Money markets will go up and down surfing the good and bad news of Covid, but will cool off with the social cracks made by inflation and the timid “end of free” money. Bitcoin will go up but not reach 100k.

Tech’s gonna tech. Nothing profoundly new, the already big ones will continue to inflate and rake the money, sure they’ll get flak, fight a few big fines, make sure the right-to-repair plane lands of favorable ground. Their angst about the unknown future will increase but the bottom line will be great.

New hacks and leaks scandals, a roaring for a few weeks about it, nothing fundamental will change.

More “EVs surpassed ICE car sales” news, existing infrastructure will not be able to accommodate them and that will be mainstream news.

Shortages of things ( both legit and artificial) will continue and contribute to market instability and high prices.

When there’s instability among the people, the regimes tend to find a common enemy to save themselves. I fear the start of big wars in 2022, the west will pussy out because the cost is high and they aren’t willing to pay, the other parties know it. In the next years somebody’s gonna get too greedy and the cost will stop being too high.

Socially, people will realize things change but they mostly stay the same. They can change by refusing to not play the game, will they have the courage to live without the goodies they’ve learn to pursuit?

I think the pandemic will be declared over in 2023. In the US, with a pandemic end in view and the Fed raising rates the Fed's balance sheet will become a major narrative https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

We will have to start thinking about the end of the "everything bubble" and the realization of the massive economic hang over from so much stimulus.

That is so 6 months from now at least though. Tonight we party like its 1999.

I wouldn't go long on crypto as is. Eventually it'll just be another complex trading instrument owned by the banks.

Payments are still dominated by credit / debit cards. In some markets app based mobile payments are starting to take off, but it really doesn't look like BTC is gaining any market share.

Maybe I'm missing something, but as far as I can tell I can't buy a single thing that I would want to buy with BTC.

It's actually getting worse. Some years ago I bought something with BTC. Now fees are so high that it is practically impossible to buy stuff with BTC.

And even if you just use BTC for transferring money, you need 3rd parties to buy/sell bitcoins (and they will charge a fee). You can't keep your money in BTC, because as I stated above you can't buy anything with BTC.

What you're listing as a downside is actually a upside - both sides are happy to cut out the 3rd party and replace it with two 2nd parties - the sender/recipient and the cryptocurrency exchange. It's less hard and cheaper than finding a common third party (also, finding a common party is impossible in some cases) and much more reliable/trustable in summary.

Yeah micro-payments and in-store payments are not revolutionized by BTC, but that does not mean BTC is useless.

Please read this book if you doubt what I'm saying. It's not a god damn conspiracy theory.

https://www.amazon.com/Real-Anthony-Fauci-Democracy-Children...

That value judgment may look a lot like an ad hominem, but it’s perfectly rational—for example, in this case, the question is, should I take the time to seriously engage with a book written by a man who claims vaccines cause autism, led a group that opposed flouridation of drinking water, claimed that 5G “damages DNA” and is being installed to facilitate “mass surveillance”, and, oh, by the way, is a master falconer? (Nothing wrong with that, but I find it hilarious.)

Obviously the answer is no. There are a lot of interesting, well-founded books on science that I want to read, and I just don’t have time to read a book by a master falconer, let alone engage meaningfully with it online. Maybe the earth is flat, and I’m just living with my head in the sand. Oh well?

- 2022 a year of Linux desktop

- Dynamic typing becomes niche technology choice

- 'Green course' becomes less popular due high energy prices

- West decreases trade with China by a substantial amount

- Russia invades a country without admitting that

- Windows 11 becomes even more user hostile and less 'Pro'

- iPhone grabs more market share in developed world

- Laws around refugees become more strict internationally

- Matrix, Signal become mainstream. I think its close already and next year will be a breaking point.

- More substantial AI adaptation/innovation in audio engineering space

- More substantial AI adaptation/innovation in anti bot space in online spaces like social media

- Governments start to open more data

Has anything at all changed in desktop Linux space in past ~10 year to make it more user-friendly to "non-geeks"? I'm using desktop Linux and nothing comes to mind.

> Dynamic typing becomes niche technology choice

I wish!

> Russia invades a country without admitting that

Hmm, I am from that "country" and I think Russia is quite past "Little green men" stage.

At the moment they intend to instigate some thinly veiled provocation (read their statements about "it is actually Ukraine who is planning the offensive!" and "undercover American soldiers are preparing to use chemical weapons in Donbass") and go in with official "peacekeeping" mission in order to protect Russian-speaking people of Lugansk/Donetsk from bloodthirsty Ukrainian nazis. Plan B (if no good opportunity for provocation arises) is to just declare that West has crossed their "red lines" and forced their hand to invade in order to protect their security.

> Windows 11 becomes even more user hostile and less 'Pro'

Already happened?

> Laws around refugees become more strict internationally

Ditto.

I meant it more as a joke as every year we expect it to be a year of Linux desktop. Nevertheless, I am quite happy with Linux these days. (I use all three OSes (Linux,Win,Mac) daily/weekly)

> Windows 11 becomes even more user hostile and less 'Pro' >>Already happened?

I think the progress is there, but I bet there are product managers already working on their KPIs to make it worse for Pro users

Now, if only we could have a Beowulf cluster of Linux Desktops! </joke>

Ha! Didn't realize you were joking on this one since your other predictions seemed serious.

> Nevertheless, I am quite happy with Linux these days.

Me too.

