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So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wa
by benjamoon 3mo ago
So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I see a Tesla drive by? HN was so much better than this.
Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?
- satvikpendem 3mo agoThank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me. I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.
- spiderfarmer 3mo ago[flagged]
- gadders 3mo agoThey must be incredibly proud of you for inventing nazis in your imagination and then fighting them. Stunning and brave.
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoElon's posse: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/neo-fascist-patriot-front-washington-dc https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/04/neo-fascist-...
- gadders 3mo agoBased on what evidence?
- pjerem 3mo agoI'll take the downvotes with you, but I feel that you have to know that you are not alone thinking like this.
- s1artibartfast 3mo agoWhat Noble sacrifice
- pjerem 3mo agoI'm not doing a sacrifice. I just think it's important for people to know they are not alone thinking the current situation is abnormal. If you are snarking about the "karma" part, it's strange that I have to clarify but that's just a formula, I can't care less about my karma on a website.
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoThanks. In my experience people who idolize billionaires, especially those that think empathy is weakness, have questionable judgement and lack a moral compass. So of course they’ll try to ridicule people like you and me. Especially on a forum started by billionaires looking for the next billionaires, frequented by people who would stop at nothing to become a billionaire. Don’t give up on pointing this character flaw out everywhere you see it, as our children come across threads like these on a daily basis. And they need to see the bootlickers for what they are.
- s1artibartfast 3mo agoIt is a formula for advertising sacrifice and victimhood.
- Pay08 3mo ago[flagged]
- pjerem 3mo ago[flagged]
- cauch 3mo agoIt feels like you are doing exactly what you criticize by putting "Nazi" as some sort of Disney villains. The reality is that the majority of the Nazi, the real ones, the ones who made the Nazi atrocities possible, where just humans like you and me, and they were "just" supporting the party because they've eaten the propaganda. Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen. I would say the opposite as you: people like you put "Nazi" as the secular Satan, and because of that, real dangerous behavior can be ignored, the same real dangerous behavior that led, step by step, to the real Nazi atrocities.
- Pay08 3mo ago> Some people that are called "Nazi" today are often __way more Nazi__ than these average Nazi citizen. No, they aren't. This is the exact thing I was talking about but you can't seem to divorce your thinking from preestablished patterns. The Holocaust wasn't some universal evil. It was a genocide of Jews. The greatest incarnation of antisemitism seen in history. It wasn't a crime against the entirety of humanity. It was a crime against Jews that got appropriated. Antisemitism is the core of nazism, but since Jewish lives are cheap, no one gives a shit about that part, or about how post-war antisemitism in Austria and Germany gave rise to Hitler and the NSDAP. They haven't "eaten" the propaganda, they lived it before the nazis ever existed. Hell, Simon Wiesenthal was forced to invent 5 million non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust simply so people would give a shit about the whole thing (I'm not even going to mention that the whole "banality of evil" thing was based on false testimony.) And when people are actual neonazis, they get excused. If you're familiar with American politics, you can see Platner as the most recent example. > The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. - George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)
- egeozcan 3mo agoHey there, you're not alone. I think it matters to make the support explicit when it comes to this matter. I'm fully open to reopening the books and discussing why we made these things unacceptable. I'm of the "let the world burn if that's the cost of free speech" kind. But you can't get on a stage and do that salute, say racist things, push Nazi propaganda, and expect people to accept any association with your name on it. That's not speaking your mind on my book, that's a call to action, especially when you are doing it literally on a stage. A line on the sand this may be, but it's my line, and I'm glad to see there are others.
- sydney6 3mo ago[flagged]
- mlrtime 3mo ago[dead]
- 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- satvikpendem 3mo agoLiteral case in point as the only reply to me is a now flagged comment again about political garbage.
- throwaway_10948 3mo agoagreed; i am not saying that we should not care about morals, but HN could really strive to be one level higher in its knowledge of ethics than 'using grok4.5 is supporting $evil', because if you go that chain then 'using A\ is supporting spacex/elon hence A\ models are poison' also seemingly stands
- strangecasts 3mo agoI think Anthropic buying compute from Colossus despite the ongoing air pollution case [1] is a stain on them and is another reason not to use them [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississippi-grok-turbine-lawsuit-naacp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississi...
