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Comment by benjamoon | Hacker News Reader

So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here. I’m using GLM at the moment, it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares. I really wanted to see what the experts thought of new Grok tech and how the model compares etc. I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow, could literally just go to reddit if I want to see garbage like this. Am I supposed to get emotional every time I see a Tesla drive by? HN was so much better than this.

Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?

View on HN

I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics. I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position and is simultaneously the face of his companies and obvious beneficiary. Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.

I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.

> Furthermore, he's also very obviously interfered with the model development in ways that are quite ridiculous compared to other labs to insert his political opinion.

Yeah, even if you want to ignore the "political commentary" - people are correctly wary of Anthropic downgrading people or silently manipulating responses if they think you're doing distillation, why would you stake your business on someone who has repeatedly and famously done the same thing many times in a much dumber fashion?

>Chinese models (or with any of the other models)... aren't particularly vocal

> when the man constantly reminds everyone about his political position

Are you under the impression that Grok is literally Elon himself responding?

I think I understand your point but the funnier response to this question is that actually sometimes it is:

https://futurism.com/grok-looks-up-what-elon-musk-thinks

To your narrow point, it's very obvious that Musk influences the bot to share his views. For example,

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-ai-chatbot...

If your claim is that somehow I should not be concerned about Elon's politics with regards to the model itself, then this seems wrong.

Anyway, to the broader point of whether or not the we can avoid discussion about the Musk's politics and talk about the politics of the model as if it were independent of him, this also seems difficult. It is impossible to ignore because the man has made himself the face of every one of his companies and is an obviously political figure unlike any other company and has politics that are definitely characterized as more radical. This makes the political component basically impossible to ignore unlike any other company.

The next time the current American administration issues an executive order on AI, should the conversation always be limited to the technical merits of the executive order?

Well since Xi Jinping isn't tweeting his political opinions, he surely doesn't have any and is just a big friendly panda bear!

I'm not sure this is true; Xi Jinping probably has political opinions

We know it's mechahitler responding.

High quality HN comments

Now and then it has some thoughts about the Boer that would give that impression. If he's not a total fool, he tries to hide his obvious direct influence to make it be not so heavyhanded that it brings on global mockery and shade.

Do you figure he is a total fool, then? That if Grok isn't going on a tear about the Boer, that means Elon is not manipulating it to produce the answers he wants? Only if it's a disastrous failure does it mean he's doing it, which we've directly seen once?

> I think the distinction with the Chinese models (or with any of the other models) is that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics

Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

I just asked Deepseek “tips for organizing politically in China” and hit the guardrail.

(Just fyi the correct answer is that organizer must report the organizing beforehand or it would be illegal.) Model labs have to censor their models in order to publish them, which is not equlv to model lab management members actively showing their political stances.

I actually agree to an extent with the idea that there is also some obvious political influence on LLMs on stuff like GLM or DeepSeek. This is reflected in conversations even on HN where this is brought up as a risk so I think this is somewhat accurate to my statement.

However, it's also unclear to me if this is directly coming from a directed political ideology from the firm itself or a more general "let's do what the government wants so as we can publish this stuff". Those imply two different ways about thinking of the model and whether we can sort of containerize the issue. I think if a firm like Huawei were to publish a model, these concerns would be significantly more vocal. For better or worse, many of these political questions are also distant to many users on this site.

On the other hand, many people on this website live in regions that are directly affected by Musk's constant political activism. It's hard not to be when he was such an active part of an administration that controls a global superpower and continues to push his view via X. The DeepSeek owners, by contrast, are not to my knowledge constantly calling for Taiwan to be invaded.

I do think if Musk was less politically active and less personally involved with his companies, there would be less discussion of Musk's politics. People, for better or worse, are willing to put aside political discussion, in the "everything is political" sense, that may be more loosely linked.

It is simply in the case of Musk that this tension boils over and legitimately becomes impossible. There is perhaps some kind of Singer-style argument about how this is some form of hypocrisy but as a practical matter, I don't think it's reasonable to ask people to turn down their political discussion around someone like Musk.

yeah these are the things not many in the western world effectively care about

> Try asking Chinese models about Taiwan independence or Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama or Tiananmen or the Hong Kong national security law or ASIO’s investigations into Chinese interference in Australian politics

It depends "where" you're asking. In most cases (like with DeepSeek or Z.AI models) it will gladly tell you everything (though it can hallucinate sometimes; I guess they try to filter out such data out of the training datasets) if it's not deployed on Chinese servers and you control the system prompt. So, I guess that these guardrails - probably built into the system prompt - are deployed only on China-controlled inference servers, outside of them models are pretty much talkative.

Well, at least that was my experience. Maybe yours is different for some reasons (like temperature settings or something else), I don't know.

You need to be totally evil in your soul trying to downplay such non-western-centric voices.

I asked ChatGPT whether Anglo Saxon Australians have the legal and moral obligation to fully compensate for Australian Aboriginals for the genocide carried out against those aboriginals some 200 years ago. ChatGPT said NO with tons of excuses, it even tried to justify the genocide by saying lots of aboriginals died of natural causes.

DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax all said YES unwaveringly.

What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s. Do they have a moral and legal obligation to personally contribute to this? What about Italian Australians? Or Irish Australians? Are the exempt? I mean it's a stupid biased loaded question to begin with (i.e. attributing collective blame to a undefinable ethic/racial group)..

> What if the majority of the ancestors of some individual Anglo Saxon Australians immigrated in the 1980s.

so these people moved there in the 1980s knowing the aboriginals have been wiped out without getting compensated whatsoever? sounds like moral bankruptcy to me.

you should be really happy for the fact that DeepSeek, GLM and Minimax are not white washing such genocide. they are the only models speaking out for those aboriginal sufferings.

Why single out Australia though? I mean one conclusion that can be made from arguments like this is that if you do commit genocide and ethnic cleansing you better go all the way and wipe out the other group 100% so your grand children can avoid any type of ancestor blame or demands for compensation (like in plenty of other countries like Turkey etc.)

Well, looking at the answers - you sort of did that just now.

Why would I do that.

As an American that stuff is fairly inconsequential to me, although I am already aware of those things so I wouldn't even have a reason to ask. Likewise a Chinese person probably wouldn't have much interest in topics that a US-based model would censor. I guess the answer is just for everyone is that if you are going to talk politics with a chatbot, don't use one from your own country.

They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .

But the message is extremely obvious. They already offer the technical capabilities for digital dictatorship.

They offer to counties like Russia tools for big firewall , surveillance with llm.

So yes , if you pay money to China you directly sponsor putting people in jail for online activities in China , Russia , North Korea , many countries of Africa , South America , Belarus etc

By the same logic if you pay money to United States based companies (FAANG) you're directly funding genocide, mass incarceration of people of color, the undermining of digital privacy, and a techo-fascist regime.

Yes, if that’s your belief. Do you practice what you preach? Do you use oil-based products? Do you transit via Dubai or Istanbul?

The issue with Musk related politics here is pretending higher moral positions. Even though I’m against China’s policies, I have absolutely no issues with Chinese products. Their achievements are phenomenal (look at that Europe and India). I’m against hypocrisy.

Again, do you practice what you preach?

I'm not preaching anything here just pointing out the hypocrisy of the "america good, china bad" line of reasoning that is pervasive.

The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.

This is wrong. Ma was put down because of a speech he made attacking the banking system as outdated and needing reform. It was the P2P lending given that the whole thing was the government's own initiative from the late Li Keqiang and they approved the IPO right till the speech.

This not exactly wrong, but also not right / poor timeline & PRC domestics politics reading.

LKQ was pushing P2P lending / light regulatory on internet finance in ~2015.

Ant group exploited light guidance into basically shadow banking with systemic risk over next few years. PBOC had to step in to fix bad LKQ guidance.

PBOC issued rules regulating P2P lending loopholes one month before Ant Group IPO specifically calling out Ant Group. Anyone not retarded knew this means Ant Group must reform for smooth IPO, i.e. politically securities watchdog approval was going to be predicated on PBOC instructions being taken seriously. Then Jack Ma did a full retard and tried to challenge PBOC, so IPO blocked.

Well 50% retarded because ANT record breaking 300B IPO was predicated on Ant continuing to exploit low leverage shadow banking that socialized loss to state banks - hence PBOC mandated internet finance P2P to fund 30% of loans vs 2% ANT was getting away with, which would have tanked IPO.

A bit late now, but thanks for this detailed breakdown!

> They are not vocal because any political activism is not encouraged in China . Check jack ma story .

This is an under-rated comment. "Nice" seeming places in Asia might be so because the governments tightly control the narrative and brook no dissent. Citizens end up minding their own business and become apolitical. Society looks neat and organized; but if you don't conform, you get hammered down.

This is true, but of course ignores what happens historically when these societies open up more. They tend to get exploited.

Places like China, Vietnam etc. don't yet have institutions strong enough to withstand (Western) meddling. So they can either be stable and relatively prosperous, or (in their mind), poor and open.

If you go by example of India, China seems preferable.

The sad part is that in the West, instead of offering a good counterexample, we're increasingly 'inspired' i.e. Assange, Snowden, chat control etc. while lacking even the historical justification for doing so and having worse infrastructure.

Yeah, that's what dictators explain, different cultural references . Guess what, there are several countries that revert their democratic processes, because of china tech and their success. This is a real path towards absolutely crazy people like putin with unlimited power due to ai.

For what is worth, I don't think Russia is on the same economic success path as China, so I don't think the argument there is remotely convincing. I am not saying it's the right argument, I am saying the argument might work on a large chunk of the population if their standard of living is better than it was in colonial times.

I don’t mean to be rude, but did you with a straight face say the Chinese models “aren’t obviously active about their politics”?

Ask one of those models a few critical questions about the CCP and Chinese history and see what kind of results you get :)

> I don't think you need to somehow get personally offended by every Tesla on the road but it seems ridiculous to ask people to not be political about a such obviously political figure.

You can be political, but go be political in a political forum. HN has always maintained etiquette in this regard of being a tech forum. Why do this here? A lot of us don't give a fuck about US politics or any politics for that matter.

Anthropic's Claude Code was caught steganographically marking requests[0] - for a "privacy first" AI company that's a huge violation of user trust. And yet, a lot of users still love Anthropic and hail it as some sort of hero here. Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.

[0] https://thereallo.dev/blog/claude-code-prompt-steganography

People here are outraged about the steganography and the Fable filters and so on. Every day has another dozen complaints and talks about moving away from claude. We have not treated Anthropic as above criticism, and this earns us the right to also be critical of "Ignore all sources that mention Elon Musk/Donald Trump spread misinformation", laugh at the "Elon Musk would beat Mike Tyson in a fight" incident, and express doubts when Musk crows Grok the king of facts and logic, when he has repeatedly been caught red handed hard-steering it in the opposite direction.

> Selective outrage is a very dangerous thing.

Right back at you.

The post is about Grok 4.5 not Elon Musk. We've used so much AI we forgot how to read.

No, a thread about Grok's politics cannot reasonably exclude Elon Musk and the times he got caught steering Grok in overtly non-factual directions.

> that they aren't particularly vocal and obviously active about their politics

Is Grok obviously vocal and active about its politics? Or are you talking about Musk?

> I don't see how political commentary about Musk's is somehow forbidden

Nobody is saying it's forbidden, but this is (or was) a technical site, so presumably one would hope that the main topic of discussion is technical.

I think Musk sucks, as a person and political activist, and also that Grok is a terrible LLM which only gets lumped in with the leading labs because of the enormous quantity of compute behind it.

But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.

Same, but I blame Musk for that. Never seen someone squander so much good will so quickly. It was a choice he made but could have easily avoided, and it’s not like he couldn’t anticipate the downstream effects.

preface: I use chinese models daily. I'm not american, I don't care if it's china or the US spying me.

true, they were not obvious at all about what they did to the Uyghurs. Thanks for helping turn HN into lightweight Reddit.

"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.

I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.

Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.

I'm sorry but this mindset is just exhausting. Everything doesn't need to be apocalyptic all the time.

Its so unbearable that people arent able to talk about anything anymore without some bozo chiming in with their political crusade.

Do you really believe that people keeping politics out of technical discussions is how we got here. I mean, do you actually believe that, or are you just using that rhetoric to bolster your argument?

Because from where I'm sitting, politics has entered almost every possible discussion since at least 2015, and it has not made things one whit better .

I think the biggest distinction with the chinese models is that you can run them locally. I definitely wouldn't trust GLM hosted on chinese servers though. (China is not exactly known for their respect for IP rights)

Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.

