[stub for generic-indignant tangents - not what this site is for - please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ]
[flagged]
Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
501–510 of 889 posts
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered the possibility that your opinion is just not representative of the scientific consensus?
Wikipedia does not care about scientific consensus. It just summarizes "reliable" secondary sources.
Wrong in two different ways:
- this tends to approximate consensus.
- Wikipedia does care, and has a policy on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scientific_consensus
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ask the people at Twitter The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?
Stock options aren’t magic. I bet you that the remaining Twitter employees won’t see a higher comp than equivalent employees at BigTech companies between their cash + RSUs when SpaceX IPOs. Aren’t employees also subject to a lock out period where they still can’t sell their stock until $x number of months after an IPO unlike employees of public companies that can sell as soon as they vest? Honest question, I’ve worke…
180 day lockup period is standard
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Work is and has always been an economic bargain: Your time for their money. Morality is a luxury that only the independently wealthy can afford. Any business that allows it's employees to function according to their own morals becomes uncompetitive against its peers. That's why small companies by individual founders who want to stay true to their mission often stay small. They inevitably get bought out by one of the…
We are not talking about some destitute person hocking cigarettes on the street for minimum wage. We are talking about smart, educated people who are making 500k a year to build the torment nexus. There is no excuse for this. It’s pure greed and any other explanation is deflection.
It's always baffling to me to see people in tech, particularly in hackernews, talking about others earning salaries many times the median of the country and acting like these are people who just simply have no other choice.
They really, really do. In fact, those salaries being so high is probably also due to the fact that you will be doing work that's a net-worse for the world so they gotta compensate accordingly.
A lot of these firms are parasitic institutions at a society level. They do benefit themselves and their workers at the expense of everyone else. Personally, I find it hard to respect someone that takes that choice, but I also get it. A lot of people only care about their own and their immediate people's benefit.
On that note, I really recommend "No other choice" by Park Chan-wook or the book ("The Ax") it is based on.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything relating to a datacentre that you can do in space you can do more easily on earth, regardless of 10,000x inference growth or supply chain or production or starship or silicon. I just don't think you can be cost competitive with earth bound data centres if 'protected from the poors' isn't a selling point. By the way, 10,000x inference growth would look like what happened with cryptocurrency mining - after a…
Zoning is one area that’s better in space. And power density for solar is another. I don’t get your mining analogy though - a non upgradable data center pod is either going to pay off its capital costs or it won’t. Once it has, any revenue is close to 100% profit. 10k demand increase is the opposite of mining dynamics: there you get a 10k supply increase that the price has to support, in combination with more efficie…
Zoning is one area that’s better in space.
Not really, though? The idea that Earth-based data centers need to be built in populated, developed areas is indeed dumb, yet it seems to be inexplicably baked into everyone's assumptions. In particular, the small discrete data centers that Musk wants to launch could go anywhere on Earth.
They could be powered by local PV arrays and batteries, they can be cooled by smaller radiators than they would need to use in space, and they could be networked via Starlink or something very much like it, just as they would need to be networked in space. There's nothing special about space, it just costs more to get there.
If he wants them to be out of reach of governments, why not put them on container ships in international waters? There are thousands at sea at any given time, and I'm sure their operators would be happy to rent them out.
Hell, put them on dirigibles that just drift around in international airspace for months at a time. Anywhere but space.
And power density for solar is another.
Does power density matter in terrestrial solar applications? If so, why? These things can and should be deployed in oceans, deserts, and trackless wastelands. Who cares how big the solar panels are?
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
it's not working
US isn't randomly launching nukes yet
yet.
Because so far if we left it to AI they would be much quicker to do it [1]
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-r...
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
My ex-Twitter employee coworkers beg to differ. They made plenty of money before Elon came around. Once he was in the company, one of them actually hired a personal attorney to confirm that he wasn’t going to be burned by the things Musk was asking him to do, before he finally decided it wasn’t worth it to work there anymore and left.
I think Musk is odious but I think there's a lot of complicating evidence to the story of what happened at Twitter. And: very smart people, like Dan Luu, were complaining about their culture long before Musk arrived.
Is there anything from Dan Luu you could point me offhand at about Twitter's culture? The only thing I recall was a blog about technical issues but that didn't seem to have much bearing on the culture.
My understanding is Twitter always had cultural issues but it was not very different from other tech companies of the time, and what most of us would consider "directionally correct." I have it on pretty good authority from a very senior engineer who left before Elon took over (so no grudges other than, you know, "because Elon") that a lot of the things he said publicly about Twitter's technology was highly misleading or downright false. Like, IIRC, something about them not having CI/CD. Total lie.
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethically, if you do not agree with the company you work at, the optimal course of action if you can stomach it is to stay and do a bad job rather than get replaced by someone who might do a good job. I have been in such a situation before, and while I was not able to coast along until the company went under, the time delta between me getting fired and the company going under was measured in weeks. In hindsight I'd p…
Ethically, if you extend this reasoning, are we not obligated to find a position in the most morally repulsive organization we are aware of, and then coast?
I think there is an implied "given the company you joined turns out to be nonethically aligned"
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Giant waste of time while Anthropic/OAI keep surging forward. And Google. They're quietly making a lot of progress in the coding space with antigravity and Gemini 3.1.
Has Antigravity gotten any better?
>There is currently no support for:
>Bring-your-own-key or bring-your-own-endpoint for additional rate limits >Organizational tiers in general availability, or via contract[1]
Literal clown car product.
No plan for serious enterprise support (even 6 months after launch)
Re: Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ask the people at Twitter..
You mean the 80% of the workforce that was fired and the company continued running just fine? Usually just firing 3 to 5% of any company workers have terrible consequences for the company that does it. It does not speak so well about the workers.
I don't understand this take. Do people think engineers go in to work to turn handcranks to keep the machines running? It's actually a credit to the automation built by the engineers he fired that it kept running!
At the time I joked that like Chaos Monkey, we should have an "Elon Monkey" to "fire" arbitrary people by sending them on mandatory vacations with no connectivity to see what falls over.