- emil-lp 3mo agoThe hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up. You're using the sell my soul to the devil argument. If you achieve what you want to, it doesn't matter if you sold your soul on the way.
- benjamoon 3mo agoIf you’re using Claude then guess what, it’s running on Elon’s GPUs. If you’re using Codex, then say hello to Microsoft for me. Let’s just presume that everyone hates everyone and get back to talking tech.
- LightBug1 3mo agoBullshit argument. If people care about shit, they might not eliminate everything, they do what they reasonably can. Do what you can, if you can, how you can, when you can. Not, ohhhh, "If you drink water, you're still using MS servers, I'm very intelligent". I thought that meme was well understood by now.
- nkoren 3mo agoThe issue is the sheer odiousness of Musk's political machinations. Claude has never tried to inject racist "white genocide" conspiracy theories into every unrelated conversation. You don't have to be much of a pearl-clutcher to find that shit (or a thousand other things that Musk has involved himself in) extremely disturbing. I'm a longtime space guy, so Musk has been on my radar for decades -- since long before he was a billionaire. He actually first hit my radar even before founding SpaceX, when he made a "Mars Greenhouse" presentation to the Mars Society in 2001 (I'm a founding member). Since then, I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments, which are indeed extraordinary. I wish to hell he'd stayed apolitical -- if he had, then we could indeed just talk tech. But he didn't, and we can't. There was a time when the absolute best rockets in the world were German -- but if it's 1942 and you're talking about sourcing rockets from the Luftwaffe, then I hope to hell you'd be focused on a few things beyond just the technology itself.
- uxcolumbo 3mo ago
- logicchains 3mo agoIf it makes you feel any better, note that a good number of those comments are just bot comments, although not yet as much as on Reddit.
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoI get that people in the US need to be apathetic towards politics to even survive in today's hopelessly divided and misinformed society, as it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections. But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society. There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less.
- Gareth321 3mo ago> But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society. Dane here, this is not just specious, it's inaccurate. We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. Tens of thousands of people all over Europe are arrested and imprisoned each year for speech which would be considered protected in the US. [This man was arrested for calling a politician an idiot.](https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675942?syn-25a6b1a6=1 https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...) [Another German citizen was investigated for calling another politician fat.](https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-user-for-calling-female-politician-fat https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-u...) [This UK citizen was arrested for re-tweeting a meme and refusing re-education classes.](https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-communications-after-posting-meme-mocking-the-transgender-flag/ https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...) You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities. For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges.
- spiderfarmer 3mo agoI can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job. Can Americans do that? I can say "I hate the orange clown (insert any other politician) and actively dislike everyone that voted for him", without getting a call from HR. Can they? I can't even enter the USA if I share some of the social media accounts like I'm legally required to do. The 'free speech absolutists' are all calling for censorship in this thread. So much for free speech.
- amunozo 3mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway_10948 3mo ago1. to have a healthy HN, we can't have this amount of political discussion under Grok 4.5. I am politically very liberal and not a fan at all of elon, but this ratio of technical vs. politics drives away the best discussion and will reddit-ify HN. This is my primary argument. 2. also, talk to people more! elon is very controversial, and that means that people's opinion of him differs a lot even in the more liberal crowd! i am not saying that we should be apolitical, but the HN bubble is bubbling, and the bubbling bubble will bubble away good technical AND political discussion. we can weaken elon's cause much better if we have a good grasp of people's actual opinion of elon and we go defuse that
- spiderfarmer 3mo ago[flagged]
- throwaway_10948 3mo agoyes elon has gone crazy; yes trump is a convicted felon; mention it, and move on, fixating on these is not the way to actually defeat elon or trump as shown by the recent elections. there are better things to do to weaken elon and trump's cause
- calgoo 3mo agoYes, like not buying or using their products, their political supporters products and telling others to do the same. This has been proven over and over again to work. Thats why, dont use Grok, dont buy a Tesla, dont support the mega corps that have bent a knee to them, dont buy Java licenses use open source, etc etc etc.
- mlrtime 3mo ago
- christkv 3mo agoPeople just need to get off the internet, go outside touch some grass and realize you are being ginned up by bad actors on both sides. Outside of your bubble most people are actually still nice.
- throwaway132448 3mo agoYou reap what you sow. What I want to know is why so many people are lamenting actions having consequences?