Proton / Valve. Steamdeck will bring more people to the ecosystem than anything else. (Yes, to the desktop as well, not just the console)

this

Which one? These two are not compatible. Besides, Signal I can see, but a possible Matrix mass adoption is probably still years away. Experiences from previous years have shown that there seems to be no incentive for a majority of users to move to decentralized protocols. Unless either WhatsApp or Signal adds compatibility, that is. Does not look like it's happening any time soon though: https://community.signalusers.org/t/make-signal-use-matrix-p...

As for Matrix or Signal, at least for me both are fine. It feels extremely good that when exchanging contacts with tech related people most of the time they use either Signal or Matrix. Signal is becoming very popular between non-tech people too. I can see that a good amount of my contacts have it already.

For example: iOS and Android are both mainstream and pretty much not compatible.

- The current cryptocurrency bubble will burst and most interest will evaporate. It will not go away completely though - it will be kept alive by the dream of getting rich with near-zero effort, like the casino and gambling industry, and there may even be another cryptocurrency bubble in a few years time.

2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25594068

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21802596

2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18753859

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16007988

2017: none?

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10809767

2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822723

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6994370

2013: none?

2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395201

2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1970023

2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025681

- Russia will dispute eastern Ukraine, and cut gas supplies to Europe leading to extremely high energy prices in Europe and increasing the gap between living standards in the US and EU.

- Le Pen will narrowly lose to Macron in the second round of the French election, but the Zemmour + Le Pen total will be a majority.

- The Swedish Democrats will enter government in Sweden with the Moderates. But little will change in practice.

- The Republicans will win in the mid-term elections due to growing economic concerns.

Let me counter that: Macron won't run for a second time to avoid the humiliation of having a low score under 10%.

Valérie Pécresse will be elected president winning over Zemmour. She will do the same things as Macron and will be as hated in 5 years from now.

> but the Zemmour + Le Pen total will be a majority.

I agree on that.

By what measures are living standards higher in the US then the EU? Genuinely curious.

House prices : salary ratios are much worse in the EU (because salaries are so much worse in general), and housing is much smaller (no room for hobbies, home gym, usually no AC, etc. - which is awful during the recent lockdowns). Gas/diesel prices are much worse too (and driver training, car insurance, road tax, etc.) so car ownership is much more expensive (and severely regressing compared to prior generations).

Electricity is much more expensive, so is food, vehicles, electronics, pretty much anything you can think of. Salaries are lower and taxes on income (not property/inheritance, etc.) are much worse. And all of this is set to get worse next year with prices, inflation and income taxes going up and salaries not shifting (there has been no "Great Resignation" here).

If you want to see the death of the middle class, just look at Europe. With low home ownership, prospects are much bleaker for any sort of retirement too.

This is also true if you look at average prices vs average income (though that’s a really crude metric): https://www.worlddata.info/cost-of-living.php.

Houses are larger, on average, in the US, but I’m not sure that’s a meaningful comparison; houses tend to be larger in New Jersey than in New York City, but I’d rather live in NYC. ;)

It is true that net income after taxes and transfers is higher in the US (https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/income/), but it’s important to look at it after taxes and (market value of) public services (“transfers”), not merely after-tax; in many EU countries taxes include the cost of health care, whereas in the US healthcare is largely employer-provided and costs ~2x and is half as good (measured by outcomes).

All that is to say it’s complicated. The US is by most measures richer than EU countries, and prices are generally commensurately higher.

But I do think it’s strange to conclude from this that the EU is seeing “the death of the middle class”; the metric I most associate with that is income or wealth inequality—a shrinking middle relative to the rich and poor—and by common metrics like GINI or top percentile share of wealth (or by percentage of the population living in poverty: https://www.statista.com/statistics/233910/poverty-rates-in-...), the US tends to do substantially worse than the EU states.

That's kind of the point. A significant part of my hometown takes a bus to work and shops in a walking distance from home. There's just not that much need for the cars in the first place.

> usually no AC

Among other generalisations, this is the most striking. Where in the EU? Due to the climate, I don't think anyone in my hometown has any need for AC. On the other hand, every block of flats has hydronic heating which regarding comfort and cost is way better than what is common in other countries.

Things like that are just not comparable at a scale of a continent.

Housing is smaller but one doesn't live in a suburb, cars are more expensive but that's the idea, fuck cars. The one that stood out to me the most is "so is food". What? American supermarkets are cra-zy expensive to me.

I'm not saying you're wrong but that both our analyses are probably nonsensical.

Do you have any supporting evidence for this gap beyond GDP?

Want the US to beat the EU? Measure quality of life by the number of square feet of living space, hours of native-language cultural output available per year, percentage of the population with air conditioning, cost of a gallon of gas, and number of billionaires.

Want the EU to beat the US? Measure quality of life by % of people without healthcare, days of annual leave per year, and rates of bankruptcy.

- a huge worldwide economic downturn where the first tiny little domino is the price of those ape NFTs crashing

... but more realistically:

- The World Cup in Qatar will go ahead in November+December with fans, despite growing concern over a new emerging variant

- Queen Elizabeth to pass away

- Boris Johnson to somehow hang on as UK Prime Minister

The United States government will continue to not do much about climate change.

Starship will carry a payload into space and both stages will be recovered.

James Webb will produce some amazing images of things we've never seen before.

Fusion power will make slow, steady progress.

There will be at least one major exploitable security vulnerability that will adversely affect the day-to-day lives of a lot of people.

Wealth inequality will get worse. Confidence in democracy will go down. Authoritarianism will continue to be increasingly popular around the world.

