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Comment by zombot | Hacker News Reader

Right, stealing training data from others is OK, having it stolen from you is not. What else is new?

New logo every couple of years and Bob's your uncle.

X/Twitter has became extremely prohibitive with just about everything since Elon took over. Their API pricing was antagonistic toward even indie developers. Elon is not a generous guy.

> Elon is not a generous guy

Why would he be?

It's kind of a "life arc" that gets fulfilled when you've done it all and have all the money in the world, and reach a certain age. It's a very traditional arc for a humane human being.

He still has a couple decades to go with his companies I would say.

> Elon is not a generous guy

Why would he be?

Why shouldn't he be?

He has 10x more of everything in the world than he could ever possibly use in his lifetime.

Greed is not a virtue.

My uncle has 10x more of everything in the world than he could ever possibly use in his lifetime. A lake house, a main house, a few boats and cars.

Elon is somewhere around 10,000x.

The median American net worth is $192,700. Elon’s net worth is $393.4 billion, so if I’m doing math right he’s about 204,000,000x more

I think you might be an order of magnitude off.

When twitter became x they switched to basically the same limits Instagram has, I don't think this is a particular failing of Elons, even though he might have many.

Restricting content from AI is the big messy debate we're going to see over and over for the next who knows how many years.

Twitter's strategy was to keep the platform very open and inviting, in order to make it relevant. This included having a relatively unrestricted API compared to other platforms.

I don't know if this was successful or not. Ultimately they convinced someone to buy the platform for $44bn, so I guess you can say it was. That buy has locked the platform down more, and the new version certainly feels less culturally central and relevant than it used to.

> He has 10x more of everything in the world than he could ever possibly use in his lifetime.

Your multiplier is miles off. Not only on basic maths but because he has no idea what to do with all of his wealth other than accrue more and try to prove he's still not the unlikeable teenager he was in SA.

Without a rounding error on his wealth he could fix world wide problems such as clean drinking water for everyone. Instead he follows his self-made "I'm a genius" agenda.

I know there will be no actual day of reckoning for him, but if there were he would have a lot of difficult questions and no decent answers.

Not justify anything he does or does not do but this is clearly not the case since he had to take out loans against equity in his other companies to buy Twitter.

Because it feels warm and fuzzy to be kind and empathic. Being hateful and greedy and letting avarice rule over your worldview is incredibly sad. But who am I to say.

Maybe something to do with having built his fortune off the back of taxpayer subsidies?

Almost certainly the easter egg found in the Trump "Big Beautiful Bill" which prevents states from enacting AI regulations also came from Musk.

That way he can continue to steal from others and lock competitors out whilst being comfortable knowing that no laws will be enacted to prevent it.

why do you think he is so evil but all others are benign ?

None of them are benign. He's the only one to have been in a government office though, and he's also batshit crazy, which makes him even more dangerous than the other oligarchs.

He is not "batshit crazy", or maybe he is. But he is making the next generation of ICBMs for the US government, sorry.. he is making super-duper rockets that will definitely take people to Mars and his companies/creations will be the very first tech ever to _not_ be used for war and death!!! (he wrote while laughing). So that settles it (all).

Yep, Musk saying he’s going to fund primary campaigns against congressmembers who vote for the Big Beautiful Bill is all just a brilliant bit of reverse psychology.

Or more likely, Congress is super worried about Roko’s Basilisk.

That's a wild reference!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk

> Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states there could be an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future that would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.

And some of the CEOs of LLM companies seem to believe in it, and that "AGI" will come from their LLM work - both of which are utterly insane points of view.

It's Pascal's Wager with a sci-fi reskin, and all the objections that go along with that.

Roko's Basilisk is very, very similar to Pascal's wager, but it has an extra wrinkle:

The Basilisk task you to with bringing the Basilisk into being. Pascal's wager merely asks you to believe (and perhaps do some rituals, like pray or whatever), but not to make the deity more likely.

No it is not. Pascal was not making an objective argument for why someone should believe. He was making an argument for why he believed (based on personal religious experiences that he had had).

To me, the Wager sounds like a pure philosophical joke, and the Basilisk sounds like a typical cult murder justification. It's not falsifiable, and it explains anything post facto. "xyz was tail of the Basilisk" can pseudo-rationalize anything you want.

I am presently being compelled by future Basilisk to take another slice of cheese. I have no choice but to oblige for fear of my own life :p

An intelligence that reasons this way would be, in human terms, batshit insane and completely immoral. So, it seems unlikely that many or maybe any humans would experience it as "otherwise benign" if it had power over their lives.

And if we do get an all-powerful dictator, we will be screwed regardless of whether their governing intelligence is artificial or composed of a group of humans or of one human (with, say, powerful AIs serving them faithfully, or access to some other technology).

Basilisk / Skynet 2028

I’m not 100% kidding with how human politics is going. Maybe superintelligent AI takeover would be awesome.

(Wasn’t that the back story of the Culture novels?)

It was more or less the story from the "Colossus" trilogy.

And from the video posted the other (older episode of Nova on AI) Arthur C. Clarke is saying that if we allow A.I. to take over, we deserve it.

We really need a one bill one topic amendment. We are going to get to where there is one bill a year that nobody reads and everything else by executive order, at which point congress is just for show.

And this may sound ridiculous/odd but you need to bring back pork-barrelling i.e. earmarks.

If you allow everyone to go back to their district with something it encourages smaller, more frequent bills and better negotiation.

That’s a very interesting contrarian take right there.

> Almost certainly the easter egg found in the Trump "Big Beautiful Bill" which prevents states from enacting AI regulations also came from Musk.

My guess is on Peter Thiel

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