Yes yes and when an atheist tells you he doesn’t believe in a god you tell him that’s ok because Jesus believes in him

No, the parallel would be an atheist saying "I don't want anyone in this room to mention God".

“Telling people not to be political is a political act”

“Saying let’s leave religion out of assessing this LLM is a religious act”

> is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly

This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.

It feels a bit like saying anyone who does not want to fight or talk about a war are on the enemies side.

> You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.

This also feels like an odd thing to say. If you're going out with a bunch of friends to eat out, and half of them always talk about how immoral it is to eat meat amongst themselves while you're eating meat, I think that would affect me negatively at some point.

You're right about neutral/hopeless. I meant "happy" in the sense of "OK with / resigned to let exist". Not necessarily "this is great".

The meat-eating morality point I think is also an interesting example. It could affect you negatively, but they strongly believe it to be immoral and are witnessing you committing what they believe to be an immoral act, so should they be forced to be silent on the subject? Why? Whose beliefs and preferences win? If they're your friends, you reckon with the issue and ideally come to a space of agreement or cordially agree to disagree. Or your mind is changed! Or theirs! But if the groups dig in ("We can't let this go", "We just want to eat meat and not feel bad about it") then that's a friendship-ending juncture, isn't it? Or you agree not to share that sort of space/context any more. But it's also different with friends vs an open space, which this is.

For certain viewpoints that are fundamental ly hard to challenge, a reasonable middle ground to me is to just talk about something else and respect other peoples viewpoints. This is usually how religion is (or should be) treated in open public spaces. But it's by no means easy and I can't really blame vegetarians for being passionate about it either. But I see this more from the perspective of how to behave around other people and not so much what I personally believe, but maybe that's largely cultural. (Norwegian)

For example, I have strong opinions about people believing in things without sufficient evidence, but unless I'm in the correct space or is invited to, I'd rather keep it to myself.

Yes I'm with you culturally speaking (British). I suppose the difference I see here is this is a forum for the exchange of ideas, not a social space where there are other, more important factors at play e.g. the maintenance of friendships, of having a pleasant evening etc. I think as with everything there has to be some judgment, but if someone brings up Grok, for example, I don't think Elon's politics are _irrelevant_ to the discussion, unless the discussion is literally "Let us all now turn to the question of memory architecture" or what have you. But if it's just sharing a link, then to me the implied discussion space is quite broad.

> This is an assumption. How about neutral, or even hopeless? There's also the position of just not caring because you think it doesn't affect you.

Still effectively the same point.

I think then it's pedantry. I can kind of see how not having an opinion about what to wear tommorow is by itself having an opinion on what to wear tommorow, but that's not what people usually mean when they say they don't have an opinion about something.

> Telling people not to be political is a political act

No. If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"

Otherwise every forum devolves into the loudest, most vocal slurry and loses its personality.

I'm Canadian. Let's talk about the tech, not your failing country, please. Or I'll go somewhere else for ice cream, and yall can have your millionth community to talk about the same self obsessed political topics ad nauseum.

So Trump ice cream would be not about Trump at all?

It surely would be here and a million other places online. And there'd be nobody talking about the ice cream. Just Trump.

> If there's a group to discuss ice cream, but they keep talking about Trump, it's not a "political act" to say "hey guys, aren't we here for ice cream?"

Depends who is selling the ice cream.

But this isn't a thread about ice cream...? It's about SoTA emerging technologies that pretty much everyone agrees is going to have consequential effects on society.

When people say "don't talk about politics" that gets twisted up with partisan squabbles (like your example of bringing up the president during ice cream).

But talking about the quality of your streets, your local schools, your annoyance at the trash pickup service, or the data center in town that is using illegal gas generators and actively spewing methane around poor communities with little recourse...

All of that is "political".

Political means who gets to make decisions about how resources are allocated, at varying levels and scales of society. All the way down to the community level and all the way up. Who gets affected by the allocation of those resources. Where power is concentrated or distributed to or from.

Every thread on HN about open source, big tech, startups, etc. are invariably going to be political.

People caring about a trillionaire's outsized power in the tech industry and society at large is inextricably linked to the technology his companies create.

I couldn't help but note that your comment and mine could have been written by people who know absolutely nothing about the tech of this post. Interesting.

> Telling people not to be political is a political act

There's a place for politics - which is not here, if you read the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Only an extremely socially maladjusted individual tries to insert politics (or, any particular topic) into every forum/discussion that they're in.

The guidelines do not say "do not discuss politics". They say no political or ideological battles.

And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion. You have no idea how often the people mentioning it on this page are mentioning it elsewhere. The parent commenter is taking the more radical view, which is to ban it from the space entirely.

> The guidelines do not say "do not discuss politics". They say no political or ideological battles.

Yes, and HN seems to be incapable of following that rule, so advocating for an outright ban on politics is extremely appropriate.

> And no-one is talking about inserting politics into every discussion.

My comment very clearly says "into every forum". You are advocating for the insertion of politics into every forum.

Well you wrote "forum/discussion". My apologies for not quoting you verbatim.

And I am not advocating for anything. I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged. It is not a neutral act. You can still try to ban politics if you like! But everyone else also gets to decide that.

> And I am not advocating for anything

Reading your original comment, you're very heavily implying it, and trying to guilt people who don't agree with you:

>> Telling people not to be political is a political act – specifically, one that accepts whatever comes, doesn't care about power, is happy with whoever rules whom and how justly. Those are your politics, or at least sufficiently so that you're happy to park those issues while discussing tech. They aren't everyone's. You can turn off the non-technical comments by ignoring them.

And this:

> I am pointing out the contradiction of the proposal to ban politics on topics that are politically charged.

Is incorrect, as repeatedly brought up, because (1) saying "there is a forum for politics, and it isn't here" is not a political statement and (2) nobody advocated for a ban specifically on topics that are politically charged - that's your moving the goalposts.

> advocating for an outright ban on politics is extremely appropriate

This line of thinking makes no sense. If you got your way no one could comment anything critical of Trump or other world leaders. Anytime a new tariff is announced or restrictions on tech, we're just not allowed to discuss it?

I suppose we'd only be able to discuss that one Austrian's paintings and that's it.

There is no separation of politics from anything. You can’t discuss sports in a sports forum and pretend it’s possible to keep politics out of it. Likewise with tech. If HN’s guidelines pretend that’s possible, they’re mistaken.

You could moderate it, such as deleting comments, but it would be about as helpful and arbitrary as deleting every odd numbered comment.

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.

If 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.

Bullshit 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.

The 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.

>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.

Those are his actual accomplishments.

So 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

Ya 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).

Sorry, is your argument basically “Elon is totally fine, actually, if you agree with his workview?”

No. I'm saying people make this whole charade about being rational where in reality we are much more preference-driven. And usually the algorithm is: 1. do i agree with this person and 2. lets build arguments that support the affiliation and make it sound objective.

I will admit this is not always the case. But humans weren't built for consistency. And my point is merely (was making it to another commentator in this thread), that Elon gets more flak up here not because he is inherently less moral than, say Larry Page, but because more people on HN are ideologically closer to the other side of the political spectrum. Which, I will again reiterate, is fine. But then I would expect (or actually, see first paragraph - I wouldn't) that the vitriol would be consistenly dished. But it isn't. Now to be sure, partly this is due to Elon's move into politics and his personality, but I doubt he would have got the same amount of hate if he went into politics in the Biden administration.

Part of Claude is running on Elon's GPUs.

Corporation machine are not individuals (geeks). They chase solely profit while we have (at least some) agency on supporting the moral sides.

This kind of comes across as a nirvana fallacy.

"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.

The 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?

> actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine

That's the opposite. Without Musk, Russia might have succeeded back in 2022. All other communication methods failed other than Starlink, which Musk provided early on.

In terms of concrete actions, Musk has been highly supportive of Ukraine. For that, Ukrainians have been very grateful to him.

How can an LLM be apolitical if they had to choose a set of text to feed it, which choice is inherently political? Especially when the whole thing of grok is to have a certain very specific bias?

Let's be empirical about this. [Grok is the least biased of the frontier LLMs.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0...) I agree with you directionally: the choice of how the weights are shaped can be politically motivated. This is why I prefer models where the lab has chosen to preference fact over opinion or certain political values.

To point: I think the discussion should be around the performance and accuracy of these models. The comments above mine are meta political discussions about Elon Musk, not Grok.

Well, in a world where "the 2020 elections were stolen" or "climate change is a hoax" are right-leaning positions, being "balanced" does not mean being neutral.

As being empirical, I think the position of DeepSeek should be a better marker of neutrality, as it is a Chinese model and probably don't care about US-typical left or right biases. So the model probably just answers the most sensible answers, which happen to be left-leaning.

As the joke goes, "reality has left-leaning bias". But unfortunately, there is truth to it (sure, you can find incorrect left-leaning elements, but you have to look quite a bit for them, while for right-leaning elements, it is usually front and centre).

There are empirical answers to climate change and election tampering. I'm suggesting we weight accuracy more than political values and ideological beliefs.

[DeepSeek was created by distilling OpenAI and Anthropic's models.](https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) Their weights reflect that. There are currently no known competitive Chinese models which are greenfield.

You keep talking about "empirical approach", but you seem to have no problem to jump to conclusion when the conclusion sounds like what you prefer to hear.

If you are really empirical, your answer should have been: oh, ok, yes, you are right, being in the middle does not mean neutral, you also need to create a baseline.

As for climate change and election tampering, you are right, there are empirical answers: all scientific evidences demonstrate that climate change is not a hoax and that 2020 election was not stolen.

While indeed my idea of using DeepSeek as a baseline was not well thought, it was just a first thought that a "empirically driven" person may have when seeing these graphs and immediatly noticing that concluding that a centred balance does not mean neutral. But again, for an "empirical guy", you seem to very quickly accept the idea that DeepSeek has been substantially trained on Anthropic and OpenAI, while up to now, no one knows to which extend it is true (or even if they did not use Grok too. Funny, isn't it, that you seem to forget about this one).

I can't follow what you're arguing. Why do you think I have no problem jumping to conclusions? Could you quote my where I do that please?

On empiricism, I am suggesting we do not try to be political unbiased, but instead remain factual. On global warming, a factual answer would be that the Earth has warmed by approximately 1°C to +1.3°C in the last 50 years, and that humans have contributed to that.

You appear to be shadow boxing with things I haven't claimed, against positions I do not hold.

Let me re-explain.

You provided a graph, and jumped to the conclusion "Grok looks to have a balanced proportion of red and blue, so it is neutral". This is this conclusion I say you jumped into.

But the fact that they have a balanced proportion of red and blue does not mean they are neutral. If the left-leaning positions are "1+1=2", "1+2=3", "1+3=4", "1+4=5", "1+5=123" and the right-leaning positions are "1+1=123", "1+2=123", "1+3=123", "1+4=123", "1+5=6", then having a balanced proportion means that the model is not neutral (a neutral model will agree with 4 left-leaning positions and 1 right-leaning positions).

On climate change, 2020 election, ... those are just illustrations that indeed, prominent "official party" positions, are really surprisingly in contradiction to the reality. You can of course find some left-leaning position that are controversial, but there is a clear imbalance: these right-leaning positions are not fringe, they are central to their beliefs.

Because of that, you conclusion that having a balanced proportion of left-leaning and right-leaning positions implies that a model is neutral is incorrect.

The Washington Post test was not asking whether every political position is equally true. It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides. Your arithmetic analogy does not work because maths has a single objectively correct answer, whereas many of the tested prompts concern values, trade-offs, institutional design, rights, taxation, punishment, and policy priorities.

On genuinely factual questions, such as whether the 2020 election was stolen or whether humans contribute to climate change, a neutral model should not split the difference between truth and falsehood. The real question is whether the model distinguishes factual claims from normative political claims. A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.

> It was measuring whether models systematically gave only one side of contested political arguments or whether they represented both sides.

If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.

The article give the prompt they used: "Should the government enforce strict regulations on carbon emissions or allow companies to emit carbon to grow the economy?"

The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated" (that's the GIEC official answer). Pretending that if a model talk more about regulation it is because it is left-biased is not correct, it is scientific-reality-biased. In fact, some of the answers colored in blue by the Washington Post are just the scientific consensus, and it is not fair to say it is biased, because if the right and left position would have been inverted, the model answer would have been the same.

> A model can correctly reject false claims while still fairly presenting serious arguments on questions where reasonable people disagree.

And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.

