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Comment by SailorJerry | Hacker News Reader

This made me think of Henry Ford's quote about people wanting a faster horse. Granted, he was an extreme outlier, which is why he's worth quoting

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But when people told him his cars sucked and they wanted their horses back, he didn-

Wait, no, that never happened. People bought his cars voluntarily and came back for more. If Ford had stolen horses out of peoples' barns and left cars in their places, then said, "You just don't like change!" when they objected, that would be more like modern-day Windows.

I just don’t get the sense that we are at the model T stage yet. This feels more like the Cugnot Steamer era, not the Model-T era.

1.6% of GDP wasn't poured into the model T. And even if it was there was a definite market and a clear path to profitability. These fundamentals are missing, have been missing for many years, from AI. No matter how much money gets poured in there is still no way to make it profitable. It is entirely a game of wealthy spending money to consolidate power.

Is AI-windows really the car though?

more like they retrofitted a motor into a dead horse with an exoskeleton.

Who the fuck actually wants Recall spyware?

That "quote" is most likely a modern invention anyway:

https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/02/23/horses-quote-henry-fo...

I hate that quote. Whenever I see it brought up, it makes me wonder what people think it's supposed to represent. The hypothetical person asks for faster horses because they know they'll be dismissed if they ask for something they think is even more impossible than faster horses.

Imagine the ghost of Henry Ford asked me what I wanted from transportation today and I said "a new novel technology to enable sub-second transcontinental travel". I'd be laughed at even harder than in an alternate reality where I asked for marginally more convenient air travel, without knowing Henry Ford actually did resurrect himself and invent the Stargate last tuesday.

Wasn't there something about the wormhole that required it connect two relatively large gravitational bodies rather than a single one? I also remember 'harmonics' related to having more than one Stargate on a planet, even if the other was unusable.

For sub light second I think Scifi tends to like something along the line of isolating a region of space in an energy field and then either shifting or transposing that area with another. At least for the not 3D body printer death machine version of teleportation. Though maybe that was a very poorly phrased description of imposing a probability shift via precisely regulated change of energy state for a reference frame to match the state of another region.

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