Hacker News Reader

Comment by syntaxing | Hacker News Reader

I noticed this the other day with the Anthropic upholding its redline. I think this is the first time in history where consumer tech exceeds military tech. Historically, it was always military tech trickles down to consumer.

View on HN

Consumer tech "exceeded" military tech when the first consumer-grade FPV drones started destroying tanks and bombing trenches in 2022.

Exactly as cyberpunk books predicted, the technology is so advanced that all you need to create a weapon is sold in a toy store.

weren't the first instances of that. you could argue that places like /r/combatfootage are the consumer 'tech' that leads some of this, but it wasn't 2022.

This is footage of a drone strike against personnel in a building from July 2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/wbb1yh/ua_su...

This apparently has more footage from 2022: https://www.reddit.com/r/UADroneArchive/comments/11nxhh4/ua_...

ISIS was dropping mortar rounds from consumer drones back in 2017 already

Afghani terrorists were using weaponized consumer drones back in 2020.

https://www.twz.com/37398/deadly-taliban-attack-on-governors...

I argue that it’s different. Ukrainian military needed this to adapt to the warfare. The US has plenty of means to bomb people (look at Iran) with or without consumer drones. Our military does not have any native LLM capabilities.

> I think this is the first time in history where consumer tech exceeds military tech

Never mind airplanes, telephones, steel, cars, trucks, photography, steam engines, gasoline engines, light bulbs, electric power generation, ...

Indeed for once data volume >>> other concerns

This is a completely unfounded conspiracy theory, but I think it’s a fun one. I think Elon Musk is running these companies the same way that he is a top ranked Diablo player. He just plays one on TV. The decision makers in the military industrial complex pushed black programs into a group of private company so they could scale and cut red tape while shedding contractors with really serious performance problems. So now a faction of “the insiders“ control space launches, social media, and have a backup AI company. There are less successful programs like Tesla for getting cattle like me to drive an electric car that can be remotely driven into a median or disabled if someone in Bethesda decides that they don’t like you. Also there is a not so successful attempt to revolutionize tunnel logistics for defense. So what I’m saying is that this is military tech, they just pretend these are private companies run by a Tony Stark showman. I can’t support this with evidence, but it makes for a good story.

hahaha, the conspiracy i always joke about is when the first time a starlink satellite deorbiting is going to kill someone 'accidentally'.

Conspiracy theories aren't very productive. But the one thing that continues to bother me is how there is no great explanation for why TSLA is still worth much. It's a shrinking car company that is failing to execute at FSD and says it's going to make humanoid robots instead of cars.

There is no good reason TSLA should be valued any more than 10% of its current valuation, and even that would be rich. There is a fine argument it should be worth 3-4% of what it currently is.

It is almost like there's a connection between PayPal, Elon Musks fortunes, and crypto.

I still wonder who Satoshi really was. I wonder how Microstrategy remains solvent.

Whomever it is, was, there are a handful of individuals still holding block controls on the ORIGINAL chain... that could topple ANY valuation. Those who sold around $0.32/USD would be happy to know that chasing the dragon would have made them as mad as the leads on TV shows.

The vision for the future elon gives us (exploring the stars, human augmentation, advanced AI likely leading to elimination of suffering) is a heaven-like vision in a western world where most people don’t believe in anything much, and many of our leaders and intellectuals are misanthropes who think having kids is selfish.

I don’t care what tesla’s quarterly sales are, I’m supporting elon’s vision.

That vision is a lie, and it's a distraction. It is taking advantage of the emptiness that they themselves created, and now they are making you angry to distract you while they rob you. I sincerely wish you well in life, don't pick the wrong heroes.

Who is your hero, and why?

It is just a bet on Elon’s vision, nothing more, you put a little money there, many people do the same, price go up. Just that.

There are no other companies in the same position as Tesla, time will tell if it succeeds or not.

There are many such mysteries, right? How does Oracle make money when every product of theirs sucks and is worse than free alternatives? How is it that Google and Meta seem to have more revenue from “advertising“ than everyone spends on advertising? Where are the product sales that can be traced to this massive amount of spending? I don’t think you could even articulate a plausible business plan around what Google claims to do, especially when they were hot in the early 2000s. How do large financial institutions, like JP Morgan, get fined for financial crimes yet still operate with total public trust? Just as strange as Bigfoot and aliens but in plain sight.

Again, I’m going to qualify this with the disclaimer that this is my own baseless conspiracy theory presented purely for its entertainment value. I suspect that the United States has many effectively state owned enterprises just like the PRC, but there are elaborate obfuscation techniques used to make that seem as if that were not the case. In part that is because a large criminal network is wearing the dead US government like a skin suit.

Most insightful HN comment in recent memory.

I think the notion of a cryptocurrency treasury company is idiotic but Strategy (MicroStrategy) is an audited public company. If you want to know how they're solvent then you can literally just read their financial statements.

https://www.strategy.com/financial-documents

Reply on news.ycombinator.com