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The 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 matte
by emil-lp 3mo ago
The 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>I've built up a huge amount of respect for his technical accomplishments Are these his actual accomplishments or is he just taking credit for the accomplishments of others in his companies. Just like he took credit for being a founder of Tesla and pushing aside the actual founders.
- nkoren 3mo agoThose are his actual accomplishments.
- uxcolumbo 3mo agoSo what are his actual technical accomplishments? Other than marketing and promising FSD is ready tomorrow or we'd land on Mars in 2026, or getting Billions from tax payers in subsidies that allowed him to be as successful as he is ---- what are his actual technical accomplishments? Has he invented anything, e.g. a new space bracket, or some better radiation shielding or anything that's in heavy use now at SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, etc? EDIT: clarity
- urbsgpw 3mo agoYa maybe. But gemini didn't want to make all white families (or even white nazi soldiers). Isn't that just as racist and more importantly, counterfactual? Or is that good, because we should all strive to make our personal lives look like The Odyssey? The world is more nuanced (or should be). But up till Trump (who is a loathsome cheap crook, so Im not saying this in support, but stating a fact) the whole Silicon valley other than Karp and Thiel was basically one hivemind. And btw that's ok, they/you are allowed to have your worldviews. But don't mistake morality for preference similarity. Fine, you like your elves black, your models chinese, your religion from the Arab peninsula and your sexual preferences lean towards the rainbow (the cliche right wing characterization of a "lefty" in 2026), you have every right to have that view. And also every right to say Elon suck (and yes, he is marketing over matter, I agree, but he is the only serious westerd large scale industrialist). But then let's not pretend that the reason why Dario or Sam are "ok" isn't because you're lifestyle and worldviews are more aligned with them. And not because of an objective real metric which makes Elon bad and Altman better (example, pick any tech CEO/founder other than Karp or Luckey).
- KptMarchewa 3mo agoPart of Claude is running on Elon's GPUs.
- xiaoyu2006 3mo agoCorporation machine are not individuals (geeks). They chase solely profit while we have (at least some) agency on supporting the moral sides.
- spider-mario 3mo agoThis kind of comes across as a nirvana fallacy.
- Gareth321 3mo ago"Everything is political" is what people say when they want everything to be political. We don't have to make LLM models political. You do it because you enjoy soapboxing. It's perfectly reasonable for people who enjoy this technology to ask you to keep it in spaces which are dedicated to soapboxing, like Reddit. Not HackerNews.
- atwrk 3mo agoThe owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?
- gadders 3mo ago[flagged]
- mschuster91 3mo ago> i.e. anyone not the far left is an extremist He literally involved himself with Tommy Robinson and Reform UK [1], as well as supported German AfD [2]. It doesn't get more far-right than that - the AfD is so far-right that even other European far-right parties such as France's RN distance themselves. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70ep8lp4jjo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70ep8lp4jjo [2] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/musk-afd-wahlkampfshow-100.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/bundestagswahl/parteien/mus...
- gadders 3mo agoDude, no they're not. Tommy Robinson is a grifter, but Reform has a pretty good chance of winning the next UK general election People are realising the current omni-party centrist/centre-left politics and economics have failed utterly.
- 3mo ago
- jack_pp 3mo agoWake up, the people in power are corrupt regardless of their political orientation. There are no saints in politics. This has been true since times immemorial with few exceptions.
- peepee1982 3mo agoPeople have a series of rationalizations. People say for example that science and technology have their own logic, that they are in fact autonomous. This particular rationalization is profoundly false. It is not true that science marches on in defiance of human will, independent of human will, that just is not the case. But it is comfortable, as I said: it leads to the position that "if I don't do it, someone else will." Of course if one takes that as an ethical principle then obviously it can serve as a license to do anything at all. "People will be murdered; if I don't do it, someone else will." "Women will be raped; if I don't do it, someone else will." That is just a license for violence. Other people say, and I think this is a widely used rationalization, that fundamentally the tools we work on are "mere" tools; This means that whether they get use for good or evil depends on the person who ultimately buys them and so on. There's nothing bad about working in computer vision, for example. Computer vision may very well some day be used to heal people who would otherwise die. Of course, it could also be used to guide missiles, cruise missiles for example, to their destination, and all that. You see, the technology itself is neutral and value-free and it just depends how one uses it. And besides -- consistent with that -- we can't know, we scientists cannot know how it is going to be used. So therefore we have no responsibility. Well, that is false. It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know. But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we're not living in an abstract society, we're living in the society in which we in fact live. If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used. -- Joseph Weizenbaum
- w4yai 3mo ago> The hardcore nerds have always been political. Wake up. Wrong. This is the way you want it to be. Your own opinion being introduced as a universal rule. Wrong.