That viral video of a 'deactivated' Tesla Cybertruck is a fake
theverge.com
theverge.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859807
It'll be interesting to see if the situation evolves further.
But hey, the media probably wouldn't lie these days, and Musk bad man.
I don't know whether you mean Threads or Bluesky but it sounds like you haven't used either.
And there are plenty rational reasons to have that goal.
There are guidelines and each guideline is mostly loosely encouraged by the community here by downvoting - in effect becoming community standards. However a well written exception can receive upvotes (even though strictly against guidelines) because it is a community and individual judgement mostly gets priority.
Flagging is different because it is a much stronger signal of violation of norms, however it is still mostly a signal from the HN user community.
The moderation balance on HN appears to be quite functional to me (although I'm happy with many guidelines that others fight against).
Just my opinion on the topic.
I think you're trying to fabricate an alternative version of reality while being aware that the facts (i.e., the actual posts in the thread) are not on your side.
"no, they didn't believe it, they were engaging in strategic trolling and vote gaming" as if that doesn't imply a way more malicious frame of mind than some hapless idiot looking at the message and going "yup, seems legit, upvote we go".
(disclaimer: I wasn't in those comments, IDK who's reality is true here)
As someone who did see that thread evolve, let me help you out.
HN (being largely comprised of redditors) were more than happy to amplify pure misinformation because it was politically expedient. The evidence that it was fake was given fairly early on; a lot of people ignored it.
It's certainly a condemnation of the userbase on this forum.
Note that I put all the comments in reverse chronological order because historical vote data isn't available, so which comments are at the top here isn't necessarily reflective of which ones were at the top at the time.
You can judge for yourself whether my summary was misleading.
I think you didn't even bothered to read your own citation.
The first comment literally leads with "This isn't real".
The bulk of replies are questioning the questionable claims, and asking for their sources.
There are indeed a few comments from gullible people, but to frame this as gullible people being prevalent in the thread is outright wrong, as your own source shows.
By my count, five comments expressed some kind of overt skepticism, and another four included a "if this is true" disclaimer without indicating any particular grounds to disbelieve it. The other 21 all either explicitly accepted the story as true, or implicitly didn't care whether it was true or not (e.g., piling onto criticism of Tesla without mentioning the specific controversy).
IMO, at least by the time I saw it, there were more than enough red flags raised to say that having it on HN before more evidence is available is only flamebait.
Do you think I shouldn't update my understanding based on new information?
You're doing it again here with the passive voice. You weren't wrong, it was "Ockham's razor" and "those priors" that were wrong.
>Do you think I shouldn't update my understanding based on new information?
Your responses here show that you aren't actually doing that. You aren't taking any responsibility for your prior incorrect assumptions and therefore you are likely to continue making similar wrong assumptions in the future. How can you learn from this experience if you can't admit that you did anything wrong?
Yes, my speculation on incomplete information was wrong. That's obvious to anyone who can read. I haven't hidden it, I haven't said I was ever correct, and even in that thread I explicitly said there are two possibilities and here's the one I find more likely.
Yet you're acting like I kicked a puppy and need to apologize for my moral failings. Chill, it's not a big deal. I'll probably be wrong about something else in the future too. All I can do is update my understanding and try not to make the same mistakes going forward.
All I want from you is to...
>update my understanding and try not to make the same mistakes going forward.
The first step in that process is examining your prior mistakes so you know what not to repeat. Your comments have shown an unwillingness to do that work. You're treating this as a mistake that you just happened to fall into through no fault of your own and not a mistake caused by your own actions.
The outcome of this one event simply doesn't imply anything about the correctness of AlotOfReading's model. The model might actually be mistaken, but that's not an argument you've made.
How many times would you have to burn your hand on a hot stove before you can conclude that touching it will result in a burn?
Yes, that was exactly the point of my question. I was subtly accusing you of the same thing you are now overtly accusing me of doing. I was showing that we shouldn't look at everything through the lens of a probabilistic model.
The authenticity of the video was not a coin flip in which the results would be random within some sort of probabilistic distribution. We were not predicting a future event. We were observing and analyzing a past event. AlotOfReading didn't just come to the wrong conclusion. Their analysis of the evidence was flawed from the start and that is why I disagreed with them in that original thread before either of us knew the truth.
You comment was:
> What's the alternative here? A rapper went to the effort to publish an MV, then figured out how to display a fake disabled message in the vehicle, then faked a C&D, knowing that these actions would give Tesla a very legitimate claim against them?
> Ockham's razor is not favorable to the alternative.
I think the issue is that you greatly underestimated how far people are willing to go for likes. There are billions of people online, and while most would not bother to do what you said, some of them are indeed willing to go to incredible lengths for views. The YouTuber who intentionally crashed his plane, for example [1]. This stunt with the Cybertruck feels relatively low-effort by comparison.
Or as my favorite response to your comment summed it up:
> "You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?"
I don't typically like sarcasm in a thoughtful discussion, but in this case it felt warranted.
You also failed to apply Occam's razor to the other side, and consider the legal and reputational risks that Tesla would face by remotely disabling someone's car while they were driving on the expressway. Yes, Musk has done brash things before, which certainly increases the believability of this hoax. But this would be new ground even for Musk. And you have to weigh Musk's capacity for doing brash things against the entire internet's capacity for generating fake news and hoaxes.
You probably should have known better than try and apply Occam's razor to determine the likelihood that an instagram post is a hoax. There are just too many irrational people out there (and rational people acting in bad faith) for Occam's razor to be applicable. And the fact that you were able to overlook the overwhelming number of counterexamples to your application of Occam's razor suggests to me that there may have been some confirmation bias at play.
A lie is a lie, it does not matter how plausible it is. "No smoke without fire" is complete bullshit that leaves room only for cascading hatred.
In this case, there's definitive proof of it being a hoax, and news of it seems to be spreading. But how many more subtle falsehoods are being spread, ones that aren't as easily disproven? And how many perfectly plausible lies does it take for a narrative to become self-sustaining?
There is no shortage of real and verifiable things to be outraged about (Tesla-related or otherwise). Don't waste your headspace on anything less.
I think the “does not” stands out to me more than “can not”. I’d rather keep my dumb car knowing it can’t be disabled remotely at all without something like an emp.
Its just how it is.
(not singling Elon out, he's one of many)
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/kamala-harris-de...
Not to the stupid.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/03/media/elon-musk-x-kamala-harr...
There are to this day many people who honestly believe untruths because the media repeated lies and half truths loudly, followed by quiet retractions when they got caught.
- Jonathan Swift
I have adopted an extremely skeptical view of almost all content on the internet now. Fun videos that are staged aren't particularly harmful. Something like "a crazy coincidence or wild prank" made to look real and genuine is not particularly sinister. I personally have briefly put way to much stock in a screenshot of a Tweet from an unattributed anonymous poster alleging X happened. Simply because "it feels true" and confirms my bias. Be careful out there kids!
It felt good to martyr him and say that he was cancelled for saying truth to power against President Trump. The truth is that his show was losing $40 million a year and only had traction with viewers that were outside the target advertising demographics.
You want to be the admin for everyone else? Well you get the responsibility and emotional demands from everyone else too.