I read a few books the other day, The Million-dollar, One-person Business and Company of One. They both discuss how with the advances of code (to build a product with), the infrastructure to host them (with AWS so that you don't need to build data centers), and the network of people to sell to (the Internet in general, and more specifically social media, both organic and ads-based), the likelihood of running a large multi-million-dollar company all by yourself greatly increases in a way it has never done in the history of humanity before.
They were written before the advent of ChatGPT and LLMs in general, especially coding related ones, so the ceiling must be even greater now, and this is doubly true for technical founders, for LLMs aren't perfect and if your vibed code eventually breaks, you'll need to know how to fix it. But yes, in the future with agents doing work on your behalf, maybe your own work becomes less and less too.
There are already several million-dollar companies of one. Pieter Levels is one such famous builder on X. CertifyTheWeb.com is another one man millionaire product on HN.
I mean I've copy pasted conversations and emails into ChatGPT as well, it often gives good advice on tricky problems (essentially like your own personalized r/AmITheAsshole chat). This service seems to just automate that process.
Good for you, I want to see more things created by those who have an imagination but don't necessarily have the technical skill or time to bring it to life; there is no need to have it be monopolized by those who do, everyone deserves to have their ideas seen, at least in some form.
Very true on all of those accounts (and I mentioned in another comment about the Bessemer Process). What's interesting on an economic level is that they knew about hyperinflation but were powerless to actually combat it at a high level. Diocletian tried but they simply were unaware of what truly creates hyperinflation and tried price ceilings which of course do not work for scarce goods.
The Bessemer Process, as well, allowed better steam engines. Like it or not, human advances follow at a fairly linear level where, indeed, former advances inform the latter. It's not necessarily so that we lost a bunch of information during the so-called "Dark Ages," it's more that humans then focused on a different set of objectives that nevertheless had a lot of scientific advances unto themselves.
I think it's a lot less linear than often imagined. we took a somewhat weird path through physics due to trusting Aristotle blindly for ~1.5k years. it seems totally plausible that if we reran humanity, gravity, basic E&M, ideal gas law etc all get figured out much earlier.
I like this series from ToldInStone about how an Industrial Revolution was not remotely possible from the Roman perspective [0] but I like what you've done with the comic.
Absolutely, I get that. But the whole idea behind the story is to introduce outside knowledge into the Roman world. If someone managed to bring steam power to ancient Rome, it would trigger a complex chain of events, a kind of technological revolution. It probably wouldn't resemble our own Industrial Revolution.
For example, I don't see railroads becoming a priority. Rome's geography is centered around the Mediterranean, and most trade happens by sea. So steamboats it is.
Sadly the author mentioned that the script itself is stuck in rights limbo, where they sold off the rights but never saw that it'd amount to a movie, yet.
> There will only be ebooks and on-device AI assistants will read it to you on demand.
Honestly I read (or rather, listen to) a lot of books already by getting the epubs onto my phone then using a very basic TTS to read it out. Yes, they're definitely not as lifelike as even the most common AI TTS systems but they're good enough to listen to at high speed. Moon+ Reader is pretty good for Android, not sure about iOS.
https://youtu.be/oEC5fIw0bL0
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