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Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

The use of the word "scam" is really inaccurate based on the rest of the post. He agrees that the demo is real, and calls it a scam since others are working on similar things and they are trying to get funding. Neither others working on the same thing nor trying to get funding make something a scam. It would be a scam if they weren't really rendering what they say they are in real time, but Notch doesn't claim that.

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He calls it a scam because they're making hyperbolic claims, very carefully ignoring any mention of any of the drawbacks to this technology, and pretending that it's all brand new technology when it's actually been done before. And they're doing this to make money via investors.

It would be _fake_ if they weren't rendering it in real time. He didn't call it fake. He called it a scam.

The ridiculous used car salesman type pitch in the demo videos certainly doesn't help. They're made with the same sort of breathless breath-through narrative you hear in free energy and perpetual motion machine demos.

How do we know it has been done before? All I've seen so far are people guessing how it might be done--and then analyzing their own guesses to find they are inadequate, and then somehow concluding that means that nobody could do it.

Also remember that english is not his native language, so his understanding of the word may differ from yours.

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