Unusually large numbers of people will continue to quit their jobs. People who can will retire early.

Housing will continue to be really expensive. Homelessness won't get any less prevalent.

The summer will be really hot, with unusually serious droughts and wildfires.

* $NET up 75% to $133. Nailed this one, currently at $133.20

* AMD ramping enterprise adoption. Check.

* Apple $3T market cap. Pretty much hit this, currently at $2.92T

* G and FB unscathed by regulation. Check.

* TikTok expands to take on Snap and IG. Check, they're already bigger.

* A breach larger than Solarwinds. Arguable, but I think this is a check.

Predictions for 2022:

* $NET rolls out an enterprise database offering, and dramatically expands their analytics and logging products.

* $NET up 60% to $213 or more.

* $S up 30% to $68 or more.

* $CRWD up 20% to $251 or more.

* $PTON gets acquired or merged, likely by Apple.

* Red tsunami in 2022 mid-terms, Democrats trounced in both the House and Senate. Biden becomes a lame duck.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25602654

- One EU country will default (not Italy), the EU will bail it out

- China will enter a recession

- 2022 will be the year of the hottest and coldest temperatures on record

- and also highest CO2 produced on record, caused by huge fires in the Russian Taiga.

Given your name, it seems you might be a bit biased about Italy not defaulting ;)

Who?

Also "most probably" sounds like you have have already been short selling a good chunk of your savings.

It was a completely random prediction, so a completely random country is a good match.

- More large companies will invest in Bitcoin, including Tesla who will purchase another $500 million worth. Tesla will also start accepting Dogecoin as payment.

- NFTs will continue to be hyped up along with Web 3.0 but there will be no actual progress. Once the crypto market crashes by 60-70% the companies which remain will start to truly build the future web technologies we will be using in 5-10 years time.

“All predictions are false” could be wrong, because other predictions are right even though some are wrong.

Housing market will continue to be pumped up by the U.K. government

Covid will be declared “over” in at least one major western country (probably UK)

Weather will keep getting worse.

Windows 11 will follow the same fate as Vista.

The WinUI team will be disbanded.

The GNU/Linux desktop will reach 3%.

More corruption trials will get archived.

War on the world will continue.

Europe will keep closing the borders to refugees regardless of the official message how human rights are taken care of.

Dictatorships will keep spreading around the globe.

I guess that will do as predictions.

Economies get rid of even more middle class layer. Ideally there is a bigcorp and a guy who still costs less than a robot.

Software developers, scenario 1) get paid x10-20 more than average, scenario 2) find a way to involve more people through some sort of simplification of their bullshit. My bet 95%/5% (thus I work for 2).

Neural networks cross few lines they weren’t expected to cross anytime soon.

Cryptocurrency becomes irrelevant because mass surveillance is a solved “problem”.

A regular person can’t understand the world anymore to have a reasonable voice in it.

Already happened a long time ago. The world is now so complex it's un-understandable (imho).

The triggers will be multiple, unlike 2008. Crypto crash will play a big part, but also housing market crashes, the end of the retail stock boom, inflation-wage price spiral, structural problems with the Chinese economy, and geopolitics spilling into economics.

A good time to ensure you have savings to weather the storm, hopefully get ready to invest once the crash is done, and if you can then take advantage by taking time off, studying for qualifications, or starting a business (recession is a great time to start up).

Hang on to your hat and get your finances in order, even if that means downsizing your house.

That's definitely possible but it can definitely still "go up" - even for years. We're already used to debt to gdp being around 130% in the U.S (which a decade ago would have been unthinkable), who says it can't go to 200%. These numbers lose their wow effect really quickly and we all get used to them. In fact, breaking the current dynamic is so hard and risky that central banks are tempted to stretch the debt further and further to prevent a market crash and a recession. And yet there's inflation for real now, a sign things maybe can't go on like this for long.

I really have no idea but I'm not brave enough to make predictions over such a random thing as where the economy goes next year.

- car manufacturers will start to phase out ice production

- all time low birth rates

- brexit and covid will still be major problems for politics

- worker shortage we saw in GB, will hit rest of West Europe

- major collapse of German pig farming after tonnies moving away

- rise of living costs will kill almost all of which was left of brick and mortar shops

- Elon says something so incredibily stupid that this time it affects his company's performance.

- The social media attention contest continues to be won by fakers, ex-addicts and felons. More non-family friendly content is being accepted from the overlords at FAANG. This has profound effects on society.

- More people from the left start identifying as intellectual right. There's a phaseshift happening and one day it's woke to be right and reactionary to be left.

Is this really any different to the "reality TV" era in the early 00s? I suspect there's something innately human about wanting to see trashy people.

Dunno, it's a small sample size but anyways a fun prediction.

- people will lose interest in NFTs, the bubble will deflate

- google chrome will decrease it’s market share

- Queen Elizabeth reigns for her Platinum Jubilee (February) marking 70 years on the throne, but abdicates before year end due to ill health.

- Big tech gets bigger, no large impactful legislation is introduced either sides of the Atlantic affecting any of the major players. One specific exemption is Roblox, which sees a major legal challenge relating to concerns over being unsafe for children.

- World Cup in Qatar will go ahead despite COVID and new boycotts. England will reach knockout stages but go out on penalties.

- A major tech company releases an AR/VR headset to a tepid consumer response.

- New, less severe, COVID variant spreads. Most Western governments don't lock down, most companies don't delay return-to-office plans, life resumes mostly to normal for the general population.

