently. You will come up with technical means to increase their productivity.
You can gain a competitive advantage by technological innovation in a free market that has competition.
That is why science exploded. Out for necessity. There was a need. There was a profit to be made.
This is also why progress is now stagnating in the age of big monopoly capitalism. And no, we can't ever go back to free market capitalism. Certain industries simply need a certain scale that makes it not compatible with it. You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model.
We will see a lot of progress once we move beyond our current economic system.
The Renaissance predates colonization.
> This is also why progress is now stagnating
What? Progress is now stagnating?
> "You can't build a startup training the next cutting-edge LLM model"
Again, what? That's exactly how ChatGPT and Claude were created. And many other startups with targeted models like ElevenLabs.
> once we move beyond our current economic system
If it's one of the other systems tried before, "progress" will not be on the menu.
I think the issue with slowing discovery comes partially if not largely due to the decay in aristocratic pursuits of disinterested knowledge, plus the decay in human capital over the last 150-200 years
This has always been a really important point:
> Every discovery opens up additional discoveries to make. Which in turn lead to more discoveries.
A lot of great ideas just need the right prerequisites to become possible.
Makes me wonder if LLMs lowering the bar for implementing new ideas mean that future ideas that depend on said implementations will finally come into their own. Not sure what those would be, but there have to be ideas that depend on prerequisites that didn't occur because there wasn't a technical guy/team interested in implementing those prerequisites.
What would be nice too is if it lowers the bar for entry, then people closer to the real problem can work on it. There are a lot of mediocre or overpriced products due to the fact a team of software engineers don't understand the problem well
I was surprised when I heard Tristan Buckmaster, an expert on fluid dynamics, say that we still don't understand basic things from first principles like how airplanes generate lift.
https://youtu.be/PQYFRuZ5phs?si=wy8-ksarC1pVgQuT&t=5235
I suspect we're always going to be in this state because every breakthrough raises new fundamental questions.
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 a dime a dozen, they've never been the interesting or limiting part of creating a real product.
Well... sure, because implementing ideas has always been really hard work. That's not really true any more for software, so I don't think you can blindly assume that ideas will continue to be the easiest part.
Totally agree. I see a severe lack of ideas in my surroundings, so more opportunities actually, the issue is...who will listen
Indeed ideas are a dime a dozen—until "maybe," you blog about one and a month later watch Zuckerberg announce it?
Since fall 2023, I’ve used ChatGPT voice while driving (for varied uses), which led me to blog on August 14th about OpenAI's rumored hardware. We dont need another thing to carry but clipping it on our keychains would make the best sense (the idea i proposed).
Then a month later at Meta Connect 2026 I see Zuckerberg announce the Muse Charm keychain. A coincidence.. im thinking. I did later in August apply to Scale AI & submitted my blog post here.
https://ryanspahn.substack.com/p/openais-rumored-speaker-bel...
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.
On the contrary, AI has sucked all the air out of the room. There are still a hundred thousand normal consumer apps waiting to be built, but nobody's building (or funding) them anymore, they're all off chasing this new thing.
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.
Do you mind if I ask how you find customers?
I've freelanced before and always ended going back to a "real job" because I either couldn't find clients, or when I did, they didn't know what they wanted and weren't prepared to pay what it would actually cost.
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.
This is circular reasoning. The fact that most eventually failed can't inform the reasoning of why they eventually failed.
> “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.
I wonder about our innate desire to want glory :/
This is absolutely not true!
They're just hard for me to find.
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)..
The Idea Guys™ will finally get their day :)
I would go further and say they're a sniveling slimy worm, unworthy of anyone's love or affection. This holds true for anyone who disagrees with any of my opinions.
Ideas are not found. But its a good way to show the readers not to waste time with this essay.
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.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/772441/the-stranges...