HN has really embraced our current techno-pessimistic culture, so all the things that get on trashed here are definitely worth looking into. And no, I'm not joking. In the old days, HN had split brain, so things would both get trashed and celebrated - the famous Dropbox thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)? The top comment is gently dismissive, but overall the thread is also quite encouraging. Twitter is much better, since you can still get the split-brain effect there, rather than isolating yourself in a negative echo chamber.
So fining headlines isn't hard, I think the real value these days, which didn't exist prior to YouTube becoming huge, is that now you can actually really dive into these things in a way that was incredibly inaccessible before.
Take self-driving cars: You'll see the usual dismissive crap here, but then you can go on YouTube and you can watch Karpathy talk for hours about how they're building their system. Then you can go watch someone like Yannic Kilcher talk about Karpathy's presentation, explain pappers on which the work is based, etc. Then you can go watch AI DRIVR test the latest iteration in the real world. Because there's so much content, you can basically find content at every level, from basic pop-documentary explainers all the way to lectures and paper analysis, allowing you to gradually go deeper and deeper.
Rockets and Space? Scott Manley and EverydayAstronaut will explain missions, engines, everything. SmallStars has amazing visuals. EVs? Sandy Munro will tear down an entire car and show you every single little thing in there. Electric Flight? "Electric Aviation" will explain the engineering tradeoffs between Lillium's small ducted fans and Joby's large propeller design. Biology? iBiology let's you dive into any current reserach (Synthic Bio, Connectome scanning, using DNA as structural material). You can just keep going like that for anything, it's just plain amazing.
Self-driving cars are a bad example for your argument because self-driving cars really are very restricted in their regions of operation. Yes, self-driving cars can work in Arizona where everything is flat, dry, and unobscured. But they just don't work in most parts of the country for half the year because of snow covering markings, emergent lane flocking that has nothing to do with actual lanes, and other winter driving fun. Autonomous cars won't work in these vast regions of the world until they can do the wrong thing the same way humans do.
The hype surrounding them is, and always has been, hype. No substance.
I think you might be spending too much time in echo chambers. The hype probably underestimates the impact the tech will have (it is near impossible to predict higher order effects) and there's been an incredible amount of progress over the last few years.
The only social media I use is HN and IRC. The only chamber I need to yell into is right outside my door, full of snow with the roads covered. Any car using absolute positioning of self and road will drive in the wrong lane. Why? Because they humans aren't using the right lanes and what the humans are now flocking to as a lane is now the correct lane. And it's not like the sides of the roads remain absolute either. This is not some hour long transient situation. It's for 5 months at a time. Unless an autonomous car can follow the emergent pseudo-lanes (there's no real distinct visual markers either) and make the wrong decision like all the other humans it's going to hurt and kill people.
And that's why you only hear about autonomous car tests in arid warm regions. All the ones in cold climates so far have failed or used special roads with embedded sensors, or a car with many TB of pre-recorded ground penetrating radar scans mapped to road positions. And those absolute positioning based navigation systems would be deadly if mixed with emergent human lane behavior in winter.
I can understand why people who've never driven over a real winter can think autonomous cars are ready. But they'll have to achieve near human emulation of purely vision based driving to make the same errors humans do in winter. And that's a long, long way away.
I'm from Canada, so I'm somewhat aware of winter, yes.
Technology will always arrive at different times at different places. Your area probably got high speed internet and electricity later than cities, and it'll get AEVs later as well. As any technology, it'll target areas with highest benefit:cost ratios first, then incrementally expand. Nothing particularly notable about that and when thinking about the overall development, a 5-10 year difference between tech being available in Toronto vs Yukon is not relevant. I mean, it sucks for people wanting the tech, but that's about it.
Driving in pseudo-lanes is probably much easier than what Tesla's FSD can already do (detect, keep track of, and plan around, dozens of cars and pedestrians), the reason you'll see it last is less tech challenge, but that getting it to work in a city is much more valuable.
So fining headlines isn't hard, I think the real value these days, which didn't exist prior to YouTube becoming huge, is that now you can actually really dive into these things in a way that was incredibly inaccessible before.
Take self-driving cars: You'll see the usual dismissive crap here, but then you can go on YouTube and you can watch Karpathy talk for hours about how they're building their system. Then you can go watch someone like Yannic Kilcher talk about Karpathy's presentation, explain pappers on which the work is based, etc. Then you can go watch AI DRIVR test the latest iteration in the real world. Because there's so much content, you can basically find content at every level, from basic pop-documentary explainers all the way to lectures and paper analysis, allowing you to gradually go deeper and deeper.
Rockets and Space? Scott Manley and EverydayAstronaut will explain missions, engines, everything. SmallStars has amazing visuals. EVs? Sandy Munro will tear down an entire car and show you every single little thing in there. Electric Flight? "Electric Aviation" will explain the engineering tradeoffs between Lillium's small ducted fans and Joby's large propeller design. Biology? iBiology let's you dive into any current reserach (Synthic Bio, Connectome scanning, using DNA as structural material). You can just keep going like that for anything, it's just plain amazing.