[kevinskii]

Trevor Milton's infamous "html5 supercomputer" quote often gets shared in discussions about Nikola, and for good reason. It's one of my all-time favorite bullshit quotes:

"The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer," Milton said. "That's the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let's us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It's not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate." [1]

[1] https://www.truckinginfo.com/330475/whats-behind-the-grille-...

[ravenstine]

If I was already an investor and saw that, my eyes would bug out so fast that they'd leave my skull and achieve orbital escape velocity. That quote is peak Dilbert boss.

[gxyt6gfy5t]

Yet GM still gave them millions

[cvhashim04]

Netflix has a couple series, a “Dictator’s playbook” and “Mafia boss’ playbook”.

What they really need to do is make one for tech scroungers and frauds like SBF, Holmes, Newman, Nikola founder, etc.

[sattoshi]

There's a series about Newman and another about Holmes out there. Both are quite enjoyable.

[dylan604]

Why stop there? These are the obvious scams, but let's look deeper. Let's look at how "legit" companies are screwing their users by using all of their personal data and convincing the public that everything is perfectly normal

[peterfirefly]

Mary led and that mattered.

[FractalParadigm]

Given GM's commitment to actively removing the most popular and asked-for feature in the automotive world from their own infotainment systems, I'm not even surprised. This is a company that has proven before and continues to prove that they simply don't give a fuck about technology, they've realized they can keep throwing gimmicks or buzzwords at consumers and maintain just enough mind-share to stay relevant. It's no shock to me that a company with that sort of culture willingly bought into the same kind of flashy demos and mosaics of buzzwords that they themselves take part in.

[nikanj]

GM does not make cars for the consumers, GM makes cars for the investors. And the investors loved the idea of additional revenue from apps&subscriptions on the entertainment system

[4death4]

I literally bought puts immediately.

[lulznews]

Reality - If you were an investor and saw this your check book would bug out.

[spacecadet]

LOL soooo good. The principles never get old!!

[nradov]

That's a good one. But in terms of sheer cluelessness, hubris, and word salad incoherency I still prefer this quote from Jeff Davis, co-founder of Razorfish. They were valued at $4B in 2000.

"I think this definitely is not a fad, what's occurring right now. This is absolutely real; this is a revolution; we're packing rifles; and this is going to be something that's going to change the course of the way the world is functioning. We've asked our clients to recontextualize their business. We've recontextualized what it is to be a services business. We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them."

Their actual business? Building web sites for other companies.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-dot-com-kids/

[auggierose]

Sounds like he was bang on right?

[notahacker]

So not unlike the elevator pitch for most of the "LLM for $industry" pitches floating around then :-)

Wonder how many of them will still exist as brands in 24 years' time...

[cvhashim04]

None, but they’ll sell and exit with a few mil like bandits in the near future while you and I toil at our 9 to 5 :P

[wnevets]

That wasn't wrong in 2000, just bad timing.

[happytiger]

I mean, sure, but didn’t every single one of those clients have to adjust everything because of the rise of digital?

“Just a website” was common criticism and still is.

Great quote though. Those were heady days.

[figassis]

I mean, circa 2000 where was the BS?

[I_Am_Nous]

Back Street's back, all right!

[tessierashpool]

everywhere

[ssss11]

Oh my god. The audacity to say that.. to even think of saying that bs!!!

[bigtex]

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-tesla-cars-being-produced-now...

[ssss11]

Also this snippet: “The truck uses voice-activated controls rather than pushing buttons and reaching for various controls to help maintain a driver's focus on the driving task. “

…is bound to never have problems haha /s

[sandworm101]

Because nothing does more to increase driver focus than getting in a heated argument with a machine. My rental car last month, towards the end of a long drive in a snowstorm, told me it was "time to take a break" and displayed a coffee cup on the dash where the speedometer used to be. I swear if it wasn't a rental car I would have put my fist through that screen.

[I_Am_Nous]

I was driving a new company vehicle recently and while I'm cruising at highway speeds, it would pop up a warning that my washer fluid was low. Not sure when the optimal time to tell me is, but I can almost guarantee telling me at 60 mph is below optimal.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

That sounds illegal. I thought even Tesla got dinged for moving the defrost option. Obscuring the speed seems bonkers.

