Comment by dang
12 hours ago
[stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
12 hours ago
[stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
Elon is such a clown, he keeps posting salty tweets about Anthropic, Claude Code, OpenAI and Codex yet has no competing product.
He's about to have the most compute. Wonder if he can do anything noteworthy with it.
These kind of HN submissions test how fair discussions can be here:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Elon is literally a political figure. How is one supposed to discuss his actions without invoking his politics?
discuss != battle
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> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
That ship has sailed a long time ago, with the approval of the moderation itself.
That's excellent modbait, but of course what you say is the opposite of what we approve.
It's is a complex and hard question, but the principles we apply to it have been around for a long time and are consistent with the site guidelines. If they weren't, we'd change the latter.
I've explained all of this many times. If you, or anyone, would like to know how we approach the question, you could start here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Yup, since around 2016 HN and other tech spaces got infested with people who cannot separate their political ideology from technical discussions.
When it comes to FOSS they claim that FOSS has always been political to justify the politicization of everything they touch.
Things used to be much better when the people adhered to the age-old wisdom "Keep politics and religion out of the office" and carried this attitude to neutral spaces online.
In part, some of us got into tech because it was one of the places where meritocracy ruled and you could get away from those who thrive by overwhelming others with BS.
I apologize for the rant.
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So, it utterly fails? A good part of the community still seems to be stuck in 2017 where Elon could do no wrong.
Turns out a lot of not just wrong, but malice could be done in 9 years. And worse yet, incompetent malice. I don't know why that has to be a political statement these days, but thems the brakes here.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
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Is it politics or ideology to recognize the flawed character of someone? How cultish his following is? His erratic behavior, the damage that he's doing?
Some people will cry "politics" just to take the voice away from those who dare to question their beloved celebrities.
Yeah and it’s not our fault every Elon discussion involves politics. It’s literally all he does all day, and all he seems interested in, anymore.
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They trample science, the Paradox of tolerance in action.
Who fights can lose, who doesn't fight has already lost.
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Many wouldn't, but some people share his values, and given the compensation, it makes saying "no" much harder. Money may not be the most important thing in life, but it does make them extremely easier to live.
Same, I earn 60K as a senior, but I would never accept a 200K+ position at xAI.
As an US Citizen, you have to pay me to engage with Elon Musk's businesses. He is not a good person and does not deserve respect or admiration.
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You wouldn't want to work for a genius? Probably the most significant person alive today?
I don't think he's a genius but if he is, it'd still be underneath my standards.
I can think of lots of significant people I wouldn't work for..
Get down to A&E quick, you've clearly drunk a potentially fatal amount of Elon KoolAid. Musk is a buffoon. Clever? yes by all accounts, genius? Hardly. He's had luck, made good judgments mostly offsetting the bad ones. Most of all he has enough money to power through errors that would bankrupt thee & me.
Evidently not genius enough to not have his car business and global image fail. Genius he might be, but he's only entrenching his position in a way not dissimilar to cults: by alienating a lot of people you can get loyalty from a selected few. If that's the kind of power he wants, sure, he's a genius. But a good businessman is something else.
Let's assume that you are correct. How is that relevant to how good he is as an employer? There are lots of people in history who were very significant and perhaps geniuses in some way that I wouldn't want to work for in a billion years.
We had cabinet members for this administration call Trump a nazi months prior to the nomination. People give up all kinds of morals for financial gain. That was always true, but it's become outright blatant this past decade.
There's a reason Europe is the world leader in technology, respect for humans and humanity.
lmao
You're hilarious.
Elon Musk is a generic-indignant tangent wanker and not what this site is for.
Thanks for providing a space for me to say that.
tbh I wouldn't give Elon a dime even if Grok was miles better than competition.
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
Is it?
Elon's persona caused massive drops in usage of twitter, sales of Tesla, etc.
Unsurprisingly many would not touch grok for the same distrust.
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This is not a fully formed thought, so take it with a grain of salt:
Keeping politics off of here is a good idea.
Some things aren't really politics, but morals. Like, a discussion of different tax schemes or how much environmental regulations accomplish what they set out to do or something is 'politics'. Lamenting that there is "no homeland for white people" is... something else.
It's probably still not likely to have good outcomes as a subject of discussion here, but it's also something the tech industry needs to wrestle with somewhere, somehow.
My experience of the tech world was that it went from being a collection of oddballs, geeks, nerds and maybe kind of naive politically to mainstreaming some really evil shit.
I think this will come back to bite the industry, and depending on how angry the people with pitchforks and torches are, could end up hurting more than just the bad actors.
Would you give one to Sam, Mark, or Sundar?
What does our system say about itself when people of integrity so rarely rise to the top?
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None of these guys literally has the blood of millions of people on their hands.
Elon’s gutting of USAID (and you can argue they would have done it anyways but he chose to be the executioner) will kill millions of people every year who otherwise would not have died.
Not only will I never give him a dime, I want him prosecuted and deported.
Edit: For those downvoting, we're already at an estimated 600k deaths: https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...
Why?
He's very hard to like, and he's hard to trust with anything.
Moral grandstanding on the account of his political views and the fact that he does Nazi salutes on stage, on TV, for the world to see… might have something to do with it.
Because Elon is a criminal scam artist and a horrifying racist who seems to be completely detached from reality.
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He is re-building a company that he himself built less than 3 years ago?
Elon has less regard for sunk costs than most corporate leaders.
Ironically, he's the sunk cost.
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You've been a good HN user for many years, but lately your comment history has swerved towards ideological battle generally, and unsubstantive flamebait like this post. Can you please swerve back? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: before someone pounces, no, I'm in no way defending either E. Just trying to hold up HN.
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So you deeply admire a man who threw a temper-tantrum when his giant box designed by a bunch of people with no experience in anything underwater or rescue, much less underwater rescue - and was deemed unusable to rescue people from an underwater cave with passages so small divers had to remove their gear and push it ahead of them? And repeatedly, directly, said the lead rescuer was a pedophile?
You deeply admire a man so unable to restrain his ego and temper that much of his production team at Tesla quit, some right to his face, because they couldn't meet his nearly impossible goal of extreme levels of automation on the Model 3 production line? Which, if all else is ignored, cost Tesla billions in delays because of his demands?
You deeply admire a many who is vehemently racist and misogynistic?
You deeply admire a man who latches onto just about any conspiracy theory?
You deeply admire a man who is so desperate for attention he unblocks himself from Twitter users' accounts?
You deeply admire a man whose companies were under investigation by nearly every federal enforcement agency there is?
You deeply admire a man who has failed to meet the vast majority of his own publicly stated benchmarks?
And who engages in PT Barnum levels of bullshit, like having "AI robots" that are actually just robots piloted by unemployed actors?
The man is a pathological liar who has failed upward not because of some sort of unique talent or skill, but because he's extremely abusive and willing to break any regulation or law he sees as inconvenient.
Yes