- jack_pp 3mo agoand what are the consequences? angry people on message boards? According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?
- throwaway132448 3mo agoYou’ve taken my comment out of the context I was replying to, so none of what you’ve said is remotely relevant to what I said.
- marsven_422 3mo ago[dead]
- gf000 3mo agoEverything is political, no one, no thing is apolitical.
- Gareth321 3mo agoI strongly disagree. You can make tennis and knitting political if you're an insufferable person, but you don't have to make them political. One of the worst exports from the US this last decade has been the left-right political team sports. Most of us exist all over the political spectrum. We have some right wing values, some left. Some libertarian, some authoritarian. Many which fit nowhere on any axis. I'm incredibly tired of having my hobby spaces invaded by "DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK THIS HOBBY IS LITERALLY HITLER!?" I'm not alone.
- Luckyemmet 3mo agoDefinitely, I agree with the sentiment that most of the internet has become an echo chamber for politics and morons who spread hate and are extremely argumentative. Th left and right wing ideologies were already created to divide us but of course no one ever cares since everyone's opinion is the only correct one.
- Gareth321 3mo agoThe rage algorithms are not helping.
- superultra 3mo agoKnitting has long been a highly political activity. Knitting in public by women during the French Revolution was an audacious act of gender equality. And tennis? Goodness surely you’re aware of the modern political ramifications of tennis that happen almost constantly. There are so many modern examples but let’s pick Wimbledon’s recent banning of Russia. Or Serena Williams; who for her part would rather prefer that there isn’t a political earthquake every time she steps on the court. Perhaps a better, more honest, and certainly more realistic course of action is to acknowledge that anything involving human beings is intrinsically political, including and maybe even especially tennis and knitting, and secondly to admit that you personally would prefer not to think about the intrinsic politics of knitting or tennis when you exercise those hobbies.
- nkmnz 3mo ago1. Be offended by political comments. 2. Make political comment about political comments.
- kleiba2 3mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- 9NRtKyP4 3mo agoYou don’t exist in a vacuum. Pretending the politics doesn’t exist is itself a political position. Excluding it is how we’ve ended up with technically impressive but socially awful systems.
- belowavgiq 3mo agothere is reddit for that, go there.
- xyzsparetimexyz 3mo agoComplaining about people being political is equally pathetic. If it bothers you just ignore it
- Lomlioto 3mo agoIts more depressing to see that we have such a low morality, that it apperenly doesn't matter what you do as long as you make great tech? My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry. People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job. I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes. But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative. I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech.
- mlrtime 3mo ago"low morality" and "care" are keywords that you are trying to manipulate the reader to the [right] side of some cause. I don't feel at all bad seeing a Tesla, does that make me "low morality"?
- Lomlioto 3mo agoIt might make you less moral. Elon Musk is not someone. He is the CEO of Tesla and owning Tesla made it possible for him to buy Twitter. He is literaly the richest person on the planet and changes opinions by controlling Twitter as a platform (1984 anyone?) He has more reach and more money than anyone else. His character clearly shows that you can't trust him. It doesn't even matter if he sometimes does something good, he doesn't care. Being responsible for cutting USAID without any plan? This killed real humans and kids. The richest person on the planet is responsible for this. This becomes a real issue for everything dangerous he does because he just pushes stuff, doesn't matter if it has long term consequences. Polluting our atmosphere with Starlink satelites? Who cares eh? He doesn't. Instead him thinking about making our planet better, he thinks its fundamental that we become a multi-planet species. We are in 2026 not in 2100. We haven't even solved basic income, food stability etc. Tesla is not a random company.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- figmert 3mo agoWhether you like it or not, software is inherently political. Most aspects of our lives are. The fact you're using GLM there's some underlying political reason (yes, my guess in this case is cost, which is also political) and mentioning it's Chinese backed is equally political. You may not care, but it's political. When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements.
- inkysigma 3mo agoI think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.
- strangecasts 3mo ago> Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion. Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?
- drstewart 3mo ago>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal > when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?
- inkysigma 3mo agoI think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is: https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot-grok-brings-south-african-white-genocide-claims-rcna206838 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot... If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong. Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company. The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?
