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honestly, look internally. after the plane from qatar. after the son-in-law's real estate dealings. after the visible-to-everyone kalshi and oil futures bets frontrunning the administrations announcements. for you to still feel the need to frame things as "border-line (to be polite)" is, in and of itself, the perfect example of the overall problem.

take your inability to draw a clear-as-day conclusion and state it plainly and multiply it by another ~50M "centrists" who continue to believe that staying "not political" and "avoiding the news" is a viable strategy to just wait the problem out.

until the checked out cowards realize that strategy isn't going to work, things will continue to get worse.

"no politics" might as as well be the second maga slogan.


"no politics" is the immune response to the social-media-fueled, conspiracy-theory-driven "we are the good guys, you basically deserve to die" craze.

Both sides are culpable here. In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen (Republicans in 2020, Democrats with the since-debunked 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal). Other countries had different issues, but the shape of the problem was basically the same everywhere.

If you keep being called bad words for years for no reason, seeing your side do the exact same thing, no surprise you tune out.


"Both sides" is the biggest cop out of the last decade.


How was Cambridge analytica debunked?


> In the US, both parties were literally claiming that the elections were stolen

This is not even remotely true.

One party broadly mobilized a country wide effort to overthrow an election and usurp the incoming duly elected government, culminating in a violent attack on congress itself.

The other party had concerns about foreign interference in our elections.


I'd say the bigger issue in 2016 was the Russian interference, which has been proven and has lead to convictions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

> Simultaneously, the Republican-led Senate and House Intelligence Committees conducted their own investigations into the Russians' activities. The Senate committee's report, released in five volumes between July 2019 and August 2020, found that the Russian government had engaged in an "extensive campaign" to sabotage the election in favor of Trump

I'm also curious how you think Cambridge Analytica was debunked. I don't see any mention of debunking on their wikipedia page, but I do see facebook being fined billions for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...


The Russian collusion narrative has been completely debunked.


In a battle of "this narrative has been debunked" / "no it has not", the person who can provide links to inquiry on the narrative kinda prevails over the person who does not provide links to the debunk.

I say "kinda", in the sense that "it matters to people interested with dispassionnately learning about the subject", not "it will convince anyone to change their mind".



sorry thats too far left wing an opinion in america today


The sale was completed in 2024.


I feel that as soon as the existential threat easened with the splintering of the Soviet Union, the US started doing some self-harming libertarian flavored shit to itself.

In the 1980s, I assume getting rid of the "strategic reserve" of anything would have met more pushback, because of primal fear overriding greed.


> We are going to do a terrible thing to you — we are going to deprive you of an enemy.

– Georgi Arbatov, Soviet political scientist, 1988


Wasn’t the original purpose of the strategic helium reserve to build fleets of zeppelins?


Yes, Reagan was noted for his desire to avoid privatization of anything. /s

Kidding aside, the US has had libertarian pipe dreams for the better part of its history. The aberration was the New Deal period up until the mid 60s.


For those who don't understand, Biden sold the Helium not Trump - he took office on Jan 20, 2025.


"Current law (cira 2013) requires BLM to sell off the crude helium remaining in the Federal Helium Reserve in order to repay the U.S. Treasury the $1.3 billion debt incurred creating it. This debt will be repaid this fiscal year and that, as a consequence, the helium program will terminate at the end of the current fiscal year (October 1, 2013), absent Congressional action. Currently, the Federal Helium Reserve supplies roughly 40% of domestic and 30% of global helium demand. Loss of access to the Federal Helium Reserve would result in significant disruptions to a large number of critical U.S. industries." https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/494b2f9e-c8f5-4...

Sounds like Obama kept the gas taps flowing, instead of locking it up because authorization to sell it had expired. Here is the whole record: https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/527/...


> too far left wing

> biden

uhm...


His admin was by far the most left wing in history, only the actual far left think otherwise


Please don't call everyone names for not agreeing with you.

There are billions of people in the world, and you are one, and you have your one set of opinions out of billions.

Nobody endowed you or your opinions with any sort of infallibility or superiority over others.


How does he compare with Nixon, who created the EPA?