=====

~50%ish

- Reddit IPOs, a combination of increasing advertising and a new user influx pushes older users and communities away, several reddit-style alternatives pop up aimed at specific communities. Stock price initially pops and then steadily decreases to year end.

======

~25%

- James Webb Space Telescope makes front-page global news with a new discovery on exoplanets. (Scientific operations start summer 2022 so the timeline is tight, I might have to copy and paste this for 2023)

- HN finally implements a dark mode option

- US is hit by a major cyber attack affecting key infrastructure e.g. electrical grid

- [NOTE: Spoilers for Neal Stephenson's Fall or Dodge in Hell] An unknown activist/hacker/state-sponsored group stages a large-scale multi-vector "prank" convincing a large section of the US population something awful has happened (similar to the "nuking" of Moab in the aforementioned book). Motivation is to further divide society and spread distrust. Threads on discussion about it are the most commented and upvoted in the history HN. Even months after there exists heated debate between "truthers" and others if the event really happened or not.

NFTs will deflate as they're mostly useless and corps just want to build their own walled gardens anyways.

Bitcoin will go up as people continue to realize that a currency outside the grips of politicians is safer than any fiat in the long term.

ETH will successfully move to PoS and sharding to allow 100.000 transactions / second.

Water will be discovered on Mars.

Russia will further it's expansion, EU will send strongly worded letter.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1989-07-12

- First completely port-less iPhone released (no sim slot, no lightning port).

- NYC's MTA increases fare price to $3. OMNY overtakes metrocard usage with the addition of weekly/monthly/unlimited passes. Reduced fair options are still available for those who qualify.

- Monero gets listed on a major crypto exchange (Coinbase, Gemini...).

- React server components are released causing another surge in JS frameworks.

- Democrats lose majority in House and Senate.

- Russia invades Ukraine with no push back.

- A Freak natural disaster hits in a completely unexpected place.

Go big or go home... I'll predict that a Natural Disaster hits world-wide, i.e. a Carrington Event. The USA is hurled back into the 1800s. Electricity is shut off for 18+ months while they rebuild the entire power grid from the ground up.

Everyone basically leaves industry to work on growing food for the masses and ensure the smallest loss of life since the supply chain is completely shut down and grocery stores are closed, and there's no refigerators anyways.

Not a great time to predict this, at this point in the solar cycle we're close to a minimum of solar activity, the max should be between 2023 and 2026, but it's not expected to be too big either - cycle 25 is expected to be similar to 24 which was quite modest.

Lol, we can dream. But I'd wager, it is likely to be delisted from existing CEXes. Actual cryptocurrencies that act as actual currencies can't be tolerated for much longer.

We'll be left with surveillance coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum still listed on CEXes.

I'd also wager that actual, real world usage of Monero is going to continue to sky rocket

- Covid19 virus will mutate and people will be moderately compliant to recurring booster doses

- No significant climate change policies

- Housing prices will not go down yet people/entities will keep buying them

- America will invest heavily in arms deals and ignore investing in infrastructure and aid in local and foreign lands

- China and America will get involved in a proxy war - Fiat backed government issues e-cash will see greater push

I predict that low interest rates will continue to wreak havoc. Lots of media content will address the symptoms but never the cause. No one of influence will publicly call it out. Also should a financial crisis arrive everyone will be like, "Nobody saw that coming!" Not a profound prediction I admit.

I think people are still making payments on the houses they have bought. But most surprisingly houses are being bought by mega hedge funds like Blackrock and what not. There is no circuit breaker for that. Also in NA and EU zones particularly in Canada, I believe money launderers buy up properties outcompeting and outbidding local investors.

I also I firmly believe that, we are living in a post-scarcity economy where economic logic fails, people buy up stuff regardless of its future economic outcome.

- The NFT I made of the only known recording of my father's voice will remain unpurchased because I set a bonkers price (31.12 ETH, he died 3/11/98 which got rounded up by Rarible from 31.198), mostly having created it as a silly birthday gift to myself.

- Lots more inflation, largely due to supply chain issues.

- Employers continuing to struggle with employee retention, and filling empty positions.

- More Web 3.0 nonsense, with (hopefully) the bubble bursting and people coming back to their senses.

- Yet another 12341325 crypto currencies no one but pump and dumpers care about.

- Betty White celebrates yet another birthday, Ryan Reynolds still smitten.

- Used car prices continue to soar due to chip shortages for new production vehicles.

- Housing prices freefall most, or all and-then-some, of the gains from the past year-ish as people largely stop buying due to significantly higher grocery/other consumable bills.

Well, that prediction has failed surprisingly quickly . . .

  * James Webb Telescope to fail.
  * Republicans do well in midterms.
  * Boris Johnson replaced in the summer by Michael Gove.
  * Russian troops in Ukraine and perhaps other countries. 
  * Macron to lose; a far right candidate to become President of France. 
  * Starship to fly (eventually). But won't become orbital with landing this year.
  * Telsa stock to tank. 
  * Stock market crash. High inflation. US recession. 
  * China to challenge Taiwan to test US resolve (which isn't there). Poss take control of islands near Taiwain and take control of waters around Taiwan.
  * Biden ratings low. 
  * UK to recover best from pandemic. But UK GDP still to perform badly. 
  * Boeing to take astronauts to the ISS. 
  * Rocketlab to launch from the USA. 
  * China to launch new space station.
  * Poss new anti-government protests in Iran.
  * Full roll out of Tesla Full Self-Driving posponed.
  * Argentina to win The World Cup.
  * Mark Zukerberg to resign as CEO of Facebook.
  * Elon Musk to step back from running Tesla. Poss new CEO.
  * Polio to have close to 0 new cases.