- bandrami 3mo ago> it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares Existentially weary infosec guy voice I promise you some of us care, and the rest of you will realize why in a year or so
- Ciph 3mo agoI'm genuinely curious about your view on this. Ziphu AI release pretty capable open weights models. As long as we don't feed information that is confidential or become overy reliant on the tech that's on someone else's computer - what are the other riaks that you see in using Chinese models?
- bandrami 3mo agoMy view is that the same people who pulled off xz are putting God knows what in the weights
- Alpha3031 3mo agoThat doesn't make any sense. Model weights are literally just numbers you multiply by. To imply that it's any way even remotely comparable to the xzutils build process is... Well, I would be very technically impressed if someone managed to achieve any form of code execution, especially given unknown levels of quantisation post-release whereas xzutils was interesting mostly due to obfuscation.
- bandrami 3mo agoI was very technically impressed with xz, FWIW. Note that the troublesome vector isn't code execution by the LLM, it's instructions to produce vulnerable code
- Alpha3031 3mo agoSteering a single model towards that seems, again, technically challenging, especially if it needs to be obfuscated enough to pass code review (you are doing that for LLM code right?) and especially if targeted towards specific fields of use (e.g. critical infrastructure). I still don't see how the threat model could make sense here.
- kilroy123 3mo agoMy only complaint is that people have been tricked into thinking complaining online is taking action. The complaints are the equivalent to shouting at the TV.
- Luckyemmet 3mo agoLiterally why the term Keyboard Warrior was coined. Things on the ground and things online are very different. Nowadays 90 percent of information online is propaganda or psyops coded that its very dumb to take things at face value.
- alkonaut 3mo agoSomeone might at least read this discussion and come away with a feeling that there is something controversial about using a product or service, and read up on it before buying. If that happens to even one prospective customer then the energy we spend complaining was worth it.
- AdamN 3mo agoPolitics and tech have gone hand in hand for generations. Just think about Stallman and free (as in beer) software or encryption export controls or much of the history of computing. There is no advanced tech that doesn't touch upon the political because politics is focused on what's important and advanced technology is very important.
- tene80i 3mo agoTelling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.
- unsupp0rted 3mo agoYes yes and when an atheist tells you he doesn’t believe in a god you tell him that’s ok because Jesus believes in him
- tene80i 3mo agoNo, the parallel would be an atheist saying "I don't want anyone in this room to mention God".
- unsupp0rted 3mo ago“Telling people not to be political is a political act” “Saying let’s leave religion out of assessing this LLM is a religious act”
- CapsAdmin 3mo ago> is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you. It feels a bit like saying anyone who does not want to fight or talk about a war are on the enemies side. > You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them. This also feels like an odd thing to say. If you're going out with a bunch of friends to eat out, and half of them always talk about how immoral it is to eat meat amongst themselves while you're eating meat, I think that would affect me negatively at some point.
- tene80i 3mo agoYou're right about neutral/hopeless. I meant "happy" in the sense of "OK with / resigned to let exist". Not necessarily "this is great". The meat-eating morality point I think is also an interesting example. It could affect you negatively, but they strongly believe it to be immoral and are witnessing you committing what they believe to be an immoral act, so should they be forced to be silent on the subject? Why? Whose beliefs and preferences win? If they're your friends, you reckon with the issue and ideally come to a space of agreement or cordially agree to disagree. Or your mind is changed! Or theirs! But if the groups dig in ("We can't let this go", "We just want to eat meat and not feel bad about it") then that's a friendship-ending juncture, isn't it? Or you agree not to share that sort of space/context any more. But it's also different with friends vs an open space, which this is.
- asdewqqwer 3mo agoAnd here is a reddit meme for you https://i.redd.it/eeoo4y00lkne1.jpeg https://i.redd.it/eeoo4y00lkne1.jpeg
- Razengan 3mo ago> 2026 > Posting Reddit links They already gave away that image to their AI partners to train on.
- asdewqqwer 3mo agoAnd it is somewhat correlated to my point because?
- Razengan 3mo ago> I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow You're in luck: We have this new thing called LLMs that you can ask to summarize a webpage and filter out the shit you don't care about :)
- small_model 3mo agoAgree 100%, it's bordering on a mental illness, any mention of Elon or related tech elicits emotional posts unrelated to the tech being discussed. It's clearly biased as Anthropic and OpenAI have blood on their hands but they get a pass. I put it down to weak minded/credulous people who inhaled the left wing legacy media campaign wholesale without a critical thought.
