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Comment by keepamovin | Hacker News Reader

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I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.

Seems a bit of both. But no disparagement to your floor mopping (as I once was a dishwasher in a commercial kitchen myself), but there's a big gap between cleaning a floor, or a dish, and creating frontier models and spaceships.

That said: I think solar is niche, and a moon-shot for how they want it. Nuclear is the future of reliable energy for human civilization.

I think the K-scale is the wrong metric. I don't think we should be trying to take all the sun's energy as a goal (don't blot out the sun! don't hide it in a bushel!), or as a civilizational utiltiy - I'm sure better power supplies will come along.

Data centers ultimately need to provide power and remove heat. Solar might be a little easier for power in space, maybe, but heat is an absolute no-go, stop, this will never ever work. You can't engineer your way out of the fact that space is a vacuum.

if the thermal radiation panels have ~3 x the area of the solar panels, the temperature of the satellite can be contained to about 300 K (27 deg C). Ctrl+F:pyramid to find my calculations.

I looked, and you outlined a solution that would be hard to achieve in a vacuum chamber on earth. Now we're going to launch it into orbit and it will work great?

Building data centers in Antarctica with nuclear power would be easier. And still way harder than necessary.

Yes, how would you simulate a 4K background in a vacuum chamber on earth... or you could just trust a law that has withstood 150 years the test of time by physicists...

What have the engineers at XAI accomplished? From the ground level, it seems they followed the same research all the other LLM chatbot companies did. They followed along and made a sassy mecha hitler who makes revenge porn.

XAI isn't a serious venture.

So, the much lauded xAI is overhyped, underwhelming and ... kind of evil? In stark contrast to every other AI company, I suppose?

And people are using it for revenge porn? I haven't seen that. I've just seen that grok pioneered really good deep web search, is less woke than other LLMs and grok imagine has really good video generation and pretty good image gen. Plus the X timeline feed is really good!

> And people are using it for revenge porn? I haven't seen that.

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bont...

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/grok-says-safeguard...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/09/technology/grok-deepfakes...

https://www.vogue.com/article/grok-deepfakes-trend-essay

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/ai-grok-twitter-fake-im...

https://techpolicy.press/the-policy-implications-of-groks-ma...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/grok-s...

The French raided the X offices in Paris.

> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/03/french-he...

> It said the alleged offences it was investigating now included complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity.

Hey thanks. Yeah I really missed all that news. Head down in work the last few months. I appreciate the context.

There's no reason to think the brilliant minds at SpaceX are supportive of focusing their mission in any manner-what-so-ever on datacenters in space. You can't call on their genius as the supportive argument accordingly.

I disagree, I think the idea of a cabal of reactionary comrades inside SpaceX is activist fantasy. I think SpaceX only does what it does with full committment of its people: mind, body, spirit.

I think there's a scenario where that's true: one where the head of your company is collaborative and deferential to expertise.

There's another scenario, though: one where the head of your company is a bull in a China shop, whose successes have come almost exclusively through a Barnum-esque scheme of cascading bravado and marketing genius without much expertise, but a marvelous ability to sell any idea purely via unearned gravitas.

The former is less sexy: I've compiled loads of talented people, and we're going to solve very hard problems, even some that seem impossible.

The latter is very sexy: I'm a genius and we're going to accomplish the impossible in one year via sheer force of my grand will. And even if it doesn't actually happen, I'll sell you on the next vision.

It seems like you’re ascribing to Elon some kind of magic, where you feel he’s breaking the rules of what should be allowed in order to achieve success. Is it impossible you simply don’t understand how what he does works?

I think you may have misread my comment, because no.

So your hypothesis is Elon's domineering personality creates a culture of terrified silence where everybody wants to revolt but Elon is simply too powerful and they have no choice - and this extends to customers, sales and even technology - reality itself bends to the will of mighty Elon? And that's ... unfair?

I didn't say that, so ... no?

Ok, I'm sorry, I'll try again. Seems I've missed your point a few times now, may be projecting my own perspecitve there.

So...it's not that you don't understand how what Elon does works, you do understand it, and your descrpition of him is accurate, you just seem to think it's unfair that it does work? "unearned gravitas" "w/o much expertise" "sheer force of grand will"

So you're saying Elon isn't a deferential technically-talented leader, he's wilful and a marketer, who you feel constantly changes course, and so maybe the people who work for him are not as aligned as I believe with what he's doing?

spacex is one thing but xai accomplished what? the most racist csam prone llm?

I'm not aware of this - What's that?

Probably shouldn't speak to the brilliance of xAI engineers when you've never heard of their work

Is whatever that is their work?

Not just that, it's their one and only product, to my knowledge

Well, an LLM is a mirror, right? Maybe you were just using it wrong? Can you give any examples of what you used it for that led you to believe it's what you said?

I don't think your view is based on personal experience, but you get my, point, yes?

The feeling I get about you here is you simply dislike his companies and Musk and am enjoying seeing him get what he deserves, right? Which I think is the personal mirror of the "state feeling" behind the current official actions.

More broadly, your comments and many others like it in these threads, identify a narrow band of content with the product as a whole. And the implication being if you disagree with hatred against Musk / xAI, you must be a pervert. Which is intended as a reputational threat to intimidate people into not voicing support.

But if an LLM is used to create bad content by some, does that mean the only content it can create is bad? Does that mean that every user is using it to create bad content?

If xAI has a problem with bad content, they need better controls. I don't think these state efforts nor discourse are about the bad content. I think that issue is just a vector through which to assert pressure. I think it's because people in power want control over something that is, annoyingly to them, resisting control. And not in a way that's about "bad content", but in a way that's about inconvenient-to-them content.

I don't have an X account, so no, nothing I've said is based on personal experience. You should read the news. Google "XAI France"

Or just keep pretending I'm making things up, but I'm not.

My opinions here are not related to musk, except so far as he encouraged people to use his chatbot for disturbing, illegal ends

No, I know that. I wasn't actually implying you were personally across this. Just highlighting how personal experience differs. I don't think you're making it up, at all, I just think there's a larger story, and more nuance to the product overall.

Fair enough on your musk views - did he really encourage people to do disturbing stuff? Can you point to that? I have not seen it.

This vision doesn't come from those great engineers, but from Elon, the guy who promised Hyperloop, FSD in 2 years 10 years ago, and lots of other BS

When a cultist hits you with their side of, ahm, facts, it invariably ends up being some kind of a logical fallacy. Is there a name for this phenomenon?

In this case it is the "how we dare not trusting all the experts at spaceX."

But even the fallacy itself is applied incorrectly, as we hear zero from anyone else other than the cult leader himself.

So I am a cultist and Elon is cult leader? I think the problem with that is they actually create value in terms of products that work and sell. A cult leader would be more about rhetoric and less about results, I guess? Why does Elon make you so mad?

Nobody said you're a cultist, but do you really think Elon cares more about results than rhetoric?

Where are the Loops? The Hyperloops? The Roadster 2.0s? The full self driving from NYC to LA (due in 2017)? Mars?

Who said Elon made anyone mad?

Your comments are like 100% you projecting your imagination onto things people didn't say.

Oh I thought I was the cultist because my OG comment was saying how dare we not trust the xAI experts. Perhaps you were projecin on that?

I may have been projecting in my interpretations here - I have strong pre-existing beliefs/feelings about Elon being called meritless and claims he didn't "earn" his success. I might have a tendency to see things through that frame.

Tho, I'm quite sure somebody called me a cultist, hahaha. Seems tho I did not intend it, you ended up mad about this. I hope you feel better.

This place has derangement syndrome unfortunately. Such pessimists, it’s a bit sad

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