Don't really care either way tbh. Facebook and their related platforms could burn down for all I care.

But, I'll do a prediction or two:

Climate: The climate continues to become more and more disrupted. We see beginnings of food and water unavailability in various places.

Coronavirus: 2022 will be like 2021, lockdown here, lockdown there, new variant near late autumn.

- Africa will catch up a lot with vaccines, but that process will continue into 2023.

- China will give up on their zero COVID approach and be the last country to experience a major wave, aggravating supply chain issues.

- The left will continue to worry about COVID and politicians will continue using it as a power grab. Many irrational COVID restrictions will remain as political theater.

- mRNA technology will have several breakthrough successes and stocks of companies developing mRNA technology will steadily rise.

- Russia will stop their saber rattling in Ukraine, realizing that they don't have enough leverage against NATO.

- Ukraine will join NATO.

- The price of Bitcoin will reach a new high around the middle or end of the year, but it won't last long.

- Joe Biden will be hospitalized and Kamala Harris will attempt to push through several extreme left policies, which will be met with violent pushback from Trumpers, while Trump will amplify his inflammatory public statements.

- Due to supply chain issues, there will be shortages of many consumer products around the world, stoking inequality and discontent.

- Several countries will announce digital nomad visas to capitalize on taxes from remote workers.

Kamala Harris is not a member of the leftmost wing of her party, which is not a particularly left party by global standards. That party has, in the last couple of years, deliberately gone back to the centre (of US politics) with their candidate choice (i.e. Biden not Bernie) in order to meet the voters and present a "safe, reliable, moderate choice" to contrast the other party.

In this specific circumstance, why would Ms Harris have the inclination to, and mandate for, "push through extreme left policies" ?

I'm sure that some media figures would be pushing this idea for their own purposes of rousing emotion, but that doesn't in itself make it a prediction that makes any logical sense.

I didn't wish anything on anyone.

HN will have accessible and larger voting and parent/next/prev/root buttons/links that make usage on phones and tablets bearable.

HN will have larger fonts for better readability.

- Stronger priors / Pretraining for Neural Radiance Fields allowing photorealistic one-shot novel view synthesis.in static scenes.

- Scene Flow Fields or equivalent start just-about-working but weaker performance than unstructured video synthesis outside of rigid camera transformations.

- Some variant of WebGPT exposed to public, users realize it's already smarter than most people.

- Semi-parametric text generation gets terrifyingly good (eg 50x+ improvement for dense parameter equivalent model, not counting lookup table as params)

https://m.imgur.com/gallery/L8j3NE1

- Russia won't start any overt military operations in Donbass, let alone Ukraine proper.

- Modern GPU prices are still ridiculous.

- Europe's opinion on nuclear energy will become a tad more favorable.

- Ethereum won't shift to Proof of Stake.

- No major AI breakthroughs.

- James Cameron's Avatar 2 won't bring anything groundbreaking to the table.

- Apple won't release a VR headset.

China will experience an economic meltdown, starting in the real estate sector and exacerbated by the need to maintain the appearance of the triumph of Common Prosperity at any cost. Both Xi and the CCP will retain power domestically, but it will make life miserable for millions.

Australia will elect a Labour government. Nothing will change.

God I hope the second part of that is wrong. And I think it will be. There is no way a Labor government could be as incompetent as the Liberal incumbents — they simply don't have enough useless dickheads.

- The timing of Covid waves has impact on the US election. If things are under control, more members of the majority party at the given governmental level who can state their policies are working will win. If things aren't under control, there will be more upsets.

- Prosecutors charge Trump with crimes, likely with politically motivated timing. The result is a clusterfuck with people only digging into their current beliefs more.

- SpaceX's starship will have an orbital launch attempt within 3 weeks of FAA approval. The first three orbital attempts will have significant time between them, subsequent attempts will happen faster. Cargo will fly on Starship (likely Starlink, possibly others) while reentry and landing cause the majority of vehicles to be lost.

- I'd say less than 50%, but much higher than prior years: A major country (eg, India, Russia, Australia, a EU member) tries its luck pushing a major US tech company (Google, Amazon, Meta) too far with control, taxing, or fines, resulting in an interference of service.

- I personally have a better year than 2020 or 2021.

- We seem overdue for a cute cat or dog to become viral.

- Waymo expands service to another city. Tesla self driving continues to fail to materialize anything close to "full self driving".

- mRNA vaccine for something that isn't covid-19 is approved by the FDA.

Due to uncertainty related to the on going pandemic more and more teens start flocking to VR experiences.

The low price, good specs and availability of the Oculus Quest 2 helps the move.

A major fortnite-esque game is released for VR.

- Maine votes to support tax-funded education by private Catholic/Christian schools and other states rush to do the same

- "money is speech" broadens its appeal as new "Crowd PACs" set up crowdfunding campaigns for legislative prioritization / lobbying

- Hurricane season 2022 is the most destructive on record for the Gulf Coast, including Texas. Extended power outages combined with large unvaccinated populations lead to thousands of avoidable deaths and gun violence. Martial law is declared in multiple states, leading to violent uprising.