Biden is an anti-abortion Catholic Zionist who wouldn't even do anything (but empty talk) to raise the minimum wage during high inflation. He enabled a genocide so his gods would reward him. I guess he would be a radical commie to the extreme far right. Nixon, JFK, LBJ and Lincoln, for example, signed into law actual left policies (whether they agreed with them or not-- none were lefties).

Words have meaning. Someone a bit left of a Nazi is not on the Left even if they are to the left of the person speaking.

The Democrats are a right-wing party. They spend more energy attacking the left than they do, the Republicans. Look at what they did to the center-left Sanders and their constant lawfare to keep left parties, like the Greens and Peace and Freedom, off the ballot and out of the debates (last election, the Greens spent half their campaign funds fighting these frivolous lawsuits from the Democratic party who seek to subvert democracy [Republicans attack anyone more left/darker than them, through voter suppression and other techniques to also subvert democracy]). There is very little daylight between the two. They serve the same masters, Oligarchs and Israel.

The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them. - Julius Nyerere


really? or is it just that you don't like the answer so you keep trying to find another one.

what historical examples of this very common pattern did you read up on?


is there anywhere good to read/follow to get operational clarity on this stuff?

my current system of looking for 1 in 1000 posts on HN or 1 in 100 on r/locallama is tedious.


Ask any of the models to explain this to you


so is love

this level of reductive thought termination goes nowhere


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


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


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


Is whatever that is their work?


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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


obviously you're not a devops eng, I think you're wildly under-estimating how much of business critical code pre-ai is completely orphaned anyway.

the people who wrote it were contractors long gone, or employees that have moved companies/departments/roles, or of projects that were long since wrapped up, or of people who got laid off, or the people who wrote it simply barely understood it in the first place and certainly don't remember what they were thinking back then now.

basically "what moron wrote this insane mess... oh me" is the default state of production code anyway. there's really no quality bar already.


I am a devops engineer and understand your point. But there's a huge difference: legacy code doesn't change. Yeah occasionally something weird will happen and you've got to dig into it, but it's pretty rare, and usually something like an expired certificate, not a logic bug.

What we're entering, if this comes to fruition, is a whole new era where massive amounts of code changes that engineers are vaguely familiar with are going to be deployed at a much faster pace than anything we've ever seen before. That's a whole different ballgame than the management of a few legacy services.


after a decade of follow-the-sun deployments by php contractors from vietnam to costa rica where our only qa was keeping an eye on the 500s graph, ai can't scare me.


That's actually a good comparison. Though even then, I imagine you at least have the ability to get on the phone and ask what they just did. Whereas LLM would just be like, "IDK, that was my twin brother. I'd ask him directly, but unfortunately he has been garbage collected. It was very sad. Would you like a cookie?"

I wonder if there's any value in some system that preserves the chat context of a coding agent and tags the commits with a reference to it, until the feature has been sufficiently battle tested. That way you can bring them back from the dead and interrogate them for insight if something goes wrong. Probably no more useful than just having a fresh agent look at the diff in most cases, but I can certainly imagine scenarios where it's like "Oh, duh, I meant to do X but looks like I accidentally did Y instead! Here's a fix." way faster than figuring it out from scratch. Especially if that whole process can be automated and fast, worst case you just waste a few tokens.

I'm genuinely curious though if there's anything you learned from those experiences that could be applied to agent driven dev processes too.


it was basically a mindless loop, very prime for being agent driven:

  - observe error rate uptick
  - maybe dig in with apm tooling
  - read actual error messages
  - compare what apm and logs said to last commit/deploy
  - if they look even tangentially related deploy the previous commit (aka revert)
  - if its still not fixed do a "debug push", basically stuff a bunch of print statements (or you can do better) around the problem to get more info
I won't say that solves every case but definitely 90% of them.

I think your point about preserving some amount of intent/context is good, but also like what are most of us doing with agents if not "loop on error message until it goes away".


it has been amazing to watch how much of agentic ai is driven by "can you write clear instructions to explain your goals and use cases" and "can you clearly define the rules of each step in your process."


People Make Games did a mini documentary on almost exactly what you're asking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PHT-zBxKQQ

Its three years old so things have slightly matured.


you could stuff the racks full of server-rack batteries (lfp now, na-ion maybe in a decade) and monetize the space and the high capacity grid connect

most of the hvac would sit idle tho


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