- akie 3mo agoMaybe it's because he's a fascist?
- small_model 3mo agoHe is a business man who runs successfully companies, you are applying labels to him based on nothing more than what some left wing billionaire wants you to believe. Have you met him?
- akie 3mo agoHe's shouting his politics through a megaphone, it doesn't take much to recognize it for what it is.
- silver_silver 3mo agoHe’s an active, donating supporter of the far right in at least America and the UK. He speaks at political rallies?? Are you joking?
- jeromegv 3mo agoI have met him and also saw him standing next to Donald Trump and at political rallies. It wasn't imagined by left wing billionaire. I have also read his Twitter account where he is spreading his right wing politics, every single day.
- khalic 3mo agoReally, what left wing billionaire? Be specific, because the Nazi Billionaire is just as specific
- plutokras 3mo agoApplying an ostrich policy to Chinese models won't make their underlying geopolitics disappear. Much of China's innovation is state-funded specifically to compete with Western counterparts and erode their margins. By open-sourcing these models, China applies pressure on the US ecosystem. You enjoying free/cheap access to high quality models is the intended effect of that strategy.
- 0xpgm 3mo agoOn the bright side however, one can easily vibe code a browser extension that automatically hides comments that are not aligned to one's needs, whether its American politics or comments complaining about it :-)
- BSDobelix 3mo agoOh man, you speak to my heart! I always read stuff like this: -Why self-host? Just use AWS. What, you run your own PostgreSQL instance on real metal at home? -Just use Linux. Linux, SystemD, and Docker have won. Why care about other operating systems? -You have your own self-hosted email server, why? Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo will put your emails into spam. (Hint: They won't if your server is correctly set up. But you're just interested in outsourcing the service and have zero interest in how "modern" email works.) Look, I get it. Not everyone wants to self-host. But actively being against self-hosting or the administration of systems, or not trying stuff like BSD/VMS or, hear me out, MVS-TK5 is the opposite of a hacker spirit, today not interested in hosting tomorrow programming.
- vintagedave 3mo ago> god knows who For Grok, we do know who, and many of us remember the repeated Nazi salute, the alleged creation of underage graphic material, etc. I get a sense of tiredness around all this and just wanting to work with some tech. But, in today's world, people and their beliefs matter, and they do have impact. We have to be aware of, and react, to that. There are plenty of LLMs without that baggage. It's ok - and I'd say, something to respect - to say No to Grok and use one of the others. Hardcore nerd or not, it's a matter of what line you draw with ethics. My own line is pretty far on the 'no way' side of what we've seen Grok be associated with.
- marqueewinq 3mo agoMy thoughts on this: 1. This is a world we live in now. I personally was not interested in the politics in the slightest, but since 2022-ish it wasn't in the cards to not pay attention to what happens around. For some groups of people this forced political awareness started even earlier. 2. The output of the models is very aligned with the owner's political views. You can verify this by comparing the answers to a simple philosophical questions, like the railcart dilemma, nature of power etc. 3. I don't (again, personally) think that being a hardcore nerd should implicitly mean i'm apolitical. Moreover, i think it's unavoidable for a nerds (as in, above average IQ, degree, medium to high income) to be aghast at any notion of the government being a police state, fascist or a communist. Sorry to bring even more politics here, but, again, it's unavoidable in the current situation, i think.
- alkonaut 3mo ago”Not being interested in politics” doesn’t mean you aren’t interested, it just means politics happens to work for you. Its a strongly political take on the world too. Politics isn’t a subject like sports or tech. It’s something that permeates them all, including the discussion itself.
- khalic 3mo agolol, the sheer hypocrisy of your message
- wesleywt 3mo agoMusk has politicised Grok by manipulating it respond in his world view. You comment is extremely depressing.
- dbspin 3mo agoI think US based folks perhaps aren't aware of what Musk has been doing in Europe politically. Specifically promoting - appearing at conferences, applying political pressure as well as public statements etc - actual fascists. Not right wing controversial figures etc, but literal authoritarian, anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-democracy fascists. Not to be glib but if this was Mussolini-AI, or Pinochet-AI or what have you, the reaction would be the same. If Musk succeeds in his attempts to bring fascism to Europe and breakup the EU, the humanitarian results (ie.: a land war in Europe), will be far worse even than the tens of thousands of deaths attributed to his dismantlement of USAID.