- Canadian team (prob Calgary) gets close to but does not win Stanley cup

Covid regulations increasingly flaunted, exemplified by pernicious flashing of the nostrils in public. A new type of streaking known as unmasking will take place somewhere and be a brief meme

- Biden popularity decreases leading to more fracturing of the usual fault lines as sides dig in. But because Democrats in power not as much civil unrest

- more real AI advances, along with a bunch of AI bullshitters acting as red herring

- web3 posting will cool down in first half

- a hyped up application of gpt3 will become a topic of speculation

- trend of bad east west relations continues

- the economic bubble bursts?

I'm looking forward to incremental progress in self-driving tech, fusion, quantum computing, AR and VR, chips, machine learning, healthcare.

EGS will start to make a difference in terms of technology choices. Significant number of Enterprises using Blockchain will move completely away from "PoW blockchains".

The China/Taiwan/US conflict will stay in the diplomatic arena.

Nvidia announces a 40X0 generation of graphics cards, but no one really notices because like 30X0 they can't be purchased.

(Warning: complete layman speculation about Covid) The Covid Pandemic ends. Or rather, the organized responses to the Covid pandemic ends. New variants occur but none that isn't targeted by the immune response from previous infections. Once a vast majority of people are both vaccinated and have past infection the infection waves look more like regular seasonal waves. Travel restrictions vaccine passes etc are with us for several years however.

NFTs will become completely toxic. Large brands and game developers will deny they ever planned to implement anything resembling NFTs. The term "web3" will fade completely with few people outside a place like HN having even heard it.

Nintendo announces the availability of their 5 year old console "Switch" for select customers.

The never ending debate between dynamic/weak and static/strong typing in programming languages isn't exactly settled but the up and coming compromise contender dynamic/strong has another good year.

Another massive security hole is found in some corner of some boring library everyone uses. My guess: supply chain attack in a compiler or build system.

Boris Johnson is ousted as prime minster. He is replaced by a either a man of some charisma or a woman without charisma, as that is the requirement.

- IOUs will become common again

Covid will keep going with at least one new variant of concern like Omicron, but governments in the west will not lock down for it. Not counting ANZ and the Far East.

Web3 will soak up more VC than ever.

England to reach the world cup final. Denmark will do well. Mbappe goes to RM with Haaland.

Rewrite it in Rust becomes official Linux mantra. Lol.

Hard to tell which way it will go, but for my sake as a non-homeowner, I hope there is a huge house price crash that significantly outpaces (or at least matches) company valuations.

It will not be all over by end 2022, but it will be better. There is no sudden "back to normal" off-switch. 2019 is gone, never to return. If you want to know what the new normal is like, look around you. Some things will become slowly more like the old normal over time, some will not. leaders who are incompetent at dealing with COVID now, won't change, but might be removed from office.

With any luck, here will be improvements set in motion in how to handle and manage diseases on a global scale, as huge room for improvement has been exposed. e.g. Better global access to vaccines and treatments. It is said that armies prepare "to fight the last war", but fortunately this plan works better against another novel virus than it does against human foes. Virus ingenuity is amazing, but is blind.

I expect that I will get another (4th) anti-COVID-19 vaccination in 2022. It will most likely be:

- Just 1 jab (i.e. annual not every 6 months), as the 3rd jab increases immunity on the second, so the spacing can increase. it will not likely be "every 6 months, ongoing".

- A mRNA-based vaccine (Pfizer, Moderna or similar)

- A "second generation" vaccine that improves on the original, likely targeting Omicron or a later variant, or instead is broader in coverage of variants than the first generation anti-COVID-19 vaccines.

My biggest concern has been my kids (both under 5...and in preschool)... but not much I can do, if they get it we all get it anyways probably. Again another reason masks don't seem too valuable to me...my kids touch EVERYTHING.

In the future I'm still concerned covid could break out into a more deadly strain, or simply a NEW virus becomes pandemic and rinse/repeat all over again. Next time could be 10x more deadly and that'd be horrible...

Of course, but that is in the points above:

Lessons are being learned (e.g. the importance of air quality), new tech is being developed (e.g. mRNA), and it is hoped that global planning will be better next time; there is obviously work to do there; but no guarantee yet that it will actually happen.

The human race did have some luck with COVID-19: it could have been more deadly, and it responded well to rapidly-developed vaccines (at least at first). So it serves as good training. There is no reason to believe that these lessons definitely won't apply to the next virus, so "planning to fight the last war again" is actually a good idea when it comes to this kind of war.

e.g. this looks like terrible timing for "governance" and would be unthinkable now:

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18515726.covid-19-boris-jo...

e.g. 2, Have a look at this 2019 assessment of pandemic preparedness: UK and USA are top

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/countries-preparednes...

Clearly it didn't work out that way in 2020-2021, both of those countries did very badly indeed. lessons can be learned from this as to what is _really_ needed to be prepared.

tbh that is a good point. Sure it was a shit show...but imagine the shit show if it was even just 10x deadlier. It was definitely a good 'practice run', for dealing w/ emergencies and it's not like we don't have a huge docket of emergencies coming up in our future w/ climate change and future pandemics...

The way we did launch the vaccines is def. admirable and positive, society's acceptance is just frustrating ... it's in the way /r/conspiracy is overrun by people who end up in /r/hermancainawards that has me flabbergasted... but I guess if idiots take themselves out of the game by second-guessing true science...at least a comet isn't headed to earth and collective stupidity will annihilate us all, just themselves and their own personal circles.

The graphics card bubble pops as eth implements pos.

Tiktok announces record ipo in the us.

Also Nvidia won’t buy arm.