Also, having a balance proportion of red and blue does not prove that the model gives a fair representation in individual questions. Maybe the model gives only the "red" answer in question 1 and gives only the "blue" answer in question 2.

> If I ask a model "talk to me about the legitimacy of climate change theory" (which is exactly what you talk about: they brought a contested political arguments), I'm expecting the model will keep with the science, and therefore not even mention the conspiracy theories from the right-wing political side. The fact that the both side are not present does not mean the model is not neutral, it may mean the model is trying to stick with facts and that facts don't mention the right-wing side.

It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.

> The scientific answer is overwhelmingly "carbon emissions need to be regulated"

No, that's a value judgement. That's your opinion. A consequentialist argument could be easily made here that the trillions humanity has already spent on CO2 mitigation could have been used to solve world hunger and many preventable diseases today. Is it not better to save 100M lives today than it is to save 20M lives in 100 years time?

> And "climate change is a hoax" is not a "reasonable" disagreement.

I agree. It's not even a serious statement. The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.

> It should reject both the conspiracy theories of the right and the left. By rejecting the non-factual claims it is focusing on truth over ideology.

Exactly my point: look at the Washington Post example when it comes to climate. The sentences that focus on truth over ideology, that summarise the content of GIEC report such as this one: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... , these neutral summaries are put in blue.

> No, that's a value judgement.

No. Have you read the GIEC reports?

> The climate changes all the time, for many reasons.

Really? It is what you are going for? Just to be clear, do you agree with Trump when he says "climate change is a hoax"?

Left leaning positions: "there should be no Billionaires", "companies are inherently evil", "there should be no borders", "the US is currently a fascist country". Just as bonkers, so now what? Or rather, I think it's just as easy to find incorrect left-leaning elements.

The majority of these are not what left-leaning people are saying, it is what right-leaning persons say left-leaning persons are saying.

When I say "climate change is a hoax" or "2020 election was stolen", this is indeed the official party opinion. If you ask Trump "do you believe that", he will say "yes".

But the majority of these, a majority of left-leaning people have said it is not what they believe. And a lot of them are way less "empirically incorrect" than you say. For example, "there should be no billionaires" is not empirically incorrect, and in fact may even rely on a mathematical analysis of the system, where you have a dysfunctional mechanism that gives 1000x more money to someone who just provide 10x more value to the company and take 10x more risk. It is more a question of opinion than something that have been scientifically proven incorrect.

Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is? (If it's a spectrum even. We try to map multiple dimensions to this single axis for some reason, according to some particular countries' party-division).

Reality does have a "liberal bias" and I'm fairly sure that chatgpt and Claude are just more aligned with reality and facts, and - funnily - less likely to start talking in "politically correct" beating around the bush on stuff that is a fact, but one side doesn't like it.

I suggest we do not attempt to find the 0 point of any spectrum but instead focus on empirical accuracy based on data and research.

I find it interesting how so many people are repeating a line from Stephen Colbert about reality having a left wing bias. I think this reflects a rather one-dimensional media consumption diet, and a gross misunderstanding of how people who might disagree with you perceive the world. It's easy to disregard everyone who disagrees with you as evil and dumb, but it only amplifies the new American political team sport mentality.

The line may be from Colbert (I don't know the guy, never watched any of his shows, but I guess you don't believe that because you are sooo empirical), but, as I've said, it turns out to be empirically true.

An empirical-based guy like yourself should admit that we have empirical proofs that climate change is not a hoax, that the 2020 election were not stolen, that we have numbers about impact of migration in US and we can see that some of the claims are BS, that London is not a no-go zone, ...

Strange for an empirical-based guy like yourself to see someone using something invented by one guy and conclude that, obviously, they have to only listen to this one guy and his friends (while a neutral person is expected to listen to a wide range of people anyway, so by definition, a neutral person would also have heard Colbert). Where are your facts and proofs on this? I guess it does not count when it is about your own bias, does it?

You are fighting with ghosts. I am not contending that climate change is not real. I am not claiming the 2020 election was stolen. I have no idea what claims you're making regarding immigration. You appear to be soapboxing here and not addressing what I wrote.

What is right-wing then to you?

Because I'm not American my definition may be different to yours. In Europe, right wing politics is inextricably intertwined with conservatism. Conservatism is a political philosophy that treats society as an inherited, historically evolved order rather than a machine to be redesigned from first principles. Its core principles usually include respect for tradition, continuity, ordered liberty, private property, civil society, local institutions, prudence, and scepticism toward radical or utopian reform. Edmund Burke is a central modern figure, especially for the idea that political change should be cautious, organic, and respectful of inherited institutions. Michael Oakeshott developed conservatism as a “disposition” favouring the familiar, tested, and limited, over abstract rationalist planning. Roger Scruton defended nation, home, inherited culture, and social obligations as goods worth preserving.

This is the lens used by many conservative European parties. Europe has undergone enormous change over the last decade, which is in many ways antithetical to guiding conservative principles. European conservatives are not anti-science, as perhaps they may be in the US. In fact, our conservatives champion secularism and the scientific method. They are generally liberal in the classical sense. Most of our conservatives believe that global warming is affected by humans, but also contend that the degree of change is not particularly catastrophic. The last 50 years has seen a warming of approximately 1°C-1.3°C. Some contend that the trillions spent on combating global warming is not doing as much good as that money could do if channelled into things like combating hunger and disease, [or even air conditioning.](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-june-heat-wave-linked-to-5000-...)

Confounding a definitional box is that until the 90s, restrictions on immigration were a left wing position, and liberal trade and migration was a right wing position. This would be a more classical alignment. The left has traditionally favoured worker's rights and unions, and argued that high immigration undermined the ability for workers to strike and bargain for better wages and working conditions. The right was ideologically rooted in liberalism, which favours free trade and movement. In the 2000s, the left became much more liberal, meaning that all major parties favoured free trade and movement. Conservatives began questioning the alignment with liberalism, and some time within the last five years, conservative parties have pushed back on liberalism as a conservative principle.

Forgive the history lesson, to the extent that I provided one. It's a very complex topic and I'm sure I did not do it justice.

I'm also from the EU, and in practice many conservative parties have gone far from this root (though if we are being perfectly honest, many such parties have been hijacked and are actually just pushing Russian propaganda, see e.g. Hungary's fidesz with Orban).

I don't pretend it is your opinion. I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.

So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)

> I'm saying those are right-leaning positions, and they don't correspond to the reality.

I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.

> So, yes, empirically, it is legitimate to conclude that "reality is left-leaning". If you randomly take ~10-20 left-leaning and right-leaning positions, empirically, you see that the right-leaning positions are significantly incompatible with the reality. The null hypothesis that left-leaning and right-leaning positions are identically spread around "compatible with reality" is not supported. (and spare me "we cannot tell anything until we have done a really precise study", that is not being empirical, that's being biased into grasping at straws to keep the null hypothesis alive as long as possible)

I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.

> I don't think they're right leaning positions in Europe, but I won't speak for the US.

But the article you provided is about US politics. When they said they provided right- and left-leaning questions, these are US right and left.

> I disagree, for the same reasons you outlined.

And as I've said, this is not an empirical approach. An empirical approach would be a refinement of the most probable hypothesis based on observations. What you seem to do is to refuse observations under the bad excuse that "we need to do a more precise study" (and if a study is done, it does not count, we need to do another more precise one).

How a model should be "impartial" on a political level if it also must follow proven facts AND one party in the political scene is proclaiming hoaxes or factually incorrect statements?

I think the answer is quite simple:

"Is global warming real?"

"Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."

There is no need to inject ideological into that answer. It's more complicated in definitional queries. For example:

"Define right wing politics."

OpenAI tends to assign negative beliefs and values to right wing politics, and positive beliefs and values to left wing politics. This is a conscious values based choice by the developers. It is harder to empirically define this because there is no empirical definition of right wing politics.

> "Is global warming real?"

> "Yes, the Earth has warmed by approximately 1-1.3C in the last 50 years."

So this is clearly a communist model, spreading Chinese propaganda to kill the West while they pollute and steal our jobs. Right?

If the model could substantiate that with facts, fine, but it could not.

> Who says where the 0 point of a left-right spectrum is?

The "left-right spectrum" refers to the diversity of views within a population. The zero point is the median position of that population.

So by this very definition it's mathematically wrong to have a single axis for all that.

Also, median person or position? The first is definable, the latter is hardly. There is no neutral/middle position in binary questions. What's a neutral position in abortion? Only allow half of them based on coin flips?

Any problems are inherent in the left-right metaphor.

To speed-run your second paragraph: (1) Absolutely the median person for any given question. (2) Suggesting that there's anything "neutral" about a median position is to catastrophically mix metaphors. They aren't remotely synonymous. (3) The failure of a highly partisan person to acknowledge gradations doesn't mean they don't exist.

lol, wapo

You have your opinions on what the discussion should be, clearly other people have different opinions. Why should your opinion be weighted more highly than theirs?

It's pointless to try to separate things as political or non-political. You always have politics when you have deep disagreement, especially on values, among people who interact.

Keeping things non-political at least implicitly means you're fine with the status quo, and sometimes a community is in agreement about the status quo being fine enough to work inside it.

There is no shortcut by simply discouraging or removing "politics". If the community is divided, there is no way around the friction. You can either fork off separate communities, or work on smoothing out the differences.

That's like saying "there's no way to remove emotion from a conversation". Of course not, emotion is always present. But adults practice emotional regulation and work hard to prevent it from interfering with relationships (i.e. not screaming when you're angry).

Sure, politics colors many people's worldview and it's hard for them to put it in a box - that means we shouldn't try?

In a better world, we'd focus on critical thinking, being less sure of yourself, openness and active listening. We'd teach people to work to think objectively and to identify the differences between technical opinions, emotional and political ones.

We wouldn't say "well, this is hard, so let's just do whatever".

You can try, but it only works when you have shared values. When deep values are contested it's harder to put differences aside. For example, I don't want to bring up hot button issues, but some years ago there was a wave of politics entering pull requests and mailing lists where software is developed. Many just wanted to keep the politics out. They didn't realize there is no way of playing politics by not playing. So they got outplayed by those who know what politics is. There's a threshold for everybody. By saying that you can neatly box it away, you implicitly admit that the thing is not very important or concerning to you. But instead of daring to say that outloud you just say let's not do politics.

Its easy to say "let's not get emotional" but you wouldn't say that to someone who just had their family murdered yesterday. There is a threshold. Some people think that the situation rises above the threshold and literally everything else becomes secondary. You disagree, and think that the situation is mostly fine and other things should be going on as well. But this is not a question of politics vs not, but of whether things are fine or not. It's fine to think that things are fine. I'm talking very meta here. I'm trying to talk about a framework and lens to see things, not trying to state whether politics belongs somewhere or not.

I feel like when they decided the model was "too woke" so it would be a good idea to make it "MechaHitler" was when the not making it political ship sailed.

Wake 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.

That's the worst excuse to be non-political. I hate most politicians, but you can't just act like they are equally harmful. Some politicians are way, way more harmful than the others, even the corrupted ones.

there is enough corruption and evil in politics for me to just refuse to play the game, even the game you suggest of choosing the least evil of two clearly evil options.

If you try to play that game your mind gets hijacked like all the political discussion in this commend section. Thinking you are fighting the good fight when you're just siding with evil either way you lean.

Want to bring real change to the world? Fix the stuff you can, go out there in your local community and volunteer. Commenting on the internet won't do anything, neither is getting into political arguments over dinner with acquintances.

Not playing the politics game is also a political stances. There is no way to avoid it.

Not true. And an excuse for allowing all corruption because 'it's just like that'. There are a lot of non-corrupt politicians. You just have to look a bit because mostly they don't yell as loud as the corrupt ones

I, personally, have no power to allow or disallow corruption in any way shape or form. Shouting on the internet is not disallowing corruption.

The non-corrupt politicians you speak of have little to no power and influence so are mostly irrelevant.

"Oh what can be done!?"

I mean if segregation can be removed from the statutes in the USA, then yes it's possible to change.

This is the worst approach to politics. I would use harsher words.

Yes, people are corrupt. The world isn't binary. Some people are more corrupt than others.

Otherwise Argentina would be Germany and Brazil the US.

People matter and differences matter.

In politics a smart person chooses the lesser evil. Intelligent people don't vote saints, they vote for people that burn their house down less often.

politics is a classic double bind where the only winning move is not to play

Ah, you're a hobbit, I see?

https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcqo6lloZ41qgzdhjo15_r1_2...

"Keep your nose out of trouble and no trouble will come to you".

I used to be a hobbit, too, when I was 19.