- StefanBatory 3mo agoThey do know, they just don't care. As long as it doesn't affect them, it's "not political". Frankly, I am afraid. I see many takes here that resemble Russian way of thinking and being "apolitical" that I thought I'd never see from Americans.
- dbspin 3mo agoSlashdot went the same way more than a decade ago. It could reflect more the microcosm of the aging, wealthy, silicon valley ycombinator community than a sea change in attitudes among tech people or US intelligencia in general.
- merman 3mo agoThe rules are selectively enforced intentionally because the moderation desires it to be this way. It’s a feature not a bug. The mods are creating the echo chamber that the mods want. Personally I hate it.
- linuxhansl 3mo agoYes... And, perhaps the political comments here are a reasonable reaction to the misguided political influence that shaped grok. How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while. I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.
- weddpros 3mo agoJust in case you missed this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/06/24/are-ai-chatbots-like-chatgpt-politically-biased-we-tested-them/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... I hope we'll get updated stats on newer models eventually.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nick486 3mo ago> Where have the hardcore nerds gone? Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.
- EgregiousCube 3mo ago+1. And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.
- bilsbie 3mo agoRocket man bad
- farfatched 3mo ago+1. I come to HN for technical content. I also seek political commentary, but not here. That isn't HNs strength. > Where have the hardcore nerds gone? I'd guess they avoid posts they predict to be overwhelmingly political. Why do the political posters post? They want to influence, of course! And HN is open. So posts that can be made political, will be.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoEverything is political though, even the denial that things are political is.
- bojangleslover 3mo agoIronically, removing political comments from HN would be a great use case for a tiny local model or even just an embedding model.
- sam-cop-vimes 3mo agoThe owner of this company is a self-confessed Nazi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation If you were alive at this time, would you have focused only on the tech because it is "interesting" and advances science?
- dezsiszabi 3mo agoThere are more to life than nerd shit.
- neya 3mo agoI've been on HN since 2012-ish, but a reader since way before. In the last 5 years alone, HN has unfortunately become extremely political, steering most conversations in the direction of political correctness rather than technical objectivity. I don't think it's a problem of moderation, because, that is still quite good. I think it's just the evolution of forums in general. Invariably, someone will start with FUD or ragebait and every discussion that follows will be trying to address that instead of the technicality behind the topic. Partly, we are also to blame - a lot of the top stories on HN these days have nothing to do with technology to be honest. You'll find the most random stuff on the HN sometimes - "Why geese mate for life" or something similar that makes you wonder "what the fuck am I supposed to do with that information now?"
- belowavgiq 3mo agothe evolution of english speaking forums*. Which is rather unfortunate as a tech entusiast, as Russian forums are dying down and the only alternative are the walled Chinese forums. we could create a new HN in 10 minutes, one that expressely prohibits politics AND posts about how many eggs chickens lay in a week (where half the comments would probably end up discussing the decision in 2020 of the american gov to cull infected chickens), but it would have approxitely 0 users.
- toasty228 3mo ago> Where have the hardcore nerds gone? They grew up and understand what's at stake
- forgingahead 3mo agoHacker News sadly jumped the shark in the mid-2010s, and went into orbit after Trump was elected the first time. Since then there's been a lot of political performers here, which has killed the quality of discussion significantly. Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/ https://lobste.rs/) is apparently a possible alternative, but the original HN magic has been gone a long time.
- throw10920 3mo ago> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. Moderation can be improved by the community. Downvote political comments to show that they're not welcome. Flag them if they break the guidelines (which is almost always, because the purpose of HN is almost exactly anti-political). If there's a particularly egregious comment, or a user who's on a jihad, then contact hn@ycombinator.com. "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
- blablabla123 3mo ago> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. Grok is specifically trained on political input/output. Therefore I have trouble parsing your comment. > Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing? When was the last time you've seen tank database systems discussed here? Probably never because there seems to be some sort of unwritten moral boundary of what fits in here and what not. I hope it finds its natural alignment back. Personally I think it's fine to point out the peculiarities of certain tech ecosystem. But at some point I rather don't read more details and move on to other aggregators.
