Comment by Lomlioto | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lomlioto | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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