"Landing a rocket again nobody had thought it impossible."
Erm, ESA thought it was a dream:
"Twenty years ago, before SpaceX had launched a single rocket, Richard Bowles, a sales director of the European Arianespace launch consortium, said SpaceX’s ambition to launch, recover and reuse rockets, cutting the price of launches in half, was a dream.
‘SpaceX primarily sems to be selling a dream. Which is good, we should all dream,’ he said. ‘I think reusability is a dream… How am I going to respond to a dream?… First of all you don’t wake people up. They have to wake up on their own… They’re not supermen. Whatever they can do, we can do.’"
Books like this are for tech bros what horoscopes are for sad old ladies.
They are full of platitudes that sound relevant to people's problems and desires, that pretend to be based on science but have no actual basis in facts, provably do not work, and yet are still popular amongst the people they let down again and again.
Anyone who could write a book with advice that worked the way this purports to would be too rich to need Kickstarter to fund his books, for a start.
My friend, I know you think this is a criticism. It's pretty obvious that you haven't read the book. I'd encourage you to do so, or at least ask yourself, "Why are you commenting on a book you haven't read?" The answer must be that you're upset about a different book or about a whole class of books that have done you wrong. That's fair. I know what you're talking about. But for what it's worth, I tried really hard to make this book different. If you check the end notes, you'll see that I drew on quite a lot of research to try and make a series of evidence-based claims.
And if you really want to live in a world where people should be listened to on the basis of how rich they are, well, you don't really need to change anything, now do you?
My friend, I know you think you're defending your position well, but you've done the opposite. Scrolling to the bottom of the comments and seeing this response from you is like speedrunning your books' one-star reviews and coming to the definitive conclusion that it's not for me. Thanks for saving my time.
It's not about the reviews on some boomer platform like Amazon/Goodreads. It's about how out of touch this kind of book is. You hit the jackpot in the 2010's and because of that you might get some mainstream press and support from hardcore tech-bros for now but... I think you have no idea how culturally irrelevant (ie. uncool) a book like this is in 2026.
This is like an aerobics VHS in the 2000's. You might still get some sales because of older people... but you're done. You're no longer part of the culture. Get your speaking gigs / paid mailing list subscriptions while you can, I guess, because you'll sell 1/5 of what you sold before (being generous). It's all downhill after this.
Noticed how your HN submission is greyed out because of all the downvotes? That rarely happens in this site.
You should watch The Social Reckoning trailer which just came out. Check out the comments.
"Noticed how your HN submission is greyed out because of all the downvotes?"
Downvotes mean nothing on HN, alas.
Factual statements are downvoted because some people don't like the facts quoted.
And, worse, mods find that okay.
It makes HN a worse place for serious discussion and for finding out the facts about an issue, because what is discussed is driven by lazy, stupid people's sentiments.
The original poster wasn't very tactful. But let's see if we can turn some lemons into lemonade. I do think there are a plethora of popular / best-selling "business" genre books that do have the vibe that the OP was hinting at. Reading the book description for "Incorruptible" at Amazon doesn't make me think that this book stands out from that crowd. How could the blurb be rewritten to emphasize that this book is truly different? Just including the sentence "This isn't another book of relavent-sounding platitudes" might help. Are there any falsifiable core principles in the book? If so, could you list those in the blurb? The blurb itself sounds kind of AI-ish:
"Incorruptible argues that this failure is not primarily ethical. It is structural."
...and with at least five em-dashes. Let's assume its not AI, but even then the blurb is very business-esque generic:
"a clear-eyed diagnosis and a practical blueprint for change"
...all sounds cliche. Your comments here on HN make it much more likely for me to read the book than the blurb ever would. But I'm not a best-selling author and maybe this is the sort of blurb that sells books to certain readers? Maybe authors don't have much of a say in how the blurb is worded?
You should, however, ( assuming your ideas are correct ) be able to look at a company and tell if it is following your ideas or not and will therefore ( assuming your ideas are correct ) be successful or not, and therefore make billions investing.
well anyway, it sure IS a sunny day, and what with bieng off grid for years and looking at a major upgrade soon, I think I can also project a further competitive edge
for my business, which also runs on off grid solar.
"Kill everyone in the area" is probably the least harmful for the reason described.
It is much more dangerous when they start to be selective. Then people start trusting the selection capabilities and use them in cases where they wouldn't use a "kill everyone" weapon.
I'm not sure about worse, but think one of the differences would be the size of the 'kill zone' and the cost/availability. 10 quadcopters "cover[ed] between 3 and 5 kilometres ". That would take a lot of bombs and a multiple aircraft sorties with to kill everything there. e.g. During the Vietnam war, a group of 6 B-52 bombers modified for carpet bombings could bomb an area around 1Km x 3Km. Only the US and Russia have heavy bombers that can do that. It could be done with smaller fighter aircraft, but that's more sorties.
One way in which automated drones might be considered bad, is (if) they cannot accept surrender - but are used in scenarios where human operators could.
This is a much more difficult distinction to make than you're letting on. Cruise missiles offer no quarter, but manually operated drones might (though there is often no way to capture the opponents). The question is what is the difference between the two weapons systems...
It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.
Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.
One way is that selective killing is more useful and therefore desirable. For example consider the classic slaughterbot video. It's plausible that someone capable might want to kill all democratic senators. It's much less likely that someone capable will want to kill all of them with a massive bomb.
I did, for one, for your failure to understand the danger and implications of getting rid of all human accountability of the military for killing people.
This article is just an advert disguised as journalism.
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KNOWING OpenAI et al WILL fail is not enough to make money from that.
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