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.

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.

“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.

If you’re tired of thinking, just say that. Don’t project your middling imagination onto others.

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 aren't getting harder to find - https://smackernews.com/item/46283129 HN - Dec 2025 (64 comments)

Ideas aren’t getting harder to find - https://smackernews.com/item/35743129 HN - April 2023 (3 comments)

Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you so is a coward - https://smackernews.com/item/31485972 HN - May 2022 (2 comments)

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.

Overall it's a good thing, I think we will see the big studios loose footing in the gaming market even more, with the whole Microsoft restructuring blood bath we can already see it, big studios and brands still have their exclusives for now but I imagine they will lose market share overall since there's just so much exceptional stuff being produced by indies, and a good indie game can be just as much fun as the most expensive AAA title.

The Idea Guys™ will finally get their day :)

sometimes ideas may be harder to find and you're not a coward for saying so

other times maybe not (but I'm still not sure if people are cowards for saying so)