However when it comes to startups dealing with biology or physics you’re literally battling the laws of nature. You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV (nano diamonds for cancer detection? Gut Micro biome sequencing?) and it’s looking like similar story with fusion.
In this case if you want real reasons why Helion looks suspect check out this good summary of all the issues with their approach and promise: https://youtu.be/3vUPhsFoniw
I won’t get my life against someone figuring out fusion in the next two decades but I wouldn’t bet money towards it either.
The criticisms raised in the video are fair, and also the first youtube comment has an interesting point:
> Why would he allow this reckless behavior? Why would he himself be standing right there with them next to the device while it was in operation? Then I watched the video more closely again - he never takes the grid potential higher than 6kV. There was no fusion and no x-rays that could penetrate the wall of the vessel or the glass window. It was a ruse. You need to have a potential difference on the grids of AT LEAST 30kV to even begin seeing any fusion reactions at all. He knows enough physics to be aware of all of this. He was therefore deliberately allowing them, and the credulous audience, to believe they were actually doing fusion reactions when nothing of the sort was happening at all - they were merely staring at a pretty glowing pink cool deuterium plasma in a bottle. I believe this to be very suspicious behavior from a CEO of a commercial nuclear fusion company.
Science would develop the concept underlying helion, for instance, but then a startup should bring it to market.
I feel like the cynicism is coming from the bullshit we can all see before our eyes. We just don't know how to change it because we're all so entrenched in capitalism and corporations.
The equivalent would be if spacex said something that violated the rocket equation. They didn’t. And also while they promise the Mars, they can settle for the largest reusable rocket as a consolation prize. In fields like biotech and fusion there’s often no consolation prize. So spacex was well managed with the right level of optimism and practicality. Not so here.
Will every startup be successful? Of course not! But as a whole, technology continues to March forward and improve.
If you want to constrain your question to Silicon Valley specifically
Yes, SV funds incredibly stupid biotechs. It also passes over really good biotechs. I think it's because honest founders are likely to do good work, and won't pitch with a $$ ask that doesn't make sense, and SV equity raises don't make sense for such capital intensive activities.
Like most of the world, it suffers from extreme tribalism and group think.
I miss the former positive HN. And the positive world. sigh
But legitimately, there is a strong cynical bubble in the zeitgeist now, and it’s dangerous.
There are a few things this cynicism says.
1. “People suck and are terrible.” 2. “People are stupid.” 3. “We can’t change anything.” 4. “Great calamity is going to happen and we are powerless to stop it.”
This is a lie. The world doesn’t suck, it’s much better than it used to be, people aren’t terrible - if people were more bad than good on average we’d still be hitting each other with clubs and going Conan on people. We aren’t stupid - it’s just that the stupid people are louder. And while the possibilities for great calamity exist, they are not guaranteed.
This may be more emergent than anything else, but trust your neighbors, treat people nicely, and you - yes individually each of you - need to start trying to make the world better.
Nobody is going to do it for us. I know what it’s like to feel bleak, trust me I do - but that’s just a call to action. It’s not “techno optimism” we need - it’s optimism, there are radical solutions that don’t use a single transistor.
Better then when and by what meassure?
It is quite subjective I think.
One satirical person offered this quote:
We optimized for the minimum of individual luck, to get the maximum of people.
I am not fully behind this quote, it is satirical, but I think there is too much truth behind it. Ecologically things look bad. Geopolitical the same.
But yes, the sun is still shining and spring is nice and we do are progressing to new technological heights every day. It is just how this awesome tech is used overwhelmingly, that is a bummer.
We can still fix things. We can still change the world - and for the better. Largely we have to slough off the outdated and pernicious idea that “more money == better” first.
Except, it is not, by all the data that I know.
E.g. "https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/12/global-income-inequal..."
https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d...
>> ...leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness
This all sounds rather familiar and feels like more a cultural question than one of personal virtue.
It’s dangerous to be optimistic. When you’re excited about stuff and it doesn’t work out culturally you look like a moron, when you’re a cynic if you’re wrong nobody cares because we’re all lucky that things didn’t turn out shittily. When things do turn out poorly you look like a genius because “you predicted the calamity.”
The “easy money” comes from being a pessimist because you don’t have to commit to anything.
Sometimes the positive effects of sustained efforts have had a real impact over time. Having a cynical and defeatist attitude works against that. I don't know the roots of those attitudes exactly, but from the people I know they're not related to climate change, the country's leader, cultural issues, etc. It's more like those are a good reason for them to be more vocal about their underlying cynicism which has different roots (family life, general temperament, etc).
We have real problems. Very big ones. A defeatist attitude will ensure we end up in the worst of all outcomes. I wonder if we just have too much change too fast for our society to keep up and figure out ways to function better with the new constraints.
Edit: clarification
The techno optimists really do a lot of grifting these days (especially on YouTube), and the knee-jerk cynics are predictably annoying as well. The fact that a knowledgeable fusion insider is criticizing this speaks volumes to me, and his criticisms seem on point.
I'm a lay person so my take on it is effectively of zero value. And I don't think I'm the only one in this thread in that position :)
However, none of that has anything to do with fusion tech, so I remain hopeful about that!
If your reality is the Internet, the apocalypse is upon us.
I’ve spent the past year reducing Internet one and increasing immersion in my local community and the world looks like a very different (better) place.
