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Comment by cfeduke | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no dent

By the time there is a dent, it's too late.

Sounds great but you’ll have to provide some logic because I don’t automatically follow your extremely confident opinion…

People here are praying very hard for Twitter to fail. Nearly any social media post nowadays has 50-100 comments predicting Twitter's failure and ranting about Musk. He is living rent-free in many heads now.

Its utterly ludicrous how so many intelligent and rational people are becoming un-hinged whenever Twitter/Musk is mentioned.

Any publicity is good publicity it seems like. People don’t get that hating is not the opposite of love, it’s indifference. Mute and forget.

I just sent the second part of this to my friend WRT his ex-wife…

Hate is just confused admiration

I confusedly admire bigots and racists? That doesn’t make any sense…

Many bigots are revealed as self-hating closet cases and fetishists, so I could see a naïve analysis attempt to flip it around and assume it must go both ways.

It reminds me of the Trump thing, it seems people really lose all rationality when they are faced with a man who publically doesn't care and does whatever he wants and is successful at it. I wonder if we will one day have a psychological name for this. It must be related to something in the human brain that touches on social repression and decades of instilled moral codes like "Don't say this, nobody will like you" and then when somebody does it anyway, you feel like it's an invader from a different tribe or a tribe member violating the fabric of what holds together the tribe. When really, he's not doing much different at all and they'd privately do the same exact jokes as a kid like "Twitter is Titter! haha! Like titties get it?" I bet lots of people had such a dumb thought but repressed it and when a supposed adult and major social figure acts like that, it evokes anger that the tribe is in danger.

"and is successful at it."

Overpaying, creating a mass exodus, destabilizing the platform, and losing tons of advertisers is "successful?"

The Twitter thing is still in progress and probably his first project where you could say that he has a problem

I’d argue that one of the reasons Tesla and SpaceX are successful is not just because Elno is a “visionary” (or functional equivalent). It’s because he was/is supported by a cadre of “true believers” (eg that we must disrupt the auto industry in order to do something radical about climate change). Those true believers (like all true believers), are willing to put up with lots of strange behaviour in the name of that belief.

Twitter on the other hand was bought with a management layer that could fairly be characterised as the opposite of true believers in whatever Elon is selling. Hence the implosion.

What are your thoughts about The Boring Company?

Yeah you're right about this, but it isn't irrational. Human societies have been as successful as they have because of social contracts. The phenomenon you're highlighting here is just society's immune system to protect itself against violators of those contracts.

Trump fomented an attempted insurrection and you are shaking your head about the rationality of the people who are concerned?

It's concerning that you're not.

Apparently the people that have Musk living rent free in their heads are living rent free in your head.

Mental subletting.

I actually think the "living rent free in heads" peaked awhile ago. At this point it's just clear in a more pedestrian way that things aren't going well over there.

The fear of investors and, to some extent, Google, is that LLMs will supplant traditional search and by the time enough people are catching on to affect metrics the momentum will be too great to stop. My experience with LLMs has not led me to believe that is all that likely but opinions differ there.

We need search to be able to fact check the LLMs, but this might become extremely difficult once all the content is written by them…

Just like how it is hard to fact-check Wikipedia now that it's used a reference. A thought came to me - perhaps it's Wikipedia that should be worried that it'll be supplanted by LLMs.

[citation needed]

The phenomenon they're referring to is when something spurious is posted on Wikipedia with no or poor citations, then used as the source for a "reputable" article (without citations), then the article is cited by Wikipedia, making the spurious information look more trustworthy.

1) that hardly ever happens, it hasn’t caused any widespread issues in the decades Wikipedia has existed.

2) All sources are cited so they can be easily verified by the reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

The user experience with ChatGPT is pretty good. No ads, no spam results. There are downsides too of course: the hallucinations, and the way the ChatGPT site wants me to log back on now and then.

I was very happy with Google but recently on my iPhone the Google website started nagging me to log in every time I do a search. This is a poor experience, add to that the ad results that have gotten harder and harder over time to distinguish from real results.

I’ve found it amusing but haven’t gotten that much practical use out of it. I still make multiple Google searches every day.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

When Chrome launched, it only launched with ~2-3% market share in the first week compared to Firefox. Everyone thought that Chrome wasn't that good and Firefox would be fine. However I knew on day one that Firefox was in serious trouble and I switched browsers immediately. But what I didn't know is that Firefox would do nothing to compete for 10 years.

Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn, though.

And... I don't recall this "everyone" that you are citing. Chrome launched when Google had a ton of good will.

> Chrome launched with an absurd amount of money to burn

OpenAI has $100bn+ from Microsoft, and millions of paying subscribers.

$100bn+?

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/08/microsofts-complex-bet-on-op...

"Microsoft’s $13 billion bet on OpenAI carries huge potential along with plenty of uncertainty"

Yeah, no idea where I got this $100bn number in my head... I guess that does sound pretty ridiculous now that I think about it!

How many of the companies with the largest market cap (top 15) were also in the top 15 20 years ago? Why do you think Google will be an exception to this reality?

I think the answer is network effect. As soon as there appears a properly working easy accessible alternative (not Mastodon), people with will start moving to it. At first it won’t be visible in twitter’s popularity, but when the new service reaches some critical mass of users - the popularity will start falling quickly. Let’s see if Notes is this alternative.

By the time someone makes a bad argument its too late. We are beyond reason.

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