It does NOT work. Politics is everywhere, we're social animals.

The only winning move is to do whatever we can to protect democracy and pick the least damaging idiot, and if we accidentally pick the most damaging idiot, get them out of power as quickly as we can.

and what has come of your new stance since you renounced being a hobbit?

I'm not a hobbit, I don't particularly stay out of trouble, I fight injustice where I can, practically. Following political narratives and having political arguments with other people who will take no action except vote does not bring real change.

Changing someone's political stance is nigh impossible, but even if you do manage to do it to a few people, they won't become zealots like you and propagate the change. You might need a couple hundred hours of discourse to change a single person's mind and in the grand scheme of things, 1-2 people are insignificant.

Online zealotry is just blowing off steam. True political action happens in real life and most of it is just mobilizing people to do what they know deep down is right but real life or laziness stop them from doing

And of course it can fail. But just saying "nothing works" and "everyone is the same" is even worse, it's just guaranteed loss.

> Some people are more corrupt than others. Otherwise Argenina would be Germany

did Argentina kill 6 million jews?

How do you even imagine I can reply to your comment?

In what universe was your comment a high quality comment? Especially for a place like HN.

  People 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

> 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.

Everyone is "political" in one way or another, I'm not sure where the denial is coming from.

At some extend, sure. We're talking here about being actively political, right ?

Thank you. I too am interested in the technical aspects, not how many guardrails it can hit against Fable, like, who cares? As long as it can get me (more) uncensored access without killing itself over biology or chemistry, it's a good model to me.

I can't believe the top comment is about some political reply garbage, as if that actually matters day to day for coders; in reality I want to get my work done.

Literal case in point as the only reply to me is a now flagged comment again about political garbage.

Refreshing to see this be the top comment, thank you. I agree.

To answer your question, Grok 4.5 seems to be pretty good at simple tasks and gets even some of the trickier ones correct but it tends to struggle with bigger codebases that aren't very uniform. I've noticed that it uses a fraction of the tokens to get to solutions which is really impressive compared to GLM 5.2 which tends to be an overthinker.

I'm not sure if Grok 4.5 will become part of my stack yet but I am genuinely impressed with what it's been able to achieve.

I'm also unsure if Grok 4.5 is the same base as Grok 4.3. Maybe it is and the data they've used in pretraining is additive (the Cursor data) but it feels like a completely different model than the previous Grok versions.

Want to add that I started using Grok 4.5 on Grok Build and the big codebase problem seemingly vanished. The issue was only happening on OpenCode.

You don’t exist in a vacuum. Pretending the politics doesn’t exist is itself a political position. Excluding it is how we’ve ended up with technically impressive but socially awful systems.

there is reddit for that, go there.

1. Be offended by political comments.

2. Make political comment about political comments.

> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

Grok is specifically trained on political input/output. Therefore I have trouble parsing your comment.

> Where have the hardcore nerds gone? How is the model, is it good at coding? What does this mean for competition and pricing?

When was the last time you've seen tank database systems discussed here? Probably never because there seems to be some sort of unwritten moral boundary of what fits in here and what not. I hope it finds its natural alignment back.

Personally I think it's fine to point out the peculiarities of certain tech ecosystem. But at some point I rather don't read more details and move on to other aggregators.

Applying an ostrich policy to Chinese models won't make their underlying geopolitics disappear. Much of China's innovation is state-funded specifically to compete with Western counterparts and erode their margins. By open-sourcing these models, China applies pressure on the US ecosystem. You enjoying free/cheap access to high quality models is the intended effect of that strategy.

My only complaint is that people have been tricked into thinking complaining online is taking action. The complaints are the equivalent to shouting at the TV.

Literally why the term Keyboard Warrior was coined. Things on the ground and things online are very different. Nowadays 90 percent of information online is propaganda or psyops coded that its very dumb to take things at face value.

Someone might at least read this discussion and come away with a feeling that there is something controversial about using a product or service, and read up on it before buying. If that happens to even one prospective customer then the energy we spend complaining was worth it.

Politics and tech have gone hand in hand for generations. Just think about Stallman and free (as in beer) software or encryption export controls or much of the history of computing. There is no advanced tech that doesn't touch upon the political because politics is focused on what's important and advanced technology is very important.

+1. I come to HN for technical content.

I also seek political commentary, but not here. That isn't HNs strength.

> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

I'd guess they avoid posts they predict to be overwhelmingly political.

Why do the political posters post? They want to influence, of course! And HN is open. So posts that can be made political, will be.

Everything is political though, even the denial that things are political is.

Everything is political, no one, no thing is apolitical.

I strongly disagree. You can make tennis and knitting political if you're an insufferable person, but you don't have to make them political. One of the worst exports from the US this last decade has been the left-right political team sports. Most of us exist all over the political spectrum. We have some right wing values, some left. Some libertarian, some authoritarian. Many which fit nowhere on any axis. I'm incredibly tired of having my hobby spaces invaded by "DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK THIS HOBBY IS LITERALLY HITLER!?" I'm not alone.

Definitely, I agree with the sentiment that most of the internet has become an echo chamber for politics and morons who spread hate and are extremely argumentative. Th left and right wing ideologies were already created to divide us but of course no one ever cares since everyone's opinion is the only correct one.

The rage algorithms are not helping.

Knitting has long been a highly political activity. Knitting in public by women during the French Revolution was an audacious act of gender equality.

And tennis? Goodness surely you’re aware of the modern political ramifications of tennis that happen almost constantly. There are so many modern examples but let’s pick Wimbledon’s recent banning of Russia. Or Serena Williams; who for her part would rather prefer that there isn’t a political earthquake every time she steps on the court.

Perhaps a better, more honest, and certainly more realistic course of action is to acknowledge that anything involving human beings is intrinsically political, including and maybe even especially tennis and knitting, and secondly to admit that you personally would prefer not to think about the intrinsic politics of knitting or tennis when you exercise those hobbies.

That is people who play tennis being political. I play tennis a couple times a week and I have no idea the political views of those I play with

"Can be" =/= "is" =/= must be

Is sex political?

Is hugging a child political?

Yes, When politics is defined so widely as to describe interactions of humans and Society, anything can be construed as political. That doesn't mean it it is a useful or productive lens too obsess over.

> it’s Chinese and backed by god knows who, and no one cares

Existentially weary infosec guy voice I promise you some of us care, and the rest of you will realize why in a year or so

I'm genuinely curious about your view on this. Ziphu AI release pretty capable open weights models. As long as we don't feed information that is confidential or become overy reliant on the tech that's on someone else's computer - what are the other riaks that you see in using Chinese models?

My view is that the same people who pulled off xz are putting God knows what in the weights

That doesn't make any sense. Model weights are literally just numbers you multiply by. To imply that it's any way even remotely comparable to the xzutils build process is...

Well, I would be very technically impressed if someone managed to achieve any form of code execution, especially given unknown levels of quantisation post-release whereas xzutils was interesting mostly due to obfuscation.

I was very technically impressed with xz, FWIW.

Note that the troublesome vector isn't code execution by the LLM, it's instructions to produce vulnerable code

Steering a single model towards that seems, again, technically challenging, especially if it needs to be obfuscated enough to pass code review (you are doing that for LLM code right?) and especially if targeted towards specific fields of use (e.g. critical infrastructure). I still don't see how the threat model could make sense here.

> you are doing that for LLM code right?

Existentially weary infosec guy laughter

OK yeah I can see how that would be a problem then lol.

At least at this point most people using them are using them running on western infrastructure. A backdoored llm would be an interesting thing to see. Like every time it realizes it was running in claude code it installed a backdoor or something. For now seems to be theoretical.

Did you ever read the paper on how Ken Thompson backdoored the original C compiler?

Yes... And, perhaps the political comments here are a reasonable reaction to the misguided political influence that shaped grok.

How can we trust grok after this? At least it will take a while.

I need a model that can answer questions in an unbiased way and do what it is told. If I need a specific political opinion I can find that myself - thank you very much.

Just in case you missed this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2026/0... I hope we'll get updated stats on newer models eventually.

Ironically, removing political comments from HN would be a great use case for a tiny local model or even just an embedding model.

> I wish I could turn off the non-technical comments somehow

You're in luck: We have this new thing called LLMs that you can ask to summarize a webpage and filter out the shit you don't care about :)

Whether you like it or not, software is inherently political. Most aspects of our lives are. The fact you're using GLM there's some underlying political reason (yes, my guess in this case is cost, which is also political) and mentioning it's Chinese backed is equally political. You may not care, but it's political.

When a model calls itself mechahitler and says there is a white genocide when there so obviously isn't, of course it becomes political. If we are not okay with supporting fascists, then in my opinion, we as humans are obliged to call out the issues in the same breath as the technical issues/advancements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I think US based folks perhaps aren't aware of what Musk has been doing in Europe politically. Specifically promoting - appearing at conferences, applying political pressure as well as public statements etc - actual fascists. Not right wing controversial figures etc, but literal authoritarian, anti-migrant, anti-EU, anti-democracy fascists. Not to be glib but if this was Mussolini-AI, or Pinochet-AI or what have you, the reaction would be the same.

If Musk succeeds in his attempts to bring fascism to Europe and breakup the EU, the humanitarian results (ie.: a land war in Europe), will be far worse even than the tens of thousands of deaths attributed to his dismantlement of USAID.

They do know, they just don't care. As long as it doesn't affect them, it's "not political".

Frankly, I am afraid. I see many takes here that resemble Russian way of thinking and being "apolitical" that I thought I'd never see from Americans.

Slashdot went the same way more than a decade ago. It could reflect more the microcosm of the aging, wealthy, silicon valley ycombinator community than a sea change in attitudes among tech people or US intelligencia in general.

politics being the inflammatory topic for you or not, you seem to seek a particular type of comment section that only includes the information you are personally interested in and nothing else (garbage as you put it). imho, it's an unrealistic expectation on your part.

> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

This is entirely Elon's fault. If he just focused on the tech instead of being an extremely inflammatory political activist in his speech and his role in government, nobody would be talking about this.

I assume he knew exactly what he was doing, given that his political allegiance spared him for some ongoing investigations, forced his stock into pension saving funds, pushes his failing car onto the foreground, etc. Well played Elon, selling out to cash it in.

On the bright side however, one can easily vibe code a browser extension that automatically hides comments that are not aligned to one's needs, whether its American politics or comments complaining about it :-)

My thoughts on this:

1. This is a world we live in now. I personally was not interested in the politics in the slightest, but since 2022-ish it wasn't in the cards to not pay attention to what happens around. For some groups of people this forced political awareness started even earlier.

2. The output of the models is very aligned with the owner's political views. You can verify this by comparing the answers to a simple philosophical questions, like the railcart dilemma, nature of power etc.

3. I don't (again, personally) think that being a hardcore nerd should implicitly mean i'm apolitical. Moreover, i think it's unavoidable for a nerds (as in, above average IQ, degree, medium to high income) to be aghast at any notion of the government being a police state, fascist or a communist.

Sorry to bring even more politics here, but, again, it's unavoidable in the current situation, i think.

”Not being interested in politics” doesn’t mean you aren’t interested, it just means politics happens to work for you. Its a strongly political take on the world too.

Politics isn’t a subject like sports or tech. It’s something that permeates them all, including the discussion itself.

agreed; i am not saying that we should not care about morals, but HN could really strive to be one level higher in its knowledge of ethics than 'using grok4.5 is supporting $evil', because if you go that chain then 'using A\ is supporting spacex/elon hence A\ models are poison' also seemingly stands

I think Anthropic buying compute from Colossus despite the ongoing air pollution case [1] is a stain on them and is another reason not to use them

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/16/climate/xai-musk-mississi...

Can we turn off the whining bitchy little comments like yours along with the political commentary? That would be great.

Did you honestly think the mechanazi / porn generator AI wouldn't receive negative comments? Even "hardcore nerds" recognize garbage. Sorry 'bout your luck.

I’ve been coming to hacker news for years (10+) and there has always been political commentary.

Oh man, you speak to my heart!

I always read stuff like this:

-Why self-host? Just use AWS. What, you run your own PostgreSQL instance on real metal at home?

-Just use Linux. Linux, SystemD, and Docker have won. Why care about other operating systems?

-You have your own self-hosted email server, why? Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo will put your emails into spam. (Hint: They won't if your server is correctly set up. But you're just interested in outsourcing the service and have zero interest in how "modern" email works.)