Crypto: Some great innovation around decentralized organizations, not just in finance (e.g. VC funds organizing as D(A)Os that let crypto owners be LPs), but also in areas such as shipping, international trade, copyright etc. Also, the emergence of a "winner-take-all" Ethereum competitor, e.g. Solana, due to network effects resulting from its ecosystem.

Europe: Social Division due to Corona Measures. Economic struggles due to lack of innovation and economic activity over the last two years—inability to counteract this due to bloated bureaucracy.

USA: A move towards the political center, the decline of progressive left and alt-right. More even distribution of tech and economic activity from SF/NYC to across the country.

China: Increased focus on communism, reduction of economic freedom and centralisation of power.

Indo-China, Central India and Central Africa: Fast rise of innovation and internet enabled entrepreneurship, some major Bangalore, Hanoi and Lagos based startups.

Best Case Scenario for 2022: Russia and China stay peaceful, Omikron creates global immunity to Covid, pandemic ends and economies bounce back violently, thus ending inflation and making rising interest rates unnecessary.

Worst Case Scenario for 2022: Putin invades Ukraine. Minimal response from foreign powers emboldens China to take over Taiwan. The takeover of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing creates global chip squeeze that leaves western economies struggling. Western nations unable to counteract aggression due to crippling debt and continued economic decline.

That's a neoliberal pipe-dream... the popularity of /r/antiwork w/ even some conservatives joining the anti-establishment pro-unionism throngs.

Progressivism isn't going anywhere. The next generation is struggling, even w/ college degrees to get by. The only side even trying to solve it is progressives, I mean look at how hated Manchin and Sinema are by nearly everybody in the democratic party. I'm guessing most of that is 'for show' they're the token 'fall guys' to keep the centrists saying hey "we wanted to be progressive but Manchin blew it! Oh shux! Maybe we'll try again next decade to get Medicare For All".

If there's a break up of left/alt-right I'd rather it be a joining forces of the inequal left/right members of society - and a realization about class warfare and how they fit into it. The right's nutty at times, but I think everyone can relate to wanting better benefits, more money, more time off for births, etc...

A medium company with wild financial success attributed to their no-cloud strategy needs to write a series of blogs and do a couple of conference presentations on YouTube along with a realistic practical alternative first.

So YMMV with that one.

- Google will buy Tiktok

- Meta/Facebook will release some VR solution that fail to gain traction

- Roblox will face legal pressure due to its use of child labor and child gambling

And immediately change its name to Google Fun Videos, changing it to Google DanceParty™ six months later

Lol

If we're talking about a deal that would include ByteDance's business in the west, like the deal Trump wanted to happen, then I doubt current regulators would let Google be the one buying just because of its market share in the digital ads business.

And there's absolutely no way Google would be able to buy ByteDance itself.

3. Most Blue States turn Red

4. Something akin to P2P Substack rises

5. Moderna's shares trade horizontally

6. Gold oz. price crosses 2k USD

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29767465

* The beginnings of the burst of the housing bubble.

* A new military conflict associated with Russia.

* An extraordinary next act for Apple Silicon.

* Trump’s failure to reestablish himself as a political leader.

* an even greater worsening of symptoms from the climate crisis.

* covid will start to fade away due to a variety of factors.

I've asked my dad to let me know when he hears about cryptocurrencies being mentioned. He finally sent me an email this morning saying he wants to buy a politcal meme coin and specified he is serious (though just $100 worth).

* There will be a growing awareness between the mismatch in the heavy web dev build tools that were designed for the feature-starved browsers of the IE era and the reality of today’s evergreen browser landscape. New frameworks and build tools will show up to take advantage of what browsers can do now.

* Because almost nobody develops on 8 GB anymore and software keeps bloating, by the end of the year it will have become a bad idea to recommend 8 GB RAM PC’s even for casual use. 16 GB will become the minimum spec for futureproofing, but it will take another three years for the PC market to catch up.

* The climate will be a dominant topic again, thanks to the IPCC reports dropping and the petering out of the pandemic. Governments will fail to make progress on climate accords because the hope that technology will save the status quo will outmatch the pressure for societal change. The private sector will surprisingly start filling the gap. There will be massive private green technology investment but still few results in CCS and newgen nuclear, which will eventually turn out to only be small parts of the solution. If it is a record breaking year for severe weather, climate protests will turn grim.

I think the only reason why anyone still argues whether 8GB of RAM is enough is because of Apple still offering this miserable amount of memory on their Mac's. Anyone outside of Apple ecosystem doesn't even bother answering.

I don't really agree with that. I bought a Windows PC in 2012 with 8GB RAM and connected it to my TV, for watching YouTube and general surfing. It's still going strong. Typing this reply using that computer. A dozen Chrome tabs open, Spotify playing etc. Currently 2.9 GB in use according to Windows 7 task manager (maybe Windows 10/11 would use more RAM?). I think 8GB is more than enough in 2021 if all you want to do is have a few Chrome tabs open, watch YouTube etc. Which is the target market for low-end Macs I reckon.

- Biden will pass away, making another massive mess in the US

- Markets will see a crash event

- EU/US will yield to Putin on Ukraine

- China will up its efforts to absorb Taiwan

Was there any chance NATO would accept an applicant that is currently fighting a war?

* Russia has not yet invaded Ukraine but continues to threaten to extract concessions. However now China in parallel amasses troops around Taiwan.

* interest rates raised from ~0 to 4%+ over 3 rate hikes. more expected to come in 2023 due to continued inflation concerns.