[sandworm101]

Car had more than one speedometer. There was a mechanical speedo and tach on either side of the screen, with a digital speed display in the middle.

[hef19898]

And the other hapf of Nikolas name is sellingg that as the latest shit in order to save a buck on levers and buttons.

[77pt77]

They do this because it works.

Until sometimes it doesn't.

[alternative_a]

Oh, there is always SoftBank to the rescue.

[joegibbs]

I don't think a single one of those sentences makes any sense at all, except for HTML5 being very secure, which is trivially obvious since it's not even a programming language.

[henry2023]

Not even ChatGPT could hallucinate this.

[Cthulhu_]

That sounds like a challenge!

> ChatGPT CEO: Our company has spearheaded the development of Quantum Neural Cloud Computing, a revolutionary paradigm in the realm of artificial intelligence and data processing. We've seamlessly integrated quantum computing principles with neural network architectures, creating an unparalleled synergy that redefines the boundaries of computational capabilities.

[kirrent]

Despite being on shaky ground due to local minima, barren plateaus, classical simulability, and more, variational quantum computing is definitely a real field. ChatGPT can't even hallucinate properly.

[pyinstallwoes]

Makes me think that reality is truly leaking in some way. That's something a worse model of LLM's would create.

[taskforcegemini]

that's something Roy and Moss would have written for Jen

[7e]

It sounds like something Elon Musk would say.

[dessimus]

Except it's missing a 2-5 year timeline that will never come to fruition.

[HumblyTossed]

It reads like something ChatGPT would come up with

[dmboyd]

This is sort of unfair because I’m sure this must’ve been part of the training set. But hilarious nonetheless. https://chat.openai.com/share/6a1fdfb4-9228-480f-961e-fa2c4b...

[peteradio]

I like how it adds in a positive environmental impact completely out of its ass, just like a real Marketer!

[asveikau]

Might be because the prompt is about an electric vehicle, buyers of which would be interested in environmental impact.

[lazide]

ChatGPT is all about replies that are believable. If there is real data,cool. But if not, also cool.

Just like people!

[wk_end]

This is substantially worse than anything ChatGPT would come up with.

Edit: never mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38686399

[happytiger]

It’s like a math proof lol.

Validated peak tech. We have created an unlimited bullshit generator.

[consumer451]

I am not very familiar with this founder and his company, but how does a guy like this make it past any level of due diligence on the part of his investors?

[happytiger]

You clearly haven’t raised money from investors with that question. /j

Investors are sheep and follow their peers. There are only a handful of mavericks in investment circles, and they generate the best and the worst returns.

Consider that they all invested without seeing the engine or looking under the hood of the demo vehicle. It’s in the investor lawsuit — they even poke fun at themselves about it.

[cogman10]

Bingo. You see this in public shareholder calls all the time. Today, you can't find a tech company that doesn't say something like "We are integrating AI with LLM into our technology to blah". They don't say that because it's a meaningful or good product, they say that because investors give you a 10% stock bump just for saying "LLM".

The same thing happened with crypto, machine learning, web 2.0, etc. Investors love a good buzzword and will reward a company handsomely for using them.

Hell, that's like 90% of the reason FTX became as big as it was.

[rurp]

It was wild seeing companies have their biggest stock jump ever simply by talking about crypto magic beans on an earnings call.

[cogman10]

My company just did a shareholder meeting. Of everything we described (and we had a KILLER year) basically the only questions that were asked revolved around our usage of LLMs. It didn't matter that we made a ton of money, new products, and happy customers. What mattered was how we are adding AI.

[HideousKojima]

I'm feeling the "we need to adopt AI because it's the hot new thing/investors want to hear it" pressure at work nonstop, including some annoying mandatory trainings on it. My brother in Christ, I'm still trying to get my teammates to use git and package management, AI is going to have to wait a little bit.

[xmcqdpt2]

ChatGPT can (probably? I haven't checked) use git and package management. Maybe you should replace your colleagues with it.

[pnw]

They did a SPAC in 2020 so his 'investors' were mostly the general public. Actual investors were pretty skeptical of them, e.g. Hindenburg shorted them extensively and called them a fraud.

[TeMPOraL]

With a smile on their face and a billion dollar check in their pocket. Investors don't mind the bullshit if they're on the profiting side of it.