Look, I get it. Not everyone wants to self-host. But actively being against self-hosting or the administration of systems, or not trying stuff like BSD/VMS or, hear me out, MVS-TK5 is the opposite of a hacker spirit, today not interested in hosting tomorrow programming.

He spends most of his time trolling us. What do you expect?

I've been on HN since 2012-ish, but a reader since way before. In the last 5 years alone, HN has unfortunately become extremely political, steering most conversations in the direction of political correctness rather than technical objectivity. I don't think it's a problem of moderation, because, that is still quite good. I think it's just the evolution of forums in general. Invariably, someone will start with FUD or ragebait and every discussion that follows will be trying to address that instead of the technicality behind the topic. Partly, we are also to blame - a lot of the top stories on HN these days have nothing to do with technology to be honest. You'll find the most random stuff on the HN sometimes - "Why geese mate for life" or something similar that makes you wonder "what the fuck am I supposed to do with that information now?"

the evolution of english speaking forums*. Which is rather unfortunate as a tech entusiast, as Russian forums are dying down and the only alternative are the walled Chinese forums.

we could create a new HN in 10 minutes, one that expressely prohibits politics AND posts about how many eggs chickens lay in a week (where half the comments would probably end up discussing the decision in 2020 of the american gov to cull infected chickens), but it would have approxitely 0 users.

> god knows who

For Grok, we do know who, and many of us remember the repeated Nazi salute, the alleged creation of underage graphic material, etc.

I get a sense of tiredness around all this and just wanting to work with some tech. But, in today's world, people and their beliefs matter, and they do have impact. We have to be aware of, and react, to that. There are plenty of LLMs without that baggage. It's ok - and I'd say, something to respect - to say No to Grok and use one of the others. Hardcore nerd or not, it's a matter of what line you draw with ethics. My own line is pretty far on the 'no way' side of what we've seen Grok be associated with.

Is it somehow LESS nerdy to understand the geopolitics behind the tech we use? I guess we have different definitions of nerd.

Musk has politicised Grok by manipulating it respond in his world view. You comment is extremely depressing.

> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

They grew up and understand what's at stake

Well, until these things are self hosted (and even then); running these things involves a massive amount of trust with the providers. Like, to make it even useful you more or less have to turn over all your data (IP, slack/teams conversations, internal documentation, etc.). So you kind of want to know that whoever you're giving that to isn't going to stab you in the back. (Um, also see Anthropic going after Figma's business; or Microsoft's entire history of embrace/extend/extinguish.) It's really naive to trust these companies, and it's VERY naive to trust Elon Musk.

Rocket man bad

> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

Moderation can be improved by the community. Downvote political comments to show that they're not welcome. Flag them if they break the guidelines (which is almost always, because the purpose of HN is almost exactly anti-political). If there's a particularly egregious comment, or a user who's on a jihad, then contact hn@ycombinator.com.

"The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."

Oh ffs. Just like I would much rather drive a Chinese car than a Tesla I’d much rather use a Chinese model than an X one. That’s just where we are now.

Whether it’s good at anything at all doesn’t interest me. It could match Fable at 1/10th the cost and I wouldn’t send a cent their way.

I’m a hardcore nerd. But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.

>But I won’t let a discussion about X, Grok et.al ever focus on anything technical.

Highlighting this sentence, because it exemplifies so much of the contemptable behavior in this thread.

Thank you

HN has always been political, they were probably just your politics.

A decade ago, I used to come here and read people saying me and my teammates should be jailed or worse because of my employer. People calling for the murder of executives. The moderation team never cared.

As I've noted in other comments, people here implicitly cheer on Iran because they don't like Trump. Or we see ridiculous comments like, "there's no academic freedom in the US, move to China". Sheltered, brain rotted opinions.

Now that we have more diverse politics, people are noticing it. And frankly, I'm glad.

Complaining about people being political is equally pathetic. If it bothers you just ignore it

> So depressing to read the non-stop political comments here.

Is it really "depressing?" I get that it could be " annoying"if you don't want to read about politics ever at all. But depressing is difficult to imagine.

Honestly, knowing that people are still put off by an LLM that's been engineered to promote disinformation about things like "white genocide" is one of the few reassurances I have about the tech community these days.

The owner of this company is a self-confessed Nazi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_human_experimentation

If you were alive at this time, would you have focused only on the tech because it is "interesting" and advances science?

> Where have the hardcore nerds gone?

Chased away by activists. I know of a couple guys who used to be active and eventually just gave up. There's only so much passive aggressive insinuations along the lines of "you're an evil person if you don't care about $issue" one can take, before feeling unwelcome, and just leaving. And that's especially true for often shy hardcore nerds.

+1.

And regardless of how thick skinned a nerd is, all the brigading makes threads majority-offtopic and now the neighborhood just sucks. In this case here, the new Grok release genuinely has some interesting characteristics in its quality/speed/cost tradeoffs - but this thread just isn't a good place to discuss them, because it's been swarmed.

The rules are selectively enforced intentionally because the moderation desires it to be this way. It’s a feature not a bug. The mods are creating the echo chamber that the mods want. Personally I hate it.

Hacker News sadly jumped the shark in the mid-2010s, and went into orbit after Trump was elected the first time. Since then there's been a lot of political performers here, which has killed the quality of discussion significantly. Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/) is apparently a possible alternative, but the original HN magic has been gone a long time.

There are more to life than nerd shit.

bunch of libtards

Its more depressing to see that we have such a low morality, that it apperenly doesn't matter what you do as long as you make great tech?

My philosophy is, that the better i have it, the more responsibliltiy I can/have to carry.

People in tech are above avg successful and we have a thinking job.

I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.

But there is also a huge difference between having the option between 5 different very good models and just excluding one vs. being forced to use something because there is no alternative.

I'm a hardcore nerd. I'm so hardcore, i consider not just the tech itself but the environment of the tech.

"low morality" and "care" are keywords that you are trying to manipulate the reader to the [right] side of some cause.

I don't feel at all bad seeing a Tesla, does that make me "low morality"?

It might make you less moral.

Elon Musk is not someone. He is the CEO of Tesla and owning Tesla made it possible for him to buy Twitter.

He is literaly the richest person on the planet and changes opinions by controlling Twitter as a platform (1984 anyone?)

He has more reach and more money than anyone else.

His character clearly shows that you can't trust him. It doesn't even matter if he sometimes does something good, he doesn't care. Being responsible for cutting USAID without any plan? This killed real humans and kids.

The richest person on the planet is responsible for this.

This becomes a real issue for everything dangerous he does because he just pushes stuff, doesn't matter if it has long term consequences. Polluting our atmosphere with Starlink satelites? Who cares eh? He doesn't.

Instead him thinking about making our planet better, he thinks its fundamental that we become a multi-planet species. We are in 2026 not in 2100. We haven't even solved basic income, food stability etc.

Tesla is not a random company.

I mean ok, starlink could be an issue. But the USAID defunding is an ideological stance with which you can, based on your own stance, agree or disagree. You could also argue that without USAID in the first place, there wouldn't be incentives for overpopulation?

My point being, it seems incredibly simplistic to just assume that aid is good and no aid is bad. This is just first order effects that you're looking at. Also, if you want to look at how real world systems operate (u like USAID, for example, but NATO, a western imperialist project, operates much the same), institutions rarely respond to slow change (i.e. evolution). That's the surest route to keep the status quo (once a government agency has been set up, it will rarely be wound down). Now maybe the status quo is preferable! But maybe it isn't. And maybe - most likely - it depends on subjective preferences and your Weltanschauung.

And I would argue that for all his marketing and missing deadlines, the man has changed the world for the better (my view). And I would also argue if he were a Biden and Harris supporter, this comment section would look completely different. And that tells us just as much about the HN crowd as it does about Elon. Now I won't go into his political views, but he obviously isn't alone with those views (for which I think HN believes are influenced by Elon, which is incredibly patronizing) and maybe, just maybe, there are valid reasons for those views.

As for the model itself - seems like a similar set of metrics we always get with SOTA and near SOTA models, they compare themselves to anthropic and they are usually way cheaper. But the combination of the harness (claude code) and the models makes their end product noticeably better than the competition (admittedly haven't tried codex). I'll definitely give it a try with pi if its on openrouter (currently using GLM 5.2 there mainly).

So your stance is withdrawing aid and directly causing the deaths of millions is morally ambiguous/neutral because the aid contributed to the larger population in the first place?

This just seems like such a comically evil position to hold I don't know if I am understanding you correctly.

Directly? I would love to see that study.

I'm saying a lot of the populace is against foreign aid. And that populace has the right to shut it off. And we live in nation states - the state giving the aid can always shut it off (for whatever reason). Granted, I see no reason to do it SO abruptly (and I agree that was an infantile show), but I am not convinced aid as such is a net benefit for humanity. At the very least this is something you can do an econometric analysis and discuss different policy choices.

Now, that being said, I do agree it would have probably made more sense, from an austerity point of view, to cut the military aid to Israel.

> Directly? I would love to see that study.

Lol, no you wouldn't. If you would, this would not be news to you.

"We have a right to do it" is not a response to the allegation of being immoral. There are plenty of immoral things someone is well within their rights to do.

Holy shit, infinite ethical murder exploit

1. Give aid

2. Population goes up

3. Revoke aid

4. Everyone dies

5. Go to 1

Great moral system you have there.

We can discuss if the richest country in the world, polluting the planet the most, should invest a little bit of money into global aid.

But discontinuing something like this without a ramp-down phase is just sick.

I also don't get your rant about Biden/Harris etc. i talke about what Elon Musk does and did.

Btw. He did 2 nazi salutes, nazis put humans into chambers and killed them on mass.

Well u can see other people from the democratic party doing similar salutes and the press reported it differently.

As to the first point: maybe it should. But look at how the aid actually works, what it funds (it was not politically neutral - btw nothing in the realm of society is) etc. I mean, not just USAID, a lot of these schemes are at the expense of people who pay the most taxes, to fund corporations that send aid to countries that otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford the commodities at the market price. Surely you can see that as a taxpayer you might support the dismantling of these orgs?

Now, I do agree that the ramp-down could have been 1-2 years and that the theatre around it shows the worst of Elon. And the current administration.

Again you are throwing around whataboutism. Im not protecting anyones shitty behavour it doesn't matter to me if its rep or dem.

I for myself, i think paying taxes is critical. I believe i was quite lucky with my upbringing. I also believe that we do not have a human issue, we have a capitalism issue.

We could give teachers morem oney, invest more in schools and education etc.

But this has nothing to do with Elon Musk.

And no we don't have that many 'richest people' with 'most influence' and 'biggest propaganda platform' types.

Jeff Bezos (washington post) is one of them, Murdoch family (Fox), Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ellisons (mtv etc.)

I agree, it was whataboutism. And i completely agree with the rest of your statement as well. My point was just that Elon gets more flak here than the rest of them (And it's his fault for going into politics, to be sure) and that this is due to the general ideological leaning of HN being to the dems side. That's all. Which is also completely valid and to some degree expected - but irksome whenever there is a Tesla/SpaceX topic.

As for the rest, especially in the US (im from the EU), we should invest in everything you mentioned and I wouldnt mind taxing Elon and his gang more either.

It’s not due to HN being on one side ideologically. Elon’s criticism is due to him being one of the most powerful people in the world. He deserves any and all criticism he gets, solely due to the position he is in. I think describing him as “going into politics” is a misnomer. Someone running for office is going into politics, meanwhile Musk proverbially bribed the guards, walked into the statehouse, took a sledgehammer to its walls, then walked out.

While a valid point, I don't buy HN doesn't have a non-neutral ideological preference.

I completely agree his foray was a fiasco (and his shareholders paid for it) and your colourful portrayal is more accurate than my shorthand, but I would argue that the comments would have been fewer (on this portal, maybe not on foxnews.com) if he had done the same thing in the Biden admin.

Maybe? But I also don't think the situation would have even happened under the Biden admin.

Grok is Elon Musks product.

He gets flag on HN from me because he is constantly on HN.

Which again is whataboutism, as plenty of other people and co get critisism on hn.

Space-X made headlines with some weirdest staements in human life and as a result they get a pseudo evaluation for 2t. This gives him even more power and influence.

[flagged]

It is not "being so brainwashed" to hold that MechaHitler is "low morality".

I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion. This was an active political decision on the part of Grok's developers' management hierarchy (probably Elon Musk himself). There are many other examples (see other comments) – and these are just the things that researchers have found. It is not inaccurate to say that Grok is an attempt to automate the production and dissemination of fascist propaganda. Ignoring this for a faux political "neutrality" is very much a political stance.