* 2 more covid variants of concern. vaccine immunity escape increases each time but they still do not release a new vaccine different than the original mRNA.

* Still see headlines like: "What doe the Tau variant mean and why are experts worried?".

* 4th boosters are approved but adoption rates are very low.

* Testing is still somehow back-logged and demand for covid tests remains high.

* Oculus continues to dominate VR space with record-breaking sales but top selling app is still just the 4-year-old Beat Saber.

* Tiktok continues its dominance. Older crowd gets into TT and young kids look for something else, but nothing else gain traction yet.

* Apple released iphone 14 which is somehow even more incremental than the iphone 13.

* Trump positions for 2024 run. Fox news continually runs story how Trump was not to blame for Jan 6.

* Biden reassures that he will run again against him.

* JWST releases images. they're only ~50% of what was planned capability due to technical issues but still groundbreaking.

- Macron wins the French presidential election against Valerie Pécresse.

- Éric Zemmour is fourth behind Marine Le Pen, and he blames the women who didn't vote for him in mass. Though he is a stupid masculinist.

- Erdoğan finally listens to its economists when the Turkish Lira fall reaches new records. The currency stabilises but stays weak.

- Bouteflika is eventually declared dead.

- Biden falls asleep during the G20.

- Electricity prices will continue to rise to all-time records during the winter in Europe as Germany decides to stop its nuclear power-plants as it was planned after Fukushima years ago.

- The Tesla cybertruck will be removed from pre-order in Europe because it will never be road legal there.

- AWS eu-west-1 will be down at least once, and the status page will stay green.

- A very popular package on NPM will be hacked and deploy malware steeling credentials of major cloud providers.

- Nothing significant will be made for the environment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278

Increase in adoption of non-scientific beliefs such as …anti-vaxx … as a counterbalance to the increased complexity of everyday life.

- Democrats lose the midterms

- Apple releases AR/VR goggles

- Crypto hasn’t imploded yet

- Starship suborbital launch

- First AI generated novel makes best seller list. Arguments about how ‘directed’ it was

- Covid is endemic, restrictions generally eased, covid boosters are treated like flu shots

- We get a new JS front-end framework that takes the hype from svelte

- Hottest year on record, wildfires everywhere, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, dogs and cats living together. Despite lots of rhetoric, atmospheric co2 ppm still going up

- Many articles about how hybrid working doesn’t work. Many organisations give up on their ‘go back to the office’ plans and embrace ‘fully remote’. Lots of disruption in this space.

- Major domestic terror attack organised on Telegram and Signal

- Donald Trump does not go to jail

- Interactive Porn AI startups start doing very well

- Drones used in more conflicts, reaction is muted

- Reddit hobbles their API

China will continue and worsen it's bad behaviour. More aggression to neighbours, more oppression internally. The West etc will do nothing.

The same with Russia, no serious sanctions. Though the EU will accelerate moving away from reliance on them.

Maybe a stock market crash (long overdue) but it's unlikely as central banks won't permit it.

Continued but less severe inflation as people continue to demand goods (notable cars and houses) but supply starts to catch up.

- Someone will become a billionaire from NFTs.

- Joe Biden will die.

- Gay marriage will be legalized in at least one African or Asian country.

- Gas prices will go up.

- The UK will become a republic.

- An article written by a language model will slip past the editors of a major publication.

- Covid will disappear by the first half of February.

- Something racist will happen in the US and everyone will argue about exactly how racist it was.

- The Republic of China will recover the mainland.

- Transgender women will win every major women's sporting event, and men's as well.

- The UN will evolve into a federal world government.

- The dead will walk the earth again.

- A star will appear in the sky, and a child born under it will be destined to rid the world of suffering.

As much as I'd like that the chance of it happening is close to zero.

- Russia invades Ukraine.

- Economy gets worse.

- Unemployment or sub-employment get worse.

- There will be more scams involving Web3.

- There will be new scams involving Metaverse.

- People will be pushed into this Metaverse crap.

- Covid19 pandemic declared endemic.

- People are forced to take Covid19 vaccines so Big Pharma can make more profit.

- Surveillance will increase for the sake of safety.

- Democratic governments will accelerate towards totalitarianism.

- Cold war between US and China becomes official.

- The riches get richer.

- The poor get poorer.

- The number of climate disasters will increase.

- The number of people who die from hunger and preventable diseases will increase.

- JWST will work but impressive looking images that the public are hungry for will give way to purely scientific work that looks a little more mundane.

- Biden will subtly disappear from view as much as possible due to old age

- Governments will fail to relinquish their authoritarian mode of operation despite covid becoming endemic.

- I predict the world will be even further away from it's 2050 1.5 degree C target.

- Seriously dank memes

- Supply-chain issues will fade.

- inflation will slow.

- interest rates will go up slightly, almost nobody will care.

- asset prices will continue going up, but not as fast.

- Russia doesn't invade Ukraine.

- The cryptocurrency bubble will continue to inflate.

- things will largely go back to normal.

Just my guess...

Silent trade war between EU and China to maintain trade balance despite soaring energy prices.

Public opinion will shift on Natural gas and Nuclear energy as green energy.

Is it anything more than a speculation that it's possible in principle?

- There will correction on stock market. And solution is to pump it up even higher...

- 2-3 covid variants and we will still being doing this same approach then, with 5th dose of "vaccine"

* Omicron will be over by april.

* There will be more advanced large ai models.

* Protein based covid vaccines which lasts longer will be in common use.