It turned out to be a lie and a scam, so now people are more skeptical.
Needless to say, the world doesn't exactly lend itself to positivity about yet another fucking startup promising you fusion powered dog feeders.
You can have a look! https://hackermoods.com/
(I only did a quick search)
But then it attracted too many people that would just emulate the KPI in order to get funded, and instead of letting it crash and rise from the ashes, we lowered the interest rates and bailed out a bunch of "too big to fail" banks in 2008, pretty much guaranteeing viability of shitty investments. Oh, and when people started calling it out in 2012 with Occupy Wall Street, they were redirected using the centuries-old divide-and-conquer techniques.
So now it's a shell of former self. Founders try to create something that looks like a great company. VCs pour money in, hoping to resell to the next fool. Founders are now more like figureheads than idea-driven people. Most big successes (Uber, AirBnb) could be attributed more to regulatory capture than a revolutional way of doing something.
Smart people understand it very well and it doesn't make you very optimistic. You can pretend well enough to convince an average layperson, but deep inside you know the game is fake, and it kinda builds up. Notably, game-changers that are appreciated by users (rather than speculative investors) now mostly come from China (e.g. TikTok), because the vibe there (with all the downsides) is now closer to the "good old SV" than the current SV.
I strongly doubt this attitude ever changed. It's always been
- first comments are dismissive gut reactions
- a bit later some nuanced/positive comments arrive
- depending on mood and luck, one or the other kind floats to the top
I’m specifically not going to post examples because that will invite the same old conversations to be rehashed, and any one example is useless anyways. People will claim confirmation bias and they may even be right.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/healthy-surf/
Helion can be a cool company with real tech, and this deal a marketing play, both possibly true.
This guideline needs to be revised: It is extremely easy to be a cynic compared to being an optimist, and the rewards for being such a cynic are mismatched, as per piloto_ciego's outline on the advantages that being a pessimist/cynic has over being an optimist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892166
The ever-increasing levels of dread coming from HN is a deadly combination of Neo-Luddism & doomerism that I'm an avid crucifier of.
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?
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.
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"?
> 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.
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".
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%.
How fast of a repetition frequency is achievable and how much power does it produce?
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
Give us some substance. Dismissing critics as cynics doesn't tell me anything as a layman. A good exchange between a booster and a debunker adds something to the discussion.
In this thread people are arguing that the problem is too hard.
It does lately feel to me like a culture shift.
Sure, but people here realize there is a difference between hand waving away the complexity of a potential software implementation and hand waving away how you are going to overcome the strong nuclear force.
Anyway, we have the math and experimental evidence now to show that fusion reactors work, and it's just a scaling problem. Sure, it may cost a billion dollars, but Elon Musk could pay that 100 times over. Not only that, but science has become distracted by expensive projects, to the point that it would pour another billion into a particle accelerator rather than fund 1000 research projects for $1 million each. So the main thing stopping us is that financial barrier between the status quo and scalable progress for everyone. And the power of choice in the hands of the wealthy to deny us the catalyst (money) to overcome that barrier.
I thought that life was a meritocracy until the Dot Bomb, Great Recession and concentration of wealth post-pandemic revealed that a few key players pull all of the strings. The amounts of money we're used to dealing with are largely meaningless. So our life's work at countless dead-end jobs is just a rounding error for the wealthy.
Cynical comments could be seen as the outward projection of the jealousy we feel having to go to a job every day instead of doing meaningful deep work on projects like this. And sure, fusion might deliver 1 cent/kWh electricity. But it only costs 10 cents now. So it will not trigger a material improvement in quality of life like we might expect. Meanwhile a fusion plant might make another billion dollars for its owner, which is a material improvement. This is how injustice works as the primary commodity throughout history, and why seemingly egalitarian tech like fusion could and should be looked at with healthy skepticism. Because the people pursuing it would do more for us by taking on the real challenges like ending subjugation and empowering others (through education, automation, UBI, etc), but for all their wealth, they're fixated on egocentric solutions which may never materialize.
How do you know? Have you seen it? The website itself is very sketchy, full of unrealistic claims and very vague explanations, it reads like a fanfic. Of course do people not buy this, it just smells too hard of scam.
There is certainly nothing about what Helion is willing to say about the technology that inspires confidence, and many glaring problems with their approach.
A healthy dose of skepticism is absolutely warranted.
In a world where the NRC does not exists maybe this makes sense, but that's (thankfully) not the world we have.
Clearly not yet.
"Microsoft's CEO Says No Raises for Full-Time Employees This Year" and then in the article [1]:
Satya Nadella, whose salary ballooned to $55 million last year, wrote to employees: “As a senior leadership team, we don’t take this decision lightly."
More and more of this, ad infinitum.
It's really hard to be excited about tech when your told your job is soon to be replaced with little recourse, "CDC data shows U.S. teen girls ‘in crisis’ with unprecedented rise in suicidal behavior", AI might kill humanity within 5 years etc.
I'm keeping an open mind about it all and the future, but there is also a thing called toxic positivity and I think this is what's creating the cynicism. There's not enough actual healthy critical debate and skepticism about tech and where it's taking us and it's role in causing the issues mentioned above. It's just rich people getting richer at the moment. So I can't say I blame people for being cynical, even though it's not very healthy or constructive.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-no-raises-full-time-ceo-satya-...
What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool.
>oh no this might not work!
Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?