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.

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.

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 airplane wings 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.

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.

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.

I wonder about our innate desire to want glory :/

They're just hard for me to find.

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.

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 :)

Ideas are not found. But its a good way to show the readers not to waste time with this essay.

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