it's 2023 and skynet is nowhere to be seen. also we had an economic downturn but not THAT series of events that made us nuke the skies and create the matrix. However,  we have chatgpt , which is quite an unassuming name for an almost-AI (aka not AGI), spreading its roots deeply, with it's parent -the evil sith empire microsoft firing people and seeding its agents in large companies worldwide ,and having them make plans to AI-ize these companies (this would require the hosts doing much layoffs, which microsoft has set the ball rolling and is leading by example , with its own layoffs). 

send guns lawyers money  send microsoft execs

beware of greeks bearing gifts beware of microsoft execs quitting and joining your ranks 

interest seems to have moved past the fanciful fake meat, lab grown meat, eating bugs, and soylent type of ideas. the genetic testing bandwagon seems to have lost steam after E.Holmes of the manly voice had to go to jail.  the fintech startups continue working hard to re-distribute the thinnest slice of pie which was too worthless for the fin-whales to bother with. the android revolution has died, leaving in its wake the epidemic of larger and larger hand-held android phones, which are cheaper imitations of the 

apple phone's looks

nitin kamath seems to have democratised access to capital markets to millions (google shows zerodha user base at 6.x million, with groww supposed to have overtaken this number ).  

this looks like a phenomenal achievement, given that they didn't do this the usual route of burning increasingly large amounts of investor money to be recouped from the gullible public investor via an IPO. they also have onboarded a large number of middle and upper middle class folks onto the capital markets - something that should be good for the economy overall - in the sense that this puts more money in the hands of the company folk rather than the lenders - previously salarymen used to put their money in FDs and LIC or houses. So capitalists would have to access this money via lenders, whereas increasing share prices lets them raise more debt more easily assuming shares act as collateral .

groww seems to have been funded by ex flipkart  folks. similarly, there is a network of ex zoho folks in chennai behind a bunch of startups. there is an increasing ring of startups growing from the original epicenters

flipkart pretty much put bangalore on the map for the new tech ; earlier tech companies, like the networking behemoths and their stultifying slow-paced bureaucratic shuffles , or enterprise software slingers with their EJBs and web-services stacks plodding along slowly . 

with the flipkart wave,   and originally yahoo before them, software stopped being what could be sold, and became what could be done with them. Yahoo!s focus on data and information, opening up tons of datasets and their apis ( still better than google's apis today) , created a generation of 'hackers' .

The other option for graduating freedom-loving  engineers was open source - LAMP dev,  and linux. The cool folk checked-out out the linux source, built the kernel etc etc, the others built working websites with LAMP. Even today, quite a lot of existing startups->companies->products have their roots in rails or lamp. 

Rails is the AK47 of the software world. Many startups have leveraged Rails to build world changing behemoths, like Twitter and Groupon. The latter, for eg, rode the Rails lightning all the way to an early IPO.

between rails taking off and python web frameworks maturing, java and spring made an 'elephants can dance' move and became cool again. Java 8's lambdas make it almost as easy to use as other languages (r&p) and increase the cost of switching, for someone who has piled years upon years of drudgery in java, and now knows its idiotic bureaucratic over-verbose idioms .

back to the original refrain - with the flipkart wave in bangalore ,   graduating students made a beeline to bangalore, paying horrific rents and suffering depressing traffic to work in an industry cycle that graduated them to tech leads within five years instead of the usual ten-twenty. There was a surplus of engineers,a nd this led to a surplus of startups.  people started smaller startups in areas that were hitherto untouched, like many probing fingers of the rhizome - tax filing, movie ticket booking, bus booking, movie snack booking, real estate renting out, interviews for programmers...

suddenly, everyone and their aunt could create high volume low latency inventory listing order managing websites that leveraged the latest distributed data store and mesaging services from various open source projects.

as of 2015 onwards, i have been seeing this type of startup play out, with the old plays of infrastructure and body count come back into vogue. the lone guns still exist and fight their battles,  but something something covid has put an end to cheap capital and the disposable income on the part of the consumers. A contraction. there is also a disturbing move towards heavier iron, with things that one person can do in his basement rented apartment  becoming fewer and fewer. 

when i started, we had office timings , and desktops that we had to leave behind. internet access was limited to a few. we would explore our computers out of boredom.

There were multiple waves after that - we moved from Java to Java 2.0, then CORBA and netscape enterprise server gave way to iPlanet (which later become SUN_ONE), then  EJB, then web-services and SOAP came, then hadoop came and went then android came and went. machine learning (aka spark) and later kafka and flink. AI doesn't seem to have a java specific component.

and no one's making lists of indian origin american CEOs exclaiming look! , especially after the gratuitous layoffs.

from links from ranprieur

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This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.