Grokipedia and the coup against reality • Hacker News Board

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#71

Post by mikkupikku » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

condensedcrab wrote: post #34

LeoPanthera wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex Tesla owner, I am amused by the idea that anyone thinks that Musk was "good" at running Tesla. Those cars are cheaply and shoddily made, and have probably the worst service experience in the industry. It's my understanding that Musk has only minimal influence on SpaceX. Edit: I would like to repeat the point that I owned one, for four years, during which it had to go in for service 12 times, four of which we…

To be fair, the one thing Musk has going for him is bringing funding to opportunities and making the most of it. I wouldn't say that Musk is the only person who could have brought SpaceX and Tesla to where there are now, and certainly there are many individuals who contributed heavily to get them there. That being said, not many people have the money and interest to do it.

Bezos had the money and opportunity to do the same as SpaceX but hasn't been even remotely as successful. He technically started Blue Origin first, but wasted several years not taking it seriously as a rocket company; back then it was basically just a space-themed club for him and his friends (Neal Stephenson, etc.) SpaceX went balls to the walls and never let up. The day to day operations are run by Shotwell and she deserves enormous credit, but we shouldn't ignore the role Elon played in recognizing her potential, keeping her happy and letting her do her job (usually) not getting in her way. And a lot of the dreamer stuff, all the Mars colonization and Starship stuff, has Musk's fingerprints all over it. Granted, none of that stuff has actually happened or worked, but it has clearly been good for helping SpaceX recruit highly motivated talent. If you're a young aerospace engineer with something to prove in 2010, which company do you go to? The one that is sending stuff to the space station and talking about putting people on Mars? Or the one that hasn't publicly done anything and doesn't talk about anything either? SpaceX was run extremely well compared to Blue Origin, not just in terms of day to day management but also their big picture strategy.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#72

Post by tigerali » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

Rover222 wrote: post #67

tigerali wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unintentionally correct, I love it.

this comment was hateful

why so mad, it seems like we agree

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#73

Post by CupricTea » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

tclancy wrote: post #45

CupricTea wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The submission is titled "Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles" and is just a direct link to Grokipedia. It is quite literally the most neutral, non-editorialized submission to HN.

Did you read any of the comments in the thread? It's not done in good faith and it looks like they should have turned the dial more toward "quality" than "quantity". A stable with lots of manure isn't inherently better than a stable with less manure.

I think the comments in this thread bandwagoning the knee-jerk hate against Elon Musk put forth by the submission are a lot more bad faith and vitriolic than in the other submission.

I'm not even particularly fond of the man but this is childish behavior.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#74

Post by tim333 » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:56 PM UTC

'Coup Against Reality Itself' seems a bit of an over reaction to Musk's attempt to do a slightly less woke version of Wikipedia. If you try reading it, it's not terrible. It waffles on a bit in the usual LLM fashion.

There's some HN discussion of it here which got flagged for some reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#75

Post by mikkupikku » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #16

chasd00 wrote: post #5

people on the autism spectrum are amazingly good at what they're good at and spectacularly bad at what they're bad at. I wish Musk would just stick to what he's good at like SpaceX and Tesla etc.

Is he even good at rockets and cars or is he just good at hyping them up and attracting funding?

There is no organization on Earth, private or government, which is better at the launch business than SpaceX. And it wasn't handed to him, he had to sue the government and go up against entrenched contractors with decades of experience.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#76

Post by systemstops » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

Grokipedia literally just came out a few hours ago. So this article was already in the can before they could even test it.

Re: Grokipedia and the coup against reality

#77

Post by throw0101a » Tue, Oct 28, 2025, 7:57 PM UTC

idle_zealot wrote: post #21

The gap widens. If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point? You can't convince someone who lives in an alternate reality of anything by argument. I think I would just stop relying. Most people would. It's not a new problem, but that wall keeps growing.

> If you're discussing something online, and someone drops a Grok link as evidence or reference material, how are you supposed to continue at that point?

First, when arguing on the Internet, I'm often reminded of the "Someone wrong on the Internet" comic:

* https://xkcd.com/386/

Second, I think it worth remembering that you'll have better (online) mental health if you don't try to have the last word. At some point it's best to drop it. This has been true for a long time: Usenet newsreaders used to have killfiles so you could filter out certain people.

Also worth keeping in mind the 'human DoS' aspect of things:

> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[5][6][7][8] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[9] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[10] The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki,[1] which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning