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Comment by cft | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that LLMs are not a benefit? Smartphones? Electric cars?

Electric cars, and to a more limited extent, smartphones are both beneficiaries of the development of batteries and rare earth magnets. Smartphones, from the dull but vital investment in wireless infrastructure. This also explains why the boom in e-bikes waited until the past few years, despite the level of demand that would have been obvious to anybody, and the minimal support tech needed to make them work.

Those did not emerge from these unicorns, except maybe OpenAI. (Tesla was already public prior to this. Smartphones didn't come from a VC-backed startup.)

>Smartphones didn't come from a VC-backed startup.

This isn't entirely correct: both Palm and Apple (the creators of the smart phone) were originally venture-backed.

Apple did NOT create the smartphone. When the iPhone released in 2007 it was a feature phone- no app store and famously missing featured like copy and paste. Besides Palm who you have mentioned there was Symbian and Windows Mobile which each had third party after market apps available.

Indeed Apple did not invent the concept of the smartphone. But by all accounts the first iPhone was absolutely considered a smartphone, based on its superior hardware, advanced operating system, and fully-functional web browser.

You seem to be equating "smartphone" with "has third party apps", but that isn't the defining characteristic of "smartphone" based on any common usage.

Besides, when the iOS App Store was launched ~1 year later, the original iPhone was able to use it.

I had a Nokia n95 at the time. It also had superior hardware and a fully functional web browser. Yes the iPhone was attractive at the time but not initially a smartphone and certainly not the first

I did not say iPhone was the first, I said the opposite. And again, your definition which equates "smartphone" with "has an app store" simply differs from widespread usage of the term.

Both the n95 and original iPhone were widely considered to be smartphones at the time! Examples:

https://www.engadget.com/2006-09-26-nokias-n95-smartphone-go...

https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...

Apple & Android took the smartphone from something that belonged in a businessman’s belt holster to something that lives in the pocket of every person on the planet who can afford it, from niche to ubiquity. For sure they did not invent “phone with store”, but they did create or strongly participate in a complete change of the market that left the earlier players - Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Nokia, etc buried six feet under.

Yes, but by the time Apple created the smartphone it had long been a large public company. And Palm never created a successful smartphone.

No, I think there was little benefit besides overinflated tech salaries and founders cashing out in tech unicorns. Smartphones are products of Big Tech, EVs a handful of startups (Tesla, Rivian, Lucid).

Most recently, Silicon Valley is a grift ecosystem (fueled by zero interest rate policy) masquerading as innovation and a load bearing component of the economy. We can do without unicorns, the world will be better off for it (and legit value will need to be demonstrated vs fairy tale valuations).

(VC as an asset class has poor returns, VC funds make their fees throwing darts pretending to be thought leaders when it’s mostly luck, etc)

> (VC as an asset class has poor returns, VC funds make their fees throwing darts pretending to be thought leaders when it’s mostly luck, etc)

It's like the world declaring someone World's Greatest Coin Flipper after and not before that person flips a coin 12 heads in a row.

https://longbets.org/362/

EVs are the product of big auto manufacturers as well.

Yes, but they had to be dragged there by Tesla and BYD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

My recollection is the Leaf and Volt were selling in numbers while the Tesla Roadster was a less practical, low volume novelty.

The Leaf and Volt were compliance cars. The Tesla Roadster was “make it work” in “make it work, make it right, make it fast.”

Note Nissan and GM’s EV offerings today, considering how long they had since then.

(early TSLA investor after a ride in the Roadster)

Nonsense. “Compliance car” is used for vehicles produced in low numbers for one regulatory market (CA). That does not describe either.

Compliance car also implies it was the government, not Tesla, dragging them along.

No idea what you’re referring to. Nissan and GM still sell EV’s.

Tesla for all its contributions did not force other automakers into the market.

Smartphones at least are absolutely crippled by being locked down by user-hostile app stores and rent schemes. Instead of uplifting us, they've made us angry crackheads. I think the valley is a risk to humanity's survival at this point.

LLMs and electric cars simply have zero impact on my life, and I imagine that other people would have had few issues coming up with the latter.

Agree with your first point, but Ev’s are starting to have a impact on local air quality… just because you don’t have one Dosent mean you don’t benefit

No, obviously not. Smartphones are a mixed blessing, I'm not sure we're better off with the little distraction machines, but both them and electric cars were things that could plausibly have developed more slowly, deliberately and thoughtfully over time without being "juiced" by distorted market incentives. They could have developed by companies simply evolving phones and cars over time.

They are quite useful as GPS/camera/general info lookup devices.

But virtue of having web browsers they also channel social media. Having social media come in through our phones does make it worse, but it was already bad even on laptops. (Writing this on a social media site using my phone is kind of funny).

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