Ask HN: What's the most exiciting thing happening in your niche? or rather, what are you most excited about? This is one of my favourite questions to ask at parties as its an opportunity for someone to open up what they are good about and a chance for the listener to learn something they likely never would have before. |
It’s not really been a choice for me to be in this niche, but when you develop the lens to see some of the come drivers of how people all around the world act and think it gives you such a lovely sense of connection, shared experience, and empathy for humanity.
https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/neural-patterns-diffe...
Also this study related to the neuroscience of dissociation of memory, showing in EEG an increase in the interconnectivity in the brain before and after treatment.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.8895...
Functionally, we’re learning how to measure the effectiveness of treatments and therapies on the brain, and also learning how the brain handles difficult situations.
This isn’t without controversy, as there was a very large conflict in the field of psychology called the “memory wars”, related to some people having recovered memories via free association and suggestive therapy practices (all very discredited now), and those memories were provably false. There was a very large movement that was spearheaded by a very… suspect organization by the name of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation that posited that ANY recovered memory is almost inherently false. This didn’t really jive with people who had recovered memories of abuse who actually did find real evidence and admissions by the perpetrators. To this day there are many in the field that believe that dissociated memory is impossible. This went on for decades and made studies on dissociation and memory an extremely politically difficult thing. Remember the satanic panic in the 90s? This was that.
So now we’re moving on, finally, from that debacle, and finally being able to bring the subject in a new age, while also having learned a lot about what things not to do. It’s estimated that fully 1-3% of the /human population/ has the more severe version of a dissociative disorder, more people than have red hair. And yet, the ability to study dissociation and also the cultural understanding of it is just opening up. To me, it has the potential for huge societal implications as way that we treat dissociated memories and parts of individuals in trauma therapy is the same process by which we can heal interpersonal wounds. It’s the magic that a great diplomat has in talking with and truly hearing people and building consensus and trust and community. All this last part is mostly conjecture and a set of possibilities for broader applications on my part, but I wanted to share some of what makes me so enthused about it.
I had to take a long break from my thriving career after I found myself diagnosed with a dissociative disorder, and had to learn a LOT about how this all works in order to repair things within myself that I didn’t appreciate were broken (that’s the very short version). I’m absolutely thriving in ways that I have never imagined possible as a result of some of this work.
Wix also does something similar for simple blogs and marketing pages, but having a general purpose frontend generator would be awesome. I hope this allows smaller teams and businesses to create better websites and UX without a dedicated frontend team.
Mostly, I just want the web to be better, whether it's made by me, another dev, or a robot. Bad UIs are annoying!
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On the solar side, I see more and more companies take on the storage problem (batteries, state change materials, etc.). Right now we already have a ton of renewables out West, in some cases too much (California's grid really struggles with it). Spikes in production from sunrise to sunset unfortunately doesn't match up neatly with consumption patterns, and it's hard for the grid to suddenly have to spin up a bunch of fossil fuel plants to meet the mismatched demand when the sun goes down.
Utility-scale batteries/storage basically act as a buffer, smoothing out the demand vs production spikes.
It's interesting to me, as a software person, how this problem has some parallels to API rate limits, vertical vs horizontal scaling, etc. I love these problems at scale, how individual solar panels can build up to grid instability at the large scale, and wish I understood them better.
Which is to say I'm not fun at parties I guess ;)
Adding support to re-flash our control unit „over the air“.
I've done web dev long enough (nearly 30 years) to see it grow from some niche field for nerdy teenagers and certain businesses, to exploratory and revolutionary in the Gmail days, to now taken over by global capital and hypercommercialized.
I thought my labor was fairly compensated at $20 to $40 an hour, working for small businesses and being part of their communities not much different than a graphic designer or brochure maker.
When web dev work skyrocketed to $150-$200+ an hour, as it did during the pandemic years, it just looked like another insane dot com bubble to me. I'm glad that burst and I hope it stays that way -- IMO nothing tech gives us is worth the enshittification it causes our societies and cities, in terms of rampant homelessness and lack of housing, etc.
While challenging on a personal level, I think this was a necessary market adjustment. I know from direct experience my work isn't very difficult, both compared to other parts of the web stack and compared to the many technical fields that require years of study and PhDs and such. The wage explosion we enjoyed was just caused by speculatory investment, a form of gambling all its own, not because our skill or social value suddenly skyrocketed.
In a different world without predatory capitalism, I would've enjoyed being able to do this work the same way potters make mugs, as a personal craft and a pursuit of art. But these days more and more it seems that part of it is getting pushed out by the kind of development that only cares about profit and engagement. It's not what I want out of my career or my life, no matter how much it pays.