Too often I've seen people inventing things in a lab being denigrated for not commercialising and scaling their invention. That's the top comment on any battery announcement by a research group.

> 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.

I think you're on to something. A lot of it comes down to the expectation and what people feel they were promised.

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

Here's one with an impact: one of my relatives was diagnosed seven years ago with stage 4 melanoma, which a couple decades ago was a one-year death sentence. She got three doses of immunotherapy, her tumors shrank, and last year her oncologist said don't even bother coming in for scans anymore, you're fine.