Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephc_int13 | Hacker News Reader

I was there during the dot-com bubble.

Everything that looked like bullshit turned out to be bullshit.

And I've seen a lot of delusional bullshit during the last few years, the wort of those coming from Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

View on HN

The Metaverse doesn't seem delusional to me, it just seems like a massive gamble. I can easily envision a future where they've cornered the market on VR. Where to play the latest Call of Duty you need to do it through the Metaverse Portal, and you have access to NFT skins that you either bought or unlocked as achievement from other games.

I hope that future doesn't happen, or that if it does its through a decentralized protocol and not owned by Meta. But if the Metaverse implodes I'd still consider it a failed gamble than delusional bullshit.

I can't defend Musk the same way.

What is looking delusional is the way Meta/Zuck is handling it.

They do not have to raise money to build the tech, so they don't even have to advertise anything until they have something really worthy to show and sell.

So why are they showing something that is clearly not ready?

Either they think that discourse can translate into reality if enough people believe in it (magical thinking), or they think they already have a product. In both case this is delusional.

My guess is they know that someone else has something vastly superior in the works, and Zuck is trying to muddy the waters and make Facebook synonymous with VR before they can come in and take over. Then Facebook will be able to take a strong #2 position

Elon Musk advertised as a feature that he would cut Twitter staff to bring the revenue per employee in line with industry standards.

But I’m curious - What ideas of Elon do you find to be delusional bullshit?

"Full Self Driving"

saying "self driving cars are 2 years away" for the last 5+ years sticks out to me

I would say that "living on Mars" could be classified as delusional.

It was, but once Starship becomes operational, the financial game changes by many orders of magnitude - to a point where a single billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars.

One may hate on Musk for a number of very good reasons, but it cannot be denied him, Shotwell and the rest of the SpaceX team have thoroughly kicked the established space industry mooches into their asses.

Elon Musk has unfortunately a very long track record of over-promising and under-delivering.

Anything he say should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

I don't think he is a complete fraud, but I would not bet my shirt on his Mark colonization project.

> billionaire with no fucks to give can actually book themselves a ride to Mars

What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?

"What is a billionaire gonna do once they get to Mars?"

Undergo profound physical atrophy leading to organ dysfunction and eventually cancer ...

... since Mars gravity is something like 1/3 that of Earth.

There's a huge chasm between "disrupting an already inefficient space industry" and "living on Mars".

We barely have the capability of living long term on Antarctica, and it has plentiful water, oxygen, gravity, a magnetic field, and doesn't have lethal radiation. Until I see a 100K population colony on Antarctica, I'll be unconvinced that we even have a prayer of building a 1K population colony on Mars.

We could easily build a 100k colony in Antarctica or out in the ocean right now (or in the Australian Outback or Canadian north or any other inhospitable boring hellscape)

I'll admit that I'm not sure what the point of a mars colony is either, except for science and to act as a forward space outpost.. maybe it would be useful for industrial purposes? I guess you wouldn't have to worry about utterly destroying the environment.

If it were mostly self sufficient it could act as a seed to repair earth society in the event of a catastrophic asteroid strike or nuclear war, I guess

Meh. No one wants to live on the poles, not even for bragging rights, other than a few scientists. Mars however? There's a shitload of people who'd volunteer to go there simply for their entry in the history books.

I don't know enough about the science to have a strong opinion, but I've heard a lot of people who have been critical of hyper loop, a very expensive tunnel filled with Tesla cars in Vegas that has much less efficiency than a subway from 50+ years ago, and saying that full self driving would be easy and finished years ago (he's since said full self driving is actually much more difficult than he initially thought).

Maybe no visionary is going to get everything right. But there do seem to be some pretty major areas that have received critical feedback from people who seem to understand those domains.

Not the OP but the hyperloop thing is, imho, total bullshit. Not such a big thing though because he hasn't poured billions and billions of dollars into it as Zuckerberg has done with the VR stuff.

On the other hand Tesla has been a huge thing. I'm a big anti-EVs guy because I'm, at heart, a petrolhead, and at the beginning I was of course very skeptic of him managing to pull it off. But that opinion of mine changed completely the moment when I realised that a Tesla vehicle is basically a piece of software running/controlling a battery that happens to have 4 wheels attached, and that the Tesla engineers have managed to make good on that.

The rocket stuff is also quite cool.

i wish tesla would make hvac for houses to be honest, the amount of thought into managing heat in a tesla is something special; or maybe it's AI

Most of his AI claims are, so far, backed by nothing. The demos are underwhelming, to say the least.

The rockets and car factories are impressive.

But the tunnels, the robotaxi, the hyperloop, the solar roofs... So far, a lot of over-hyped promises that are looking more and more like vaporware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0PHv3E8jpY

"Shoot first, ask questions later"[0] when cutting staff seems like a delusional idea to me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496808

Reply on news.ycombinator.com