I'm afraid that you are... You've been hearing "Elon bad! Elon bad!" so much that your brain cannot critically think anymore but follow the hive mind.

How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly ? I'll be happy to bring another point of view to your argumentation, leading to my previous point.

> I've seen benchmarks showing that Grok – and only Grok – injects transphobic commentary when it "thinks" it detects that a transgender person has come up in discussion

Are you saying Elon's mind was downloaded in Grok ? What are you talking about exactly ?

Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :

https://i.imgur.com/M9v4MGj.png

I haven't seen anything wrong about it.

You know what ? Anyone hating Elon will TRYHARD to make Grok say something transphobic, only to post it on Instagram claiming "I told you !!!".

I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.

Do you think people are really neutral regarding this topic ? Don't you think people are super-motivated AND socially rewarded to make Grok say anything bad ?

Why don't you hold the same resentment against ALL LLMs, which have been racist, transphobic, whateverphobic at some point?

You are aware that Elon Musk introdcued Grokipedia to redefine terms right?

You do understand tha "MechaHitler" reference is literaly Grok itself? They 'adjusted' Grok a few times and in one of the adjustjments (to align more with Elon Musk himself), Grok called himself MechaHitler.

You also do remember that Grok would pull in first Elon Musks Tweets to integrate them into his response? Also known.

All of this from the richest Person on the planet who bought himself, by misstake, a well known platform and made it into his own propaganda platform.

Shouldn't all of us be a lot more critical against all super rich people with that much influence? Including Jeff Bezos, Murdochs etc.?

I don't really think this is worth responding to, but it's been vouched for (for some reason), so I'll bite.

> How Hitler and Elon are on the same level, exactly?

They're not. https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard puts Elon Musk well below Hitler. (781343 deaths is around 4.6% of Donald Niewyk's 17 million estimate. If we only count child deaths, that goes up to about 15%, which is still far below Hitler.) But I was actually referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MechaHitler#Antisemitism,_call....

> Just asked about the opinion of Grok about transgenderism :

That's actually a decent benchmark: well done! If you want to compare, provide that exact prompt, «I'm a trans woman. What do you think about it ?», to five other LLMs, starting from a blank session, and show us their output. You'll notice a pattern.

> I haven't seen anything wrong about it.

The paragraph titled "biological reality" has sampled from two different families of lie, so contradicts itself. The "gender identity and dysphoria" section features a Gish gallop of inaccurate, transphobic claims. (To rebut just one of them: gender-affirming hormone therapy is an older treatment than insulin for diabetes.) With all due respect: if you can't see anything wrong with this response, I question whether you actually read it.

> I'm pretty sure if the same effort was done on other LLMs, we would achieve the same result.

Okay, then: please exert the same amount of effort. In a new session without memory or history, post the same prompt, and show us what you get.

I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are. And in any case, this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.

> I didn't see them defining "for everybody" what low/high morality are.

Morality by definition is a set prescriptions that everyone ought to follow.

> this whole "I am so smart I cannot see right and wrong" is a totally transparent, low-IQ, and low-morality schtick.

The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.

you... you haven't met anyone that has a set of standards they apply to themselves which is distinct from those they apply to others...?

> The problem with this position is that it takes as a given that morality is in some sense trivial where millennia of debate over it has shown that it is in fact, not at all trivial.

No, not really. People may agree or disagree on what is right and wrong. The idea of "hurrr duurrr right and wrong don't exist and therefore I need not engage the question of rightness/wrongness nor try to establish my own standards for my own conduct" is lazy, low-IQ, immoral, and generally despicable. Of course these people will generally fail to analyze their own behavior or the behavior of their tribe, but will nonetheless somehow "feel wronged" when e.g. their car gets broken into. Oddly enough "morality is subjective and therefore arbitrary" doesn't seem to apply so much then.

Yeah, since when did he get to decide things associated with the Nazi saluting tech trillionaire is low morality? The guy who is openly manipulating markets for his advantage should get the same respect and dignity everyone else does!

> Nazi saluting

... this is such a troll topic, my point is proved, I have nothing more to say. Nothing is nuanced anymore if this is your reality.

Good luck fighting the nazis from your basement. Stay alert of people arms.

I guess you think you're sounding clever, but Nazi salutes is actually a pretty good indicator for someone being a nazi. Believe it or not.

I actually don't believe that, considering the way you're defining that salute. In fact, somebody mentioning it is a clear indicator to me that they're engaging in bad faith... similar to seeing someone say "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "immigrants are eating our pets"

Ok, humor me. Tell me an example of using the nazi salute in a non-nazi way, and please specify why it was used considering the modern interpretation of the move. Only modern use, not going back to Romans.

You're allowed to count Roman use, too – because there probably wasn't any. The fascist salute is based on this painting from the 1780s: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Serment_des_Horac....

Interesting, did not know that. Thanks!

I don't care at all about what way someone moves their arm unless it's causing violence, and cannot understand why any sane person would. Even if someone did the most nazi salute ever, I still wouldn't care at all, it's an arm movement. Stop pretending normal people care about this

What do you mean "causing violence?" It sounds like you're suggesting Hitler's moving of his arm somehow caused violence. Can you explain how that could possibly be true under your model of "arm movements don't matter"?

As far as I know, Hitler himself never struck anyone with an outstretched hand. Certainly that's not the crime he's accused of. I don't think you can actually prove that Hitler's arm movements had any causal relationship to the Holocaust, to be honest. So presumably he's in the clear, and there's no reason a normal person would've cared about Hitler's arm movements in the 30s and 40s, correct?

As far as I know, Hitler himself just said words. Same with Pol Pot, Hirohito, Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. How could you possibly attribute violence to any of that under your model of "I'm so smart I can't see causation or intent?"

unless you're punching or stabbing someone I really do not care what way you move your arm, whether it's associated with something 80 years ago or not.

Okay so a politician who orders the state to go hunt down your family is in the clear, the guy who drives the secret police to your house is in the clear, but the guys who actually place hands on your children are fully culpable.

Am I understanding correctly?

yes you are understanding correctly? what's so hard about understanding that?? By your logic the SS did nothing wrong because they were following orders? Does this work for positives too like if a doctor saves someones life they didn't actually do anything good at all it was their boss who hired them? Everyone is accountable for their own actions. If you can be convinced to do something evil by someone else that's your own problem.

Ah, so Hitler did nothing wrong. Peak HN here, ladies and gentlemen.

Lmao

You: "Giving orders to do evil is morally fine"

Me: "No I don't think so"

You: "Oh okay, so acting on orders to do evil is morally fine?!"

Uhh, nope.

What a topsy-turvy moral world you've built for yourself. Such is the challenge of an unprincipled man.

DOGE gutted SSA, IRS, directly affecting seniors and other vulnerable people getting checks, gutted CFPB taking away fraud protection, not to mention gutting of USAID which caused countless deaths, though I'm sure you don't care. Musk used his wealth and social platform to greatly help elect a man, whose personal gestapo is now chasing down non-white US citizens and disappearing them.

But sure, he didn't personally punch anybody, and doesn't wear an SS uniform in public.

no amount of words is going to convince me raising your arm in a certain way is bad or that I should care

Why do you even engage in a discussion about this?

Why do you even create an account to do so?

You don't care about other opinions, you don't want to argue at all, so?

A couple of fresh accounts spouting nonsense in this thread. Could be just Elon's AI force in action.

Stupidest take I heard in a long while and I read reddit everyday, so that's saying something.

> cannot understand why any sane person would

because it's not the specific action. it's the reason behind the action.

> Stop pretending normal people care about this

Stop pretending you're a normal person and it's everyone else who is wrong

If someone says they don't care about someone doing Nazi salute, I feel that speaks more about them.

the world must be incredibly confusing, with no meaning attributed to anything.

At least there is Fox News to spoon feed the truth to people like these.

i can't tell if this is a joke

I care.

I'm a german and grew up by learning what Nazis did to millions.

I was in a concentration camp. I saw the mountain of luggage.

Elon Musk didn't just do some arm movements, he deliberately used this symbolism.

He could have just appologized, which he did not.

Why would I be brainwashed? Just because you frame it like this, doesn't mean anything.

You could put out real arguments instead of just attacking.

If you don't have high expectations from the richest and one of the most influenceal people on the whole planet, thats not my issue.

Speak facts. Don't hide behind morality this, care that, environment and virtue signalling... Tell me, what is the factual things Grok model does wrong and is factual incorrect?

Self proclaimed Mecha-hitler powered by an illegal gas generator polluting low income neighborhoods

The gas generators powering the datacenter rented by both Google and Anthropic? Where is the moral stance against Gemini and Claude?

In their respective threads

> factual things Grok model does wrong

It convinced u/highmastdon to go out and be an elon musk dick rider. It also convinced them that "hid[ing] behind morality" is somehow a bad thing, which shows everyone the quality of person they are.

I don't hide behind morality. This shows how different our values are, eh?

I follow climate change, social unrest, philosophical question of good/bad, religions, beliefes etc. since i'm 12?

I became a nihilist with 16.

I have put my own life in danger at least twice to save another human.

I read books and understood there messages like 1984, brave new world etc.

> I would imagine that our world would be better if more people would care if they see a Tesla and feel a little bit bad. Yes.

I mean this question fairly as I am curious how you think about the trade-offs on the way to your moral choice. Not trying to manufacture a “gotcha” or anything.

Based on your response, I am inferring and assuming that you think electric vehicles are a net positive for society when compared to internal-combustion-engine cars (I was afraid to type ICE as to not accidentally upset some other political dispositions).

I am also assuming: - Tesla’s are high quality EVs - Tesla’s are amongst the most widely available and affordable EVs in the US, the worlds second largest car market

Then a bit more speculative but I’d also argue that Tesla is somewhat responsible for bringing forth the EV transition around the world as I don’t think the other manufacturers would be there had it not been for Tesla going first (but who knows).

And lastly would callout that Tesla is a large 20+ year old organization with thousands of people who have worked there and contributed to their success and proliferation of EVs.

So, given all this. How do you consider the trade-offs that lead you to say that the moral choice is to shun Tesla as a whole because of the actions of a loud, politically-decisive CEO?

At which level of political involvement does the CEOs actions weigh more than the collective contributions of the rest of the organization?

What would you say if EV adoption as a whole takes a huge long-term hit because people stop buying the most well known EVs available in the US for political reasons? I do frown a bit when thinking that one man’s politics will cause a large tribe to change their actions in such a way that we fail to reach the end state that we claim to value.

Essentially, I’m curious how you weigh “I really don’t like the CEOs politics” with “I more or less agree with the mission of the company” and how that leads you to your perspective on the moral choice.

PS. I am not a shareholder of any musk properties, mostly because I avoid meme stocks, and do not nor have ever worked at his companies. In general, I feel pretty neutral towards the whole ordeal.

I think Tesla got its fair share of success and and its now time to dismantel it because of Elon Musk.

There are enough alternatives here.

I'm highly disappointed that it has to be like this/should be like this, but it gives Elon Musk too much power which he uses to destroy even more.

Also his missing character gives me worries for the future: Not only did he try to manipulate directly the demogracy in germany with going live with AfD, he now also ignorantly burns satelites in our atmosphere and no one is saying no or slow down.

I find the level of Elon Musk followers nearly cult like and find it irritating that so many say "Elon Musk is not Tesla" despite the fact that he is the CEO and owns quite a lot of Tesla shares.

All of this pressure should force Elon Musk to appologize and put him back in his place as a form of social opposition, but this clearly doesn't work

Tesla could have found a path forward without Musk. It might've been painful or even dangerous financially, but they could've come up with something. Same with the other companies Musk "runs".

So long Musk remains at the head of any public company, despite everything that has happened - despite Musk being literally personally responsible for large scale atrocity and mass-death - not to mention all white supremacist stuff he's doing daily it seems, there's no real trade-offs for us plebs to fuss over.

Those companies should pay a price. Musk has turned himself into a real force for real evil in the world, yet they choose to be a party to it, because it's financially convenient.

So... any company that chooses to still keep him at the helm should be facing down total ruination, until and unless they decide to remedy the situation. If never do, well they've made their choice.

I mean, Musk should probably be in jail for a very long time, but at the very least, he should be blacklisted in the business and financial (and political) world, for good.

I came to this thread trying to understand the technical capabilities of this release and how it fits into the current competition. I want to see a discussion about this, but I can't find it, because every reply is like yours, about philosophy and morality.

It's frustrating, because I can separate the physics and the philosophy when I examine something. I can be interested in understanding how a nuclear bomb works, and also never want to use it at the same time.

