Ah, yes. That’s why we all have our meetings in the metaverse, then go back home on the Segway, to watch 3d TV and order pizza from the robotic pizza-making van (an actual silly thing that SoftBank sunk a few hundred million into). And pay for the pizza in bitcoin, obviously (in fairness, notoriously, someone did do that once).

That’s just dumb things from the last 20 years. I think you may be suffering from a fairly severe case of survivorship bias.

(If you’re willing to go back _30_ years, well, then you’re getting into the previous AI bubble. We all love expert systems, right?)

Nuclear power disagrees

Nuclear power will win (obviously). Unless you're talking about nuclear weapon.

Web3, Google Glass, Metaverse, NFTs…

Those are products, not technologies.

And Codex, ChatGPT, Claude, ClaudeCode, Gemini, Fuctzbadz, KetoClipper, BoogerDoodle, and YerMomIsABiatch are not products? AI is a product.

Jesus Christ you dumb “rocks are conscious” people are MAGA-levels of delusional.

May AI make you lose your job. And hurt nobody else.

Google Glass was a product. The others definitely are not.

Web3, Metaverse and NFTs all failed to stand on their own two legs as a technology. It feels fair to call them products, none of them ever attained their goal of real decentralization.

latest counter-example is NFT.

NFTs lost because they didn't do anything useful for their proponents, not because people were critical of them. They would've fizzled out even without detractors for that reason.

On the other hand, normal cryptocurrencies continue to exist because their proponents find them useful, even if many others are critical of their existence.

Technology lives and dies by the value it provides, and both proponents and detractors are generally ill-prepared to determine such value.

oh it's "because of this and that" now?

The orignal topic was "not once blah blah...". I don't have to entertain you further, and won't.

moving the goalposts

Okay, but during the NFT period, HN was trying to convince me that they were The Future. Same with metaverses, same with Bitcoin. I mean, okay, it is Different this time, so we are told. But there’s a boy who cried wolf aspect to all this, y’know?

Baseline assumption: HN is full of people who assume that the current fad is the future. It is kind of ground zero for that. My HN account is about 20 years old and the zeitgeist has been right like once.