[thepasswordis]

Is that true? Seems like this summer I’m driving my Tesla to watch a Starship launch and using my starlink for internet access along the way.

Meanwhile I’m using GitHub copilot to help me write code to uses some of openAIs products in my existing SaaS offering.

There is a constant stream of waymos driving past my house (with nobody in them) and I’m playing Skyrim in VR.

What technology are you talking about that didn’t pan out?

[kredd]

The general attitude in my circles is none of those technologies have had any positive impact on our or our loved one’s lives. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all “cool and awesome”, but when you put it into perspective of “is life easier” or “has our happiness increased”, my answer would be a strong no.

This general skepticism leads to younger generation to be more cynical, especially when things that have been promised just don’t work out. I can’t really support it with any reliable data, as I mentioned, could just be my circles and nobody else.

Hopefully fusion will work out though! That I’m looking forward to.

[DennisP]

Here's one with an impact: one of my relatives was diagnosed seven years ago with stage 4 melanoma, which a couple decades ago was a one-year death sentence. She got three doses of immunotherapy, her tumors shrank, and last year her oncologist said don't even bother coming in for scans anymore, you're fine.

[radicaldreamer]

I'm reminded of a coworker who asked what has been more impactful of an invention to humanity than Steve Jobs and the iPhone and was speechless when I was like how about pasteurization, penicillin, or vaccination?

[relativ575]

Perhaps many of tomorrow pasteurizations, penicillins, or vaccinations may never materialized if their inventors wouldn't have accessed to information at their fingertips, via their smartphones

[nforgerit]

Well what's the fraction of success stories compared to the promises given? And: The success stories you're mentioning would have been there (even earlier in many cases) if they'd be consistently developed over time.

Tesla did not invent the e-car nor did SpaceX have the idea to go to space. Maybe it's just people being fed up with glossy techbro marketing whilst being fired because of "past overhiring"?

[nindalf]

Too often I've seen people inventing things in a lab being denigrated for not commercialising and scaling their invention. That's the top comment on any battery announcement by a research group.

> Tesla did not invent the e-car nor did SpaceX have the idea to go to space.

You're doing the opposite, taking credit away from people who've actually succeeded at scale. I don't like Twitter guy at all, but even I can give credit to Tesla and SpaceX for becoming commercially successful with fundamentally new ideas (electric cars, reusable rockets). That's a massive achievement.

Even Helion, the company this thread is about - they'd be nothing if they didn't actually operate a commercial power plant outputting 50MW at some point. If they fail despite trying everything and someone else does it years later are you going to be on that thread saying "yeah, commercialising fusion is no big deal, Helion had a prototype going years ago"? No you wouldn't, because it's actually a massive deal if someone could do that.

[nforgerit]

Credit given! This is not, what I was up to. I was more referring to the marketing stunts behind those startups. In case of Helion this looks definitely like a marketing gig because they don't nearly seem to be there in any way.

That together with things like this weird "fusion success story" at NIF (not nearly there, even further away than pretty much all fusion research before it but a proof of concept for alternative approaches to fusion) or this weird "we were able to beam particles through a wormhole" story some months ago, make me very skeptic about the current startup economy.

It all reminds me so much of the movie "Don't look up".

[DennisP]

Helion has built six reactors. Their sixth maintained a vacuum for 16 months while doing thousands of fusion shots, exceeding 100 million degrees. Now they're building their seventh reactor, which will attempt net electricity in 2024.

NIF's results were a scientific milestone that people have been working towards for half a century. Regarding overall energy balance, NIF uses lasers from the 1990s that are less than 1% efficient. Equivalent lasers today are over 20% efficient, so their results were not as bad as many articles made out. They're still off by a factor of five, but also they got a 230% jump in output by increasing the laser power only 8%.

[zbrozek]

How does resetting the chamber after a pulse work? I would naively assume waste products are produced and probably need to be removed eventually, if not on every full "engine cycle".

How fast of a repetition frequency is achievable and how much power does it produce?

[s1artibartfast]

I think you're on to something. A lot of it comes down to the expectation and what people feel they were promised.

I think people were sold/sold themselves on unrealistic expectations, but that doesn't mean that everything is shit. They're just jumping from one unrealistic extreme to another.

We don't live in some post scarcity Jetsons future, but that was never realistic. People are disappointed that they don't have what's the homes and Families they saw in the TV shows growing up, but those were always fiction and not an accurate depiction of how most people lived