is “ingestion” part of an existing NIP? where can i read more about what’s being discussed here?
can these easily make it to nostr?
well said 👏
congrats to nostr:npub1qkfnmpuz692azr8c5phn0930x2v92xyqvwgr6ve8znaa3qd6c3hq09ertp on launching territories on StackerNews
love the creativity this encourages
Yeah, I agree 28 million is high. I was being generous. Reality is probably fewer.
But for the purposes of my argument I’m saying “roughly 0” which I think you’d agree with?
A given programmer/engineer often builds a piece of software likely aiming at more than 285 people. Because a typical person (from that pool of 285) needs thousands of pieces of software for daily life.
Think about the n*m of programmers*users. It’s practically infinite how much software we’d like/need. But the more custom a need is the harder it is to justify the cost.
Who Builds Software Matters
On the declining production costs and coming remixability of software
“As we become more sophisticated, our ideas about what our word processor, ourgraphics system should do for us diverge more and more from those of the initial designers. We now want to edit our tools as we have previously edited our documents.”
-Alan Kay, Apple Computer Corporation, Sept 1984
The High Cost of Software
Software is expensive to build today because there are very few software engineers. There are about 8 billion people in the world, but only about 28 million software developers. So the number of people who can build software rounds to roughly 0. Yet everyone in the world wants and needs software. Up till now, we’ve been prevented from getting what we actually want due to the high cost of production. Talented engineers only have a limited number of hours in a day to build so they need to get paid for their rare skill.
Software for the Masses
Building software has been expensive so we’ve become accustomed to accepting software designed for the masses. Today’s designers aim to serve the broadest set of users possible so the high cost of building gets amortized over a large number of people. That means no one gets exactly what they want, but everyone gets something that’s good enough to be useful.
AI changes WHO builds software
AI brings us tools that democratize software development. As production becomes cheaper, it changes who can build software. This changes how software gets designed, developed, and deployed, which creates an explosion in how much new software gets built. We can appreciate how AI code generation models help software engineers build. It’s easy to see how these tools can improve their efficiency. But we can organize these same tools in ways that change who builds software. And who builds software matters.
You can squint and see a future where we can all build our own custom software. We’ve seen this kind of auto-generation in the domains of language, images, and video. We'll soon see it in the domain of software creation.
Free-to-build encourages remixing
In the future you’ll notice a simple need and you’ll be able to conjure up a micro-app in minutes to address it. The economics of creating and owning software changes. Anything a user dreams up is low effort to create and copyable by someone else. That’s a good thing. It makes software more like media. Micro-apps become building blocks. Other users can remix them adding new functionality. We can now equip software with the same memetic super powers as we have with short-form video. This is the future of software. But no one has built the end-to-end tools to enable this yet.
These user-to-user creative interactions make the value of software compound. But we’ll need some network (or protocol?) to manage the specifications and data across these apps if they’re going to be collaborative.
Forget the drudgery of design, implementation, testing, deployment, monitoring, upgrading, and data migration. This will happen behind the scenes. Who thinks about flipping electrical signals in silicon these days? We operate at a higher level of abstraction.
Implications of an AI codegen revolution
+ The amount of software created increases by at least 3 orders of magnitude. Likely much more like 5-10 orders of magnitude.
+ The concept of “charging for apps” feels dated. If everyone can conjure anything into existence for pennies, why “buy” when you can “create”? “Make me a free version of app ABC”.
+ The importance of modern app stores declines. Non-technical users create micro-apps and use them. For this to work it needs to be simple. This future might look like something of a super-app for user-generated micro-apps. Or they get deployed as PWAs.
+ How data gets stored and shared could get radically reimagined.
+ These micro-app/remix concepts may themselves become the basis for a new type of app store. If this were a company, I think it would likely become the most important company in AI.
+ A new layer of collaboration commoditizes adjacent AI layers. A hyperscaler could attempt to build this layer, but it seems as likely as someone new doing it.
At this point it's all up for grabs. If you’re building something like this DM me — I’d love to play with your project and give feedback!
Can you tell us more about how you think it should work? I bet a bunch of people would be happy to give feedback and share ideas early
Exactly. I worry that “data ownership” is not a big enough driver for the average person, but create in one place distribute everywhere could be a great tool to increasing the interestingness of content available on Nostr. And then Nostr wins if it can also assemble the most interesting conversations around that content.
Imagine a service which is not pitched as a nostr service. e.g. “PostEverywhere”
Do you post the same ideas on Twitter, Threads, LinkedIn, and other places?
"PostEverywhere” makes that easy.
oh, btw, it also posts to Nostr (and creates an account there if you don’t have one)
Has anyone built a simple way to cross post to Nostr/Twitter/Threads?
i do have real love in my life! thanks for the reminder 🤙
the world has gotten so crazy
the only thing that seems real to me any more is fake Internet money
🤷🏼♂️
i think you nailed mine, too. i would also add excessive, nonstop doses of nature
what are your favorite “other things”?
🚨 Today I'm launching Ontolo. 🚀
Ontolo is a super simple micro-app that will hopefully entice everyone spend a bit of time labeling other Nostr events. NIP-32, if you're not familiar, allows anyone to label/review/comment on any nostr post. It's an insanely powerful concept (thanks nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn, who wrote the NIP), but it's still pretty underused in clients.
Why would you want to have labeled events?
1. Discovery: Labeled events can be used directly by social clients–like nostr:npub18m76awca3y37hkvuneavuw6pjj4525fw90necxmadrvjg0sdy6qsngq955 or nostr:npub12vkcxr0luzwp8e673v29eqjhrr7p9vqq8asav85swaepclllj09sylpugg when trying to suggest content that users might like.
2. Training data: We're at the gates of the era of AI. Classification algorithms and machine learning have been pretty good to classifying content but with a training dataset they can become WAAAAAY better. Hopefully, labels in Nostr will become a public good that all clients can lean on to create their own AI models for discovery, onboarding, and a hundred other things I've not thought of.
This is an experiment, like all of them, so please hit me with your feedback. Expect more fun social features soon. 🫂 LFG!
Thanks to everyone who helped me think through this over the last few days, from Tokyo until now.
🫂 nostr:npub1t3ggcd843pnwcu6p4tcsesd02t5jx2aelpvusypu5hk0925nhauqjjl5g4 nostr:npub1jlrs53pkdfjnts29kveljul2sm0actt6n8dxrrzqcersttvcuv3qdjynqn nostr:npub1l2vyh47mk2p0qlsku7hg0vn29faehy9hy34ygaclpn66ukqp3afqutajft nostr:npub1cd0l3s6qgj0s6690rtkys39mgj5upwxpm4856nhmce0pyqu6xj9qh7xlvx nostr:npub1arkn0xxxll4llgy9qxkrncn3vc4l69s0dz8ef3zadykcwe7ax3dqrrh43w
congrats, Jeff! looking good 👀
missing Nostrasia (wife in surgery tomorrow)
sending good vibes to all my Nostriches 🤙
like livejournal or substack era of blogging? 😝
podcasts have the energy of the early internet to me