I don't think there's anything misleading here, but there's still something irritating about it. These people spend loads of time and money designing futuristic stuff and giving each other awards for it. In the meantime, we mere mortal engineers are wallowing in the pits of reality, solving actual problems like the plebs we were born to be. I know it sounds horribly bitter, but I really do sympathise with the negative responses to things like this.

Allow me to articulate my issue with it. It pushes the impression that these are the creative geniuses that are pushing things forward. Someone else just has to do the 'little detail' of making it work. The engineers that spend their careers making this kind of stuff have usually thought of these ideas before, but they did not put up a flashy web page for people to fawn over-- because they actually realised the issues and inviabilities involved.

This idea is by no means the worst- that award goes to the 'modular' mobile phone designed to reduce waste, that anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge of mass production or high-speed circuitry would instantly write off as laughable. With flexible circuitry, this is actually not that far from being possible. The main issue is the data transfer.. you could spend a lot of time and money getting something to work poorly, or you could just obtain the same practical functionality infinitely better and easier by making them act as physical shortcuts to cloud (or local) storage-- why would you want your data strewn across many slow, small stickies that you could easily lose instead!? And this links back to my original point that the engineers have already thought of it-- because you have just reinvented NFC.

"I don't think there's anything misleading here, but there's still something irritating about it. These authors spend loads of time and money writing stories about the future, and giving each other awards for it. In the meantime, we mere mortal engineers are wallowing in the pits of reality, solving actual problems like the plebs we were born to be. I know it sounds horribly bitter, but I really do sympathise with the negative responses to things like this."

But when I read Sci-Fi, I'm consuming:

- The author's creativity and intelligence in extrapolating the technology's wider implications

- A good story, including character development

- Often some incredibly clever prose

- Possibly, as a very secondary thing, elements of "Hey, imagine if AI was complex enough to form human relationships!" (for example)

Here, I'm being offered the content of "Hey imagine if USB sticks were really cheap and you could just stick them on your computer like a post it!", but with the tone of "I created this thing: look how clever it is, here I am receiving an award for my ingenuity.

I understand where you're coming from; I get similarly annoyed when people that are not UX experts design UI mockups that look cool but have no consideration of usability, feasibility, maintainability, etc.

On the other hand, I love concept videos.

Hehe, when I started reading I was very appreciative of the fact I was prewarned by the "DESIGN CONCEPT" lettering.

Now, when i first looked at this i had been awake 24 hours so may have not noticed those things due to sleep deprivation. However i seem to distinctly remember not any of the clarifying language about concepts and envisioning being there 12 hours ago, so i think they saw the negative feedback and updated their website.

HN has become a site where most of the comments are severely lacking in imagination.

I suppose that's inevitable in the long run.

The site has the format of a product presentation site rather than a designer's portfolio site. Its format is intentionally misleading. And that sort of disingenuousness is grating.

If this were on DeviantArt, etc., clearly framed as a design, the reactions would be more muted and possibly positive.