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Comment by PudgePacket | Hacker News Reader

Can you blame people for getting fatigued from this kind of news? (Also it's been 16 years ;) )

Every 6 months there is a new use of graphene that promises 10x something, new cancer treatment that is revolutionary, new AI that can solve the worlds hardest problems ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf

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It's understandable. Science journalism exaggerates results, even if the original researchers and their paper did not. And even the most promising scientific results can take decades to be applied in the industry and become available to consumers.

But at the same time, this is Hacker News, not Mature Consumer Product News. Here is the best place to discuss what tech in 2030 might look like, not what we can buy today.

That's because journalists have zero morals now and nobody holds them accountable most of the graphene stories I read are complete bullshit

this might be true for certain graphene stories (or paid advertisements where it's covered up who paid for those) but please don't say that "journalists" (meaning the whole group of journalists) have "zero morals". Because (real) journalists at least report more or less about the information that they receive and (yes) interpret it, that's better than zero morals (how much can be argued). Zero morals are what you find with certain politicians (or social media users or paid-for-studies-by-cartels) that pull their stories out of their behinds with no accountability whatsoever. Journalists still have a certain higher standard. And we shouldn't neglect this or say otherwise because this would lead to further erosion of trust in media. People should trust news sources more than social media posts because real news sources are still (!) more trustworthy than social media posts. Critical reading and thinking for thyself should be on the agenda everywhere, though.

well, its easy to fall into the trap of "get more clicks"... and its not just "science journals" that suffer from that

Sure but the revolutionary cancer treatments and biotech stuff made it to market and now we have a new generation of cell and gene therapies that are incredibly effective send powerful used in patients. And mrna technology deployed to hundreds of millions of people to end a global pandemic. Biotech has been moving so fast since the human genome project that it makes no sense to call it a boy who cried wolf situation.

Also google assistant is pretty nuts if you step back and think a out it. Ai has been doing pretty alright as well. IDK what exactly your expectations are for revolutionary treatments and powerful AIs but what we have already is pretty insane.

All of those things have been in development longer than graphene. mRNA was discovered in the 1950s.

My comment wasn't about the timeline, it was about how those did truly materialize and aren't crying wolf situations

Graphene isn't a Moller Skycar though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moller_M400_Skycar

When I was about twelve years old I clipped a newspaper article about Moller and the flying saucer he had at the time. I'm in my mid-50s now.

My consolation is that there are lots of other flying car projects now. Moller might be bad at taking stuff to production but also he was probably too early.

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