johnmorrison

In the online world, it seems like there are two big things happening right now:

- Neural networks / ML (eg GPT-2) Definitely nowhere near its potential for being applied to a wide variety of areas. Find a niche you like and apply there.

- Security / Privacy (eg Telegram) Rapidly growing demand pretty much everywhere. Bonus points if you can make your product great for standard users and at the same time hackable/customizable for people who want to do that. Capitalize on both legs of the pareto distribution.

That all being said, if you are ambitious and talented without an all-consuming passion for software, I highly recommend you find something you can work in hardware. Since the '70s or so most industries have been basically frozen, besides computer hardware/software. Yet in the meantime materials science and engineering design has advanced considerably, both of which form the basis for innovation in new technologies. This is why SpaceX was able to build components for 10-100x cheaper than the leading suppliers in the early 2000s.

I work at a startup in nuclear fission, particularly because this tech is at <1% of its potential right now. The same could be said for many other areas.

Here's some ideas you might find interesting, that I think could work in the next decade or so: - Supersonic air travel - Electric air travel - Nano/micro-scale metallurgy and materials for industry - Biological materials - Gut/microbiome - Genetic engineering - Nuclear fission / fusion - Carbon capture - Cross-laminated timber (CLT) for construction - Indoor farming / optimizing farming in general - Synthetic meat / meat alternatives

All money is fake money, the notion of a currency is a value fiction shared among a group of people.

Most governments are very young, and do not last very long historically. Central banking is a handful of decades old, cryptocurrency is one decade old.

Neither the maximalists nor deniers are right at this point. It remains to be seen when/whether cryptocurrency will replace fiat currency.

Also South African here, I don't think it would be the same set of problems.

Seems like less of an incompetence/malice thing and more like a long history of bad strategies with grid infrastructure and power generation.

California has been constantly lowering its power stability throughout the day by shutting down reliable power plants for more intermittent solar and wind farms, without building the storage needed to avoid a blackout.

On the infrastructure side, it seems like there hasn't been much recent investment, and as power sources get further and further from the consumer the likelihood of a problem on some section of the lines increases.

Problems with power lines is an unfortunate reality of states where population centers are spread fairly far apart (we deal with this in Canada too). They're very expensive, especially long distance ones, so it can be hard to make incentives for infrastructure upgrades.