by panick21_ | 2025-07-20 11:33:57+00:00
Moore's law might have ended but Wright's law didn't, and even if it did, it would still be progress, we don't have exponential development in everything. Continues improvement is still continuous.

> The LHC found nothing of note.

That's just wrong.

> Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated.

Childhood mortality has not been defeated. And while Polio has been, many other things haven't.

> The periodic table is effectively complete.

People in the next 100 years will add more. And even so, there is so much about materials we don't understand its actually insane. There are many things we learn about materials that is just as or more relevant then discovering a new element.

> R&D is having limited returns.

It has always had limited returns. And in some ways it has huge returns. Making an airlplane 1% more efficient today has a much larger overall impact then making a plane 10% more efficient 50 years ago.

> This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.

That's just dismissive of 30+ years of research and work. You might as well argue that its just 200 years of catching up to the vision of Ada.

> But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.

From a global perspective there is no slowdown, its only relative to US experience.

> Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.

This has literally been every business for 5000 years.

> Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services.

And they still do.

> The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.

That's just not accurate. Go look up how much investment in next generation notes cost TSMC and then tell me all they do is extract money from consumers. Tell me that the restaurant down the street who works hard creating incredibly food is just extracting money from consumers in some kind of aggressive way.

When SpaceX deployed a whole new infrastructure around the globe, was that just extracting money because innovation is impossible, or was it massive innovation and massive infrastructure spending?

This is just a cynical world-view glorifying the past. When in effect, innovation wasn't easy. Go look up how many people died in air accidents, or car accidents. Go look up how many mainframe and minicomputer companies came and went, trying to invent the future. If anything the length companies now-days go to, to prevent a single death is actually kind of crazy.

> Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed.

There are tons of business that don't expect exponential growth. There are even many that expect to shrink. And tons of business who do expect it don't get it. And yet the world keeps turning for those business too.

Capitalism can work perfectly fine in situation of now growth, plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades. And yet food still gets delivered to stores. Trains and cars keep going around. And so on and so on. But even in those places, companies don't stop trying to grow.

Maybe we will live in a world where no company will ever grow and wont for decades, even in that world, MBA and everybody else will still try to grow companies. Even if the world experienced a 50 year decline, that wouldn't change anything. Teach them about logistic curves all you like.

> But not optimised for me.

The world doesn't evolve around you. Shocking that you had to realize that like this.