[consumer451]

Man, I am a one-time failed founder and apparently I put way too much thought into it, as one of multiple failings.

Meanwhile Adam Neumann gets a next go.

[mrguyorama]

Early investors aren't trying to find valuable, profitable, or innovative companies that will make a lot of money. Their goal is to sell to someone else at a higher price sometime down the line. Therefore the actual reality of the business is not useful, and often purposely ignored if the story seems like it can pull in enough bag holders.

[consumer451]

Do you think he would have gotten that far in today's interest rate environment? I mean, are investors paying more attention now, or does the bigger idiot theory still work?

[lazide]

It’s about cashflow now, and that’s a lot harder (but not impossible!) to BS around.

[twic]

A theory I've read on here is that VC returns come from a handful of hyper-successful firms, and the challenge is getting in on the deals in those firms at all, and the way you do that is by building a reputation as a visionary and generous investor by investing in ludicrous bullshit on founder-friendly terms. From this point of view, money given to Nikola isn't a bad investment, it's a marketing expense.

[throwawayelon]

Another one you may not have heard is Elon Musk.. he's been delivering self driving cars since 2015

[consumer451]

I am not a Musk fan at all, in fact I despise Musk 4.0, but what he accomplished prior to losing his mind is undeniable. He founded SpaceX, which absolutely accelerated our access to space by 20-40 years. Half of the satellites in orbit belong to SpaceX. SpaceX put more mass into orbit last year than all other countries combined.

He accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles by at least ten years. If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time... that's assuming that his naive geopolitical angling doesn't kill us all, and that his brain implants don't turn us into corporate zombies.

My point is, there is much about him to criticize, but he has delivered a lot in the past.

[tessierashpool]

If the worst of climate change predictions turn out to be true, this could make him one of the most beneficial humans of our time...

Not really. Methane from cows causes more harm to the environment than cars do. If he had gotten the world to go vegan, that would have been doing the impossible. Musk made an idea fashionable and sold carbon credits.

[consumer451]

I mean, Musk went the practical route. Make things that nearly everyone wants... fast cars that you can refuel at home for next to no cost.

But I hear you about food. However, the sad joke is: we don't need vegan purity. If we could just convince everyone in wealthy countries to skip meat for only two days per week, then the we might actually hit 2C max temp increase. But everyone is all about paleo meat-only or vegan/vegetarian purity crap. We just needed some moderation, but that's not as sexy as being a vegan or a Hummer driver.

We will pilot our extremes straight into the ground.

[hef19898]

All the scientifically relevant stuff would have gotten into space, Musk, SpaceX or not. All those Starlink satelites? I am still not convinced they provide any actual added value, besides giving SpaceX another product to raise funds against (Elon tried the same thing with FSD, which worked out less good so far).

Also, we were well on our path to EVs, Tesla (not Musk himself alone) accelerated that. Ten years so is bold claim, and attributing that all to one single person is just nonesense.

Edit: Tesla made shit tons of money by selling CO2 credits to legacy car makers, so in reality Musk (rather Tesla, but that distinctions is difficult) had close to no positive impact on climate change and instead profited of others continue to polute. All Musk cares about is his image as being the tech-god savior of mankind, that and money.

[zozbot234]

> All those Starlink satelites? I am still not convinced they provide any actual added value

Tell that to the Ukrainians. I'm told that they're big fans of Starlink as of late, I wonder why.

[brandonagr2]

My car drove itself to work this morning, were you trying to be sarcastic?

[kibwen]

Yet more proof that we could replace CEOs with ChatGPT and lose nothing.

[Centigonal]

Trevor Milton is to CEOs what Billy Mitchell is to pro gamers

[HideousKojima]

Billy Mitchell is a liar and a cheater, but he actually is really good at Donkey Kong. He has a publicly verified (in front of a crowd) score over 900,000. Much like how Lance Armstrong is both an excellent cyclist and a doped up cheater.

Billy is definitely an awful human being in other regards than just his cheating though, at least from what I've been able to tell.

[TeMPOraL]

Honestly, it doesn't - I can't imagine ChatGPT producing this density of blatant bullshit, not without a specialized prompt forcing it to. Bad as it is, ChatGPT by default still has some statistically average dignity.

[verdverm]

maybe this is why ChatGPT outputs some of the things it outputs

garbage in, garbage out