- budsniffer952 3mo agoHN has always been political, they were probably just your politics. A decade ago, I used to come here and read people saying me and my teammates should be jailed or worse because of my employer. People calling for the murder of executives. The moderation team never cared. As I've noted in other comments, people here implicitly cheer on Iran because they don't like Trump. Or we see ridiculous comments like, "there's no academic freedom in the US, move to China". Sheltered, brain rotted opinions. Now that we have more diverse politics, people are noticing it. And frankly, I'm glad.
- TacticalCoder 3mo agoThe crazy thing is Musk going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Europe, the biggest concentration camp where nazis and collaborationists were happily killing the jews they already hated so much (that part hasn't changed much btw) and people calling Musk a "nazi" for saying "my heart goes to you". But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.
- __alexs 3mo agoIs it somehow LESS nerdy to understand the geopolitics behind the tech we use? I guess we have different definitions of nerd.
- dimgl 3mo agoRefreshing to see this be the top comment, thank you. I agree. To answer your question, Grok 4.5 seems to be pretty good at simple tasks and gets even some of the trickier ones correct but it tends to struggle with bigger codebases that aren't very uniform. I've noticed that it uses a fraction of the tokens to get to solutions which is really impressive compared to GLM 5.2 which tends to be an overthinker. I'm not sure if Grok 4.5 will become part of my stack yet but I am genuinely impressed with what it's been able to achieve. I'm also unsure if Grok 4.5 is the same base as Grok 4.3. Maybe it is and the data they've used in pretraining is additive (the Cursor data) but it feels like a completely different model than the previous Grok versions.
- dimgl 3mo agoWant to add that I started using Grok 4.5 on Grok Build and the big codebase problem seemingly vanished. The issue was only happening on OpenCode.
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- AlecSchueler 3mo ago> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. Is it really "depressing?" I get that it could be " annoying"if you don't want to read about politics ever at all. But depressing is difficult to imagine. Honestly, knowing that people are still put off by an LLM that's been engineered to promote disinformation about things like "white genocide" is one of the few reassurances I have about the tech community these days.
- transdev12 3mo agoI’ve been coming to hacker news for years (10+) and there has always been political commentary.
- alkonaut 3mo agoOh ffs. Just like I would much rather drive a Chinese car than a Tesla I’d much rather use a Chinese model than an X one. That’s just where we are now. Whether it’s good at anything at all doesn’t interest me. It could match Fable at 1/10th the cost and I wouldn’t send a cent their way. I’m a hardcore nerd. But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.
- diabllicseagull 3mo agopolitics being the inflammatory topic for you or not, you seem to seek a particular type of comment section that only includes the information you are personally interested in and nothing else (garbage as you put it). imho, it's an unrealistic expectation on your part.
- chairmansteve 3mo agoHe spends most of his time trolling us. What do you expect?
- daveguy 3mo agoCan we turn off the whining bitchy little comments like yours along with the political commentary? That would be great. Did you honestly think the mechanazi / porn generator AI wouldn't receive negative comments? Even "hardcore nerds" recognize garbage. Sorry 'bout your luck.
- bibimsz 3mo agobunch of libtards
- root_axis 3mo ago> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. This is entirely Elon's fault. If he just focused on the tech instead of being an extremely inflammatory political activist in his speech and his role in government, nobody would be talking about this.
- port11 3mo agoI assume he knew exactly what he was doing, given that his political allegiance spared him for some ongoing investigations, forced his stock into pension saving funds, pushes his failing car onto the foreground, etc. Well played Elon, selling out to cash it in.
- overgard 3mo agoWell, until these things are self hosted (and even then); running these things involves a massive amount of trust with the providers. Like, to make it even useful you more or less have to turn over all your data (IP, slack/teams conversations, internal documentation, etc.). So you kind of want to know that whoever you're giving that to isn't going to stab you in the back. (Um, also see Anthropic going after Figma's business; or Microsoft's entire history of embrace/extend/extinguish.) It's really naive to trust these companies, and it's VERY naive to trust Elon Musk.
- SmirkingRevenge 3mo agoBlame Musk himself. He did this. He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf). He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN? Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity. Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.