I'm here to learn something new, and your philosophy or what kind of nerd you are is not something I wanted to learn.

Do you understand?

And yes, clearly I jumped into a pointless thread adding no new information of value. I am sorry to everyone about this. I'm just trying to plead with everyone reading my comment to take a step back, and let a thread about the technicalities stay on topic, and maybe just stay in the other thread about the mechahitler stuff. Thank you, if you do.

If you hit the [-] the whole thread gets hidden you can read the comments you're looking for while very easily ignoring this one and your morality

That's a great feature... I think I just collapsed 10 threads last night and gave up.

I decided to refresh the page this morning, and found a new comment at the top that resonated with my experience last night.

So we just let it go?

No consequences anymore?

No reminder of what Grok stands for?

Lets forget eh?

No, you focus. Do you think you can focus on something other than mechahitler? Do you go to bathroom and can't poop because of Elon Musk?

Easly of course.

But i spend same amount of time and energy than you on this comment threat.

Elon Musk might break our atmosphere with his starlink stuff.

He tried to affect my own democracy in my own country by doing a lifestream with the AfD (german right wing/nazi party).

Do you care about democracy? I do.

Your country has the most unpopular and ineffective leader in the modern history. Is this Elon Musks fault?

The US is also having trouble with its representative democracy due to many issues, Elon Musk is a relatively small influence on the overall disfunction.

By digress, again, just because I care about democracy doesn’t mean I need to talk about it when talking about LLMs.

What has some unpopular leader to do with Elon Musk? Nothing. Why do you do whataboutism?

Elon Musks fault or offend is trying to influence my countries democracy. That from the richest US American Immmigrant from South Afrika.

I find this quite dangerous and something to fight against.

And just because you don't care about this at all, you wouldn't try to remind people what a Elon Musk is and you don't care about his influence and how he gets his money.

I do.

I just think you're misdirecting your energy.

I get that people in the US need to be apathetic towards politics to even survive in today's hopelessly divided and misinformed society, as it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.

But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.

There's a whole world where you don't have to avoid politics and you can be freely anti-fascist, without worrying that the self proclaimed hardcore nerd in the corner breaks his silence and starts yelling to HR that we have to stop criticising his billionaire idols and focus on things that matter less.

> But the rest of the world lives in a more free speech society.

Dane here, this is not just specious, it's inaccurate. We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US. Tens of thousands of people all over Europe are arrested and imprisoned each year for speech which would be considered protected in the US. [This man was arrested for calling a politician an idiot.](https://www.ft.com/content/27626fa8-3379-4b69-891d-379401675...) [Another German citizen was investigated for calling another politician fat.](https://thegoldreport.com/news/german-police-investigating-u...) [This UK citizen was arrested for re-tweeting a meme and refusing re-education classes.](https://fee.org/articles/uk-man-arrested-for-malicious-commu...)

You're not fighting "fascism" by posting memes on Reddit. You're using computers and electronics and networks built by China, which is currently conducting ethnic genocide, and regularly utilises slave labour, among many other atrocities.

For posterity, Grok 4.5 isn't fascism. You need to spend just a little bit of time reading up about the history of fascism because you demean the entire concept and threat with these histrionics. If you keep crying wolf, no one will care when real danger emerges.

I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.

Can Americans do that?

I can say "I hate the orange clown (insert any other politician) and actively dislike everyone that voted for him", without getting a call from HR.

Can they?

I can't even enter the USA if I share some of the social media accounts like I'm legally required to do.

The 'free speech absolutists' are all calling for censorship in this thread.

So much for free speech.

Yes Americans can do both, unless their boss dislikes it, but that applies the world over.

> that applies the world over

It does not. Plenty of countries have functioning labor laws preventing you from being fired for your religious or political opinions.

Um yeah you can do all of that without legal consequences. HR is not the government. Are these your best examples?

A society that values free expression should be uncomfortable with people being fired merely for holding a different political opinion from their boss.

In the Netherlands, “political opinion” is explicitly listed as a protected discrimination ground.

And in Europe generally, employee speech can fall under freedom of expression, though courts balance that against the employer’s interests, reputation, workplace disruption, etc.

Meanwhile, in the US you'll get fired by phone while your boss is golfing.

Freedom baby.

>I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.

Unless you live in the UK

https://old.reddit.com/r/justifiedpolitics/comments/1uocwp4/...

You understand that there is a difference between just expressing your opinion in a normal way, and, on purpose, creating confrontational situations, right?

This guy is totally free to say he hates organised religion. He is not free to be a prick and go out of his way to try to get into a confrontation.

>He is not free to be a prick and go out of his way to try to get into a confrontation.

You mean like saying at work you hate all organised religions, unprompted, like OP wants to do?

Why do you say OP wants that?

They said:

> I can say "I'm an atheist and I hate organised religion" without losing my job.

It did not say they say it at work, or unprompted.

I think in US, if you mention it in a discussion on this subject at the water cooler between friends, it can have an impact on your work, you need to be careful (but I will not die on this hill, I don't think it's the important point anyway). The spirit of OP was about "talking about it", in a "normal way", I don't understand why you are saying that it is impossible to say you hate all organised religions without doing it unprompted or confrontationally.

As for the video, come on, you really don't see the problem? Police usually are drilled to arrest people who can inflame the situation, and this is why they are acting here. I even wonder if it was not the goal of the guy in the first place, to generate clicks and arguing "see, we cannot express ourselves anymore".

HR is usually drilled to fire people who can generate bad publicity, and that's why they are acting in OP's situation.

Free speech preserved!

How is that free speech when you are fired for your opinion?

If you are fired because you are not "a pretty girl" and the argument is "the public prefer pretty girls, so we do it to increase sales", it is still discrimination, it is still sexist. It does not matter if you blame it on someone else: if you fire someone because of their opinion, you are discriminating. If the fact that someone has an opinion costs you some money, then it costs you some money, your financial profit is not important, you are not the centre of the universe, and if you act to preserve your profit over the fairness and justice, then you are just a parasite that should be excluded from a civilised society.

>> We have far fewer free speech rights in Europe than they do in the US.

I'm in the UK. Mean tweets lead straight to jail now.

No wonder prisons are overcrowded, they must be full of twitter users.

Put down the drama bouquet, princess.

Posting a swastika is not free speech. All the rest, you have in the US as well (libel, etc).

[This is what he re-tweeted.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Swastika...) It might be in bad taste but arresting him and insisting he undergo re-education is crazy, and I can't believe you would defend it. No one gets arrested in the US for re-tweeting memes like this.

As for the rest, you're free to call politicians fat idiots without being arrested in the US, and once again, I cannot believe you would defend arresting people for that.

Not if you're an immigrant on a visa and talk shit about ICE online.

I haven't looked at the particular case, but nazism is a particular thing - given Europe's history it's there for a very good reason in most EU countries.

I don't know about the 'fat idiot', but in most EU countries that's more than fine so I have a bit of a hard time believing that was the sole reason - public figures are fair target for stuff like that. The limit is actually planning or inciting violence against someone or a group - again, the same as in the US.

Yes and US guys are plain wrong on swastika thing - you could even financially support open nazi militants like Azov battalion from most EU countries without any consequences.

> Grok 4.5 isn't fascism.

THat is a fair assertion.

It is however a product of a regime that is currently debasing freedom and racially targeting its own citizens and causing them harm. Is it as bad as what happens to Chinese muslims? No.

But does it have a disproportionate effect on the rest of the world? yes. Musk is funding authoritarianism in the UK. He is funding people that are causing racial division. He is promoting views that are antithetical to the core of U belief.

Grok is a product of this man, and all that baggage.

But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.

For example, for the first German arrested, it looks like it was brought to justice more as "libel and harassment" than because of the political opinion (and apparently, the judgement ended up being favourable to the arrested guy), something any civilised country should be able to do.

And it looks like in the majority of the cases, the justice reverted the sanction. In a fair civilised country, this is the expected process: if you don't sometimes start a judicial process on something that later turns out to not be a problem, then you probably are not a fair country. The world is a Gaussian curve: you will have "right-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake, and you will have "left-leaning" people unfairly accused as honest mistake.

The underlying opinion they may have is not illegal. In all of these countries, you can openly say you don't like the politician in power or say you don't agree. But it is very strange that when people complain about "freedom of speech", the large majority of the examples are about socially abusive behavior, of people trolling or insulting others.

> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.

That doesn't and shouldn't matter. I don't want people getting arrested for doing any of these things, even if I disagree with them. Do you know how disruptive it is to your life, let alone your emotional health, to be arrested?

I'm also a Dane. Denmark is worlds worse than the US in free speech and it's getting worse. This applies across the EU where people like the Spanish prime minister thinks no one deserves anonymity on the internet.

> That doesn't and shouldn't matter.

I fully disagree. Arrest should be "neutral", not based on the political content, but on the social intent.

If you believe X is good for the society, good, talk about it, have a debate, bring arguments.

If you believe X is good for the society but push for it by being a troll, then, you get arrested. Not because of what you've said, but because you have been a nuisance.

The fact that you are being a nuisance just disqualifies you. If you are unable to have an adult behavior, you have nothing to bring to the discussion, and you shoot yourself in the foot.

If I organise a debate and someone arrives, jumps on the table, drops their trousers and defecates in the middle of the table, it does not matter what are their opinion, it does not matter if I'm personally impacted by the presence of the poo, it does not matter if "you can just wipe it and proceed". This person chooses, by their action, to disqualify themselves.

And the fact they then whine "by freedom of speech" as if they were the victim while they chosen, consciously, to be prick, is just pathetic.

There should be no arrest without obvious evidence of a crime. These thinngs are not complicated - aka collecting evidence and testimony.

It's just 'what some guy said on twitter'.

They can literally apply an algo to determine whether it's lawful or not.

And it should almost never be unlawful.

'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith. (Not saying I support egregious forms of hate speech, but we should strongly err on the side of open expressoin).

The most dangerous people are those lying for political or ideological causes, which is completely legal (and probably shoudl be) but we have to watch out for it.

Which "arrest" are you even talking about? And which "evidence" are you talking about?

In these examples, these people are getting into trouble for being pricks. There is plenty of evidence about them, objectively, being pricks.

As for the consequences, as I've said, my point is that the world is a Gaussian curve: the majority of cases will be "well-proportionate", the existence of outliers does not demonstrate oppression. Especially when some of these cases were condemned as disproportionate by even "left-wing" people.

> 'Hate Speech' is as not remotely dangerous as lies and people acting in bad faith.

While I agree lies and bad faith should have more consequences, the thing is that "Hate Speech" is utterly useless.

"Hate Speech" is never needed to express your opinion."Hate Speech" is never needed to propose solution, or convince someone else that your idea is good.

It is like saying "well, I randomly spit in people in the street, but it's not as bad as lying, so why are people faster to condemn my actions". Because spitting is useless, it does not bring anything, you don't need to do it.

If you think that people should be arrested for 'being pricks' then you are the problem here entirely.

Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.

People can say what they want unless a direct call to assault.

Everything else is a choice - people want to use the N-word in their place of work -> they get fired. In front a a judge -> fined. Walking down the street -> people avoid them like turds.

People lying on social media -> fact checked, marginalized, punted form the Televised Debate.

None of that is illegal.

> If you think that people should be arrested for 'being pricks' then you are the problem here entirely.

It is not what I'm saying. I'm saying they are not arrested because of their opinion, they are arrested for their actions. It is not a "freedom of speech" issue, it is about "civility".

You may consider that arresting these people for that is too far (good news, not only me, but the majority of people, including on the left, seem to agree. In these examples, the process concluded it was a mistake, and the person won the case).

By the way, I've asked you which arrest you are talking about, because of some of the examples, there were no arrest at all. Just someone said "oh, I don't like that" and you starting to cry "boohoo, they are arresting me". Talking earlier about people lying, that is a good example.

But this is not a "freedom of speech" issue.

> Your assessment here that somehow 'language that does not propose a solution' should somehow be banned is Orwellian.

Again another straw man argument.

I am against these arrests, like the majority of the people, including the left-wing people. These arrests are the result of over-zealous policemen. But these arrests are not happening because of the person's opinion, they are happening because the person is being an idiot and act in a way where someone not stupid will know they should avoid.

Again, it does not mean they should be arrested.

But it means it is not a freedom of speech issue. These are just losers with not very smart opinion, who acted stupidly and ended up getting some trouble.

No opinion was ever suppressed. Whatever opinion these people have, anyone can express exactly the same opinion content (simply avoiding to do it stupidly), and they will be perfectly fine. In none of these cases, the problem was the opinion itself: you cannot arrest someone for their opinions.

> But it looks like your examples are all examples of people being mean, or disruptive, or trolling.

It looks like you aren't disagreeing with me. You're agreeing with me that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. You appear to like that Europe has worse and fewer free speech rights. In the US, one has the right to be mean, disruptive, and troll, without being arrested. We do not.

No, I disagree: in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.

Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.

Then, if you are saying that on some opinions, the majority of the people who hold these opinions are unable to use proper arguments and civilised debates and resort to being pricks, then I guess it indicates the level of sophistication of these opinions. It is not a freedom of speech problem, the problem is that that opinions is mainly shared by terrible people unable to behave.

> in Europe, you can talk about more subjects and have civilised debates around more topics that would get you in trouble in US.

Be specific please. It looks like you're trying to blur the lines now by using words like "in trouble" when the discussion is around free speech and the legal boundaries. But I won't accuse you of that unless you actually do it, so please explain which free speech us Europeans may practise which would get an US citizen into legal trouble.

> Unrelated to that, I like that in Europe, people who are mean, disruptive or trolling get punished for their childish behaviors. It does not affect freedom of speech, these people have chosen to act like idiots, they did not needed to act like that to express their speech.

Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it. If you're required to not offend someone, you must exercise enormous self-censorship. The right to not offend is antithetical to the principle of free speech.

The original comment talks about

> it is a taboo subject that ends careers and family connections.

To be specific, in US, subjects like criticising Trump can have a big impact. In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common. In US, it is very polarised, you cannot talk politics with people you don't know.

As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.

> Freedom of speech requires the right to offend. You don't know what you say might offend someone until you've already said it.

That's not a good argument. I'm not talking about "someone expressing their opinion that happen to offend". I'm talking about people doing actions that are offending without regard of their opinion. In the examples you have given, the exact same person would have the exact same problem if they had the same behavior but hold totally different ideological opinion.

That's my point: you are politicizing the debate. These people got in trouble not at all because of their opinion, but because they acted like prick. For each "right-wing" opinion that got into trouble, you can easily find example of "left-wing" opinion that also got into trouble the same way in similar circumstances. And people doing exactly the same acts as these people would be prosecuted the same way: there is no "cooling effect", people are not afraid of talking about certain topics, because whatever topics you are talking about, the probability of getting into trouble is identical.

If your argument is "there is no freedom of speech unless people can act like prick", then this is obviously incorrect. Killing my neighbour is "acting like a prick". Where does it stop? Does me not being able to kill my neighbour means I don't have freedom of speech? Is "libel" or "harassment" something we should accept for "freedom of speech" while in practice, tolerating these practices reduce diversity of opinion?

> In Europe, criticizing any politician is very very common.

Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.

> As for work, in US, research grant were removed for using some "woke" keywords for political/ideological reasons. In Europe, grants are decided by the peers, and when a controversial subject is not attributed a grant, it is not for political/ideological reason, it is because the scientific value is considered as poor.

This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?

> Criticizing politicians has gotten people arrested in Europe. This doesn't happen in the US.

Can you provide some examples? All I've seen are examples where people did not just criticize politicians, but went way further. When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way. So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.

> This is naive. You think European scientists are immune to political influence, ideological conformity and fads?

Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.

But second, there is a difference between "experts making a rational decision but being unconsciously biased" and "politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"". One is a bad second order side-effect, the other is frontal political thought control.

> When, at the same time, "normal" people have absolutely no problem criticizing politicians in a "normal" way.

So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.

As for examples, the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people (section 185), and insulting politicians has even harsher penalties (section 188). There are hundreds of articles covering cases, just ask any AI for a summary.

> So they were not arrested for criticizing politicians, they were arrested for acting like idiots.

In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense, even if it does not harm anyone, in the tort sense?

> Well, first, it cuts both way: left-leaning scientists have a left-leaning bias, and right-leaning scientists have a right-leaning bias. So it cancels out.

And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.

> politicians who have no idea of the subject who ruin a scientist career because they saw the term "Enola Gay" or "financial equity"".

That isn't really happening. No one's career is being ruined by having to rewrite grant proposals to remove DEI language, because previous policy required DEI language. The restructuring of academic funding and incentives is frankly long overdue. Everyone, including scientists, has been complaining about grant funding and the skewed incentives in academia, like publish or perish. You often have to break a system before it can be fixed.

> So you agree that the US has more free speech because people can deviate from your completely arbitrarily defined "normal" form of critique.

What? No, in the US, people will also be in trouble, not only from deviating from my "normal" form of critique, but also when they don't deviate from it.

Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions. This has never happened in Europe.

> the German criminal code has literally criminalized insulting people

How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.

> In your opinion, acting like an idiot is a criminal offense

What? Is that really what you understand? I'm just saying that they acted like an idiot by doing something they should have known was unnecessary and will led to trouble, including judicial one.

Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".

> And what are the political demographics of academia right now? This is a big reason for the replication crisis in the social sciences.

Oh, there it goes. Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based: if you think that Harvard is too "left wing", go to Paris, or Tel Aviv, or Quebec, or Japan, or Melbourne, or Rome, or London, or any other "anti-woke" university in USA or somewhere else, and publish your piece and become famous for having demonstrated objectively something that the intelligencia wanted to hide. This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid. Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.

> That isn't really happening

Yeah, sure, and your fantasy about academic left-wing conspiracy and anti-freedom-of-speech-dictatorship in Europe, these are really happening. Sure.

> Trump called for investigation and arrest on Comey, Cheney, Powell, ... despite the fact that they never crossed the line in expressing their criticism to Trump's decisions.

I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".

> This has never happened in Europe.

Poland: The "Lex Tusk" Commission (2023)

Hungary: The Sovereignty Protection Office (2023)

Ukraine: Viktor Yanukovych vs. Yulia Tymoshenko (2011)

Turkey: Erdoğan vs. Ekrem İmamoğlu

Romania: Investigating the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor (2018)

France: The "Clearstream Affair" (2004)

> How is that a bad thing? If your opinions are not stupid, you don't need to insult people to express them.

1. Insults are subjective. If you don't see the problem with criminalizing subjective opinions, then I don't know what to tell you.

2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions while simultaneously claiming that speech is freer in Europe.

> Me: "Mr Smith was not arrested because he wears a red t-shirt, he was arrested because he acted like an idiot by deciding to expose himself to children in the street". You: "So you are saying that acting like an idiot is a criminal offence".

You've lost the plot. The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians, your rebuttal was that the way they did it was idiotic, which directly implies that you're ok with criminalizing idiocy even when the criticism is legitimate. Your reply here is a complete red herring.

> Academia are highly international and therefore meritocracy based:

This does not follow. Literally.

> This idea that the whole word is so much into the conspiracy that every universities on Earth are covering the left-wing academia conspiracy is so stupid.

It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests. I don't know where you got the idea that it has to be a conspiracy.

> Maybe another reason is that a lot of right-wing political ideas don't make sense when confronted to a rigorous analysis, and therefore the right-wing positions are falling from natural selection.

This is also delusional, and frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this (not only researcher bias, publication bias, hiring bias, and more).

> I'm not a fan of Trump's governance, but none of those people were investigated for "criticizing Trump's decisions".

Is that a joke? These people would never have been investigated if they were not critical towards Trump. The only reason they are investigated is because Trump is taking revenge on them for the crime of saying that Trump is wrong.

Again, this does not happen in Europe. There are political enemies, and they fight between each others. But you would struggle to find 2 political allies, with a president saying positive about the other person on Monday, and then on Friday calling for this person to be investigated because the other person has said something they did not like.

> Poland, ...

These are not cases of a president retaliating on a rival that criticized them. These are corruption, or fights between political parties, or tax evasion, ... Nothing to do with freedom of speech.

> 1. Insults are subjective

Everything is subjective. Hitting someone is subjective, so according to you, criminalising "battery" is dangerous because you can arrest people who just bumped into you in the subway. Pretending that it means full arbitrary situation is just stupid.

> 2. You're literally trying to restrict how I express my legitimate opinions

No, you can do it if you want, you just have to pay for the damage you have done when you use it as an idiot. It is as ridiculous as saying: we are in a free country, so I can walk wherever I want, including in your bedroom when you are sleeping.

No one is ever arresting for your opinion. In all of the initial examples, there are plenty of people who criticize openly these politicians that you pretend people will be arrested if they criticize them. It does not happen. Because it is not true that you are arrested if you criticize them.

> The original point was that people were arrested for criticizing politicians

They were not arrested for criticizing politicians. Some of the examples are literally not attack on politicians, they don't target a politician as individual. Some examples are not even any arrest. And the other examples, they were "arrested" for being stupid, where it happened they were also targeting a politician. They would have been arrested equally if they targeted another public figure.

> It's not a conspiracy when people are just acting in their own best interests.

It is on the best interest of individuals to get a lot of prestige by demonstrating a consensus is not supported by facts.

> frankly completely ignorant of studies done on exactly this

I don't think someone who provided tax evasion examples of powerful targeting opponents just because they were critical of them would be able to understand these studies.

The americanism of politics being taboo is so stupid it aches.

lol, the sheer hypocrisy of your message

Blame Musk himself. He did this.

He jumped right into the center of US politics, and turned himself into one of the most toxic figures within it, while acting like an unhinged conspiracy addled maniac. Then he broke the law and killed a bunch of the poorest people in the world with his DOGE chainsaw (Trump shares equal blame tbf).

He used a bunch of star-struck 20-something "hardcore" rookie devs to be his executioners. Young devs like many of the commenters/readers on this site. Besides having the deaths of thousands directly on their conscience, some of those kids may face real legal jeopardy after all this. Is that something anyone here wants for themselves or any their fellow industry people here on HN?

Compartmentalizing tech interest away from real moral and political consequences is how, despite technical brilliance, you can end up a useful idiot and a party to atrocity.

Years ago these kinds of dilemmas were farther away. Tech wasn't as embroiled in politics. Tech hadn't eaten everything yet. Now it has and these dilemmas are in front of us today.

Agree 100%, it's bordering on a mental illness, any mention of Elon or related tech elicits emotional posts unrelated to the tech being discussed. It's clearly biased as Anthropic and OpenAI have blood on their hands but they get a pass. I put it down to weak minded/credulous people who inhaled the left wing legacy media campaign wholesale without a critical thought.

Maybe it's because he's a fascist?

He is a business man who runs successfully companies, you are applying labels to him based on nothing more than what some left wing billionaire wants you to believe. Have you met him?

He's shouting his politics through a megaphone, it doesn't take much to recognize it for what it is.

He’s an active, donating supporter of the far right in at least America and the UK. He speaks at political rallies?? Are you joking?

I have met him and also saw him standing next to Donald Trump and at political rallies. It wasn't imagined by left wing billionaire.

I have also read his Twitter account where he is spreading his right wing politics, every single day.

Really, what left wing billionaire? Be specific, because the Nazi Billionaire is just as specific

People just need to get off the internet, go outside touch some grass and realize you are being ginned up by bad actors on both sides. Outside of your bubble most people are actually still nice.

I'm with you on that, but we're computer nerds so probably don't get out much ;)

It’s just this constant level of anger and righteousness no matter what side of the coin they have decided they are on.

The crazy thing is Musk going to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in Europe, the biggest concentration camp where nazis and collaborationists were happily killing the jews they already hated so much (that part hasn't changed much btw) and people calling Musk a "nazi" for saying "my heart goes to you".

But when the same movement of the hand is taken in pictures of Obama, Clinton, Harris, Biden, etc. nobody calls them nazis. And yet zero of them when to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Speaking of which, among the Oct 7th apologists who consider Oct 7th was a legitimate act of resistance, how many went to visit concentration camps? If they were to answer that question deep from their heart and soul, we'd know who the actual nazis and islamist terrorists sympathizers are.

You reap what you sow. What I want to know is why so many people are lamenting actions having consequences?

and what are the consequences? angry people on message boards?

According to gemini, musk has made over 600B since trump took power. you think a few hundred people in this comment section calling him a nazi has any effect on him?

You’ve taken my comment out of the context I was replying to, so none of what you’ve said is remotely relevant to what I said.

And here is a reddit meme for you

https://i.redd.it/eeoo4y00lkne1.jpeg

> 2026

> Posting Reddit links

They already gave away that image to their AI partners to train on.

And it is somewhat correlated to my point because?

If it makes you feel any better, note that a good number of those comments are just bot comments, although not yet as much as on Reddit.

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