Definitely one approach to the circumstances. I tried some variation of this and it blew up in my face (as I expected ).

Towards the end of my time there, a “fixer” was brought in to shore up the team that I was working on. The “fixer” also became my manager when they were brought on.

The “fixer” proceeded to fire 70+% of the team over the course of 6-8 months and install a bunch of yes people, in addition to wasting about $2,000,000 on a subscription to rebuild our core product with a framework product no one on the team knew. I was told to deploy said framework product on top of Kubernetes (which not a single person on my team had any experience with) while delivering on other in-flight projects. I ignored the whole thing.

I ended up deciding I was done with Tesla and went into a regularly scheduled 1:1 with my manager (the “fixer”) with a written two-weeks notice in hand, only to be fired (with 6-weeks severance, thankfully) before I was able to say anything about giving notice.

One of the best ways to get fired in my opinion.

Why did Tesla work initially? Because they were first to market and people were willing to overlook flaws?

When did it start falling apart?

Why hasn't the same happened to SpaceX? (Gov contracts, too big to fail, national defense, no competition yet, etc.?)

And honestly, why hasn't anyone domestically put up a decent fight against Tesla? Best I can think of is Rivian, and those have their own issues.

I’ve experienced it at other places as well, just not the frequency or indirectness as Tesla.

During the first 24 hours of the Model 3 pre-order launch, Elon tweeted that we would support another 3-4 currencies than we had built and tested for. The team literally found out because of his tweet and had not planned for those currencies. That wasn’t the first time that sort of deal happened where we found out about a feature because of one of his tweets.

During my last job search I had an interview with Walmart, related to health software. I was flatly told that I might have a project canceled, then restarted on the original timeline. I declined after the interview.

They then shuttered the whole thing some months later: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/01/1248397756/walmart-close-heal...

Which is to say, these things are real warning signs about the company.

In the case of Musk's companies, here we are discussing a major failure and firings.

So this is a common tactic.

I have experienced management assigning people to multiple projects, vaguely acknowledging a time split. The moment the actual work starts people have to go 100% on all projects. This is normal.

Agreed. Tesla taught me the hard way about work/life boundaries. I spent a lot of time working a full 8-9 hours during the day, then doing deployments during the nights, weekends, and on “vacations”. A 60-hour week was a “light” week at Tesla.

Didn’t have kids or friends at the time and was going through a breakup, so I was okay with throwing myself at the job for a while. Once my situation got better, all those hours didn’t make as much sense, so I started looking for another job. The very next job was an immediate pay bump of 20% for half the amount of work.

These days, I clearly restate what is being asked (per my understanding), what I’m currently working on, if the thing is being asked is more important or not, and if the requestor is willing to delay the original timeline by the amount of time the interrupt will take plus context switching time.

Most often, the answer is no.

Yes, but in most well functioning large organizations, that happens very rarely.

I am calling my approach to these tasks to make them rot away. If CEO/customer wants something, I will ignore it until he will start demanding it repeatedly then I will start thinking like working on it. Because it can also happen that CEO/customer will want shiny thing you will deliver the shiny thing and he will have no clue why did you do that, because he forgot that he wanted that - the task has rot away.

In other companies they don't make this explicit during the interview, so something is different

I think there just wasn't enough space on the left to fit philosophy in.

Cfe: "it's impossible to be rational without agreeing with me on everything" and other hits.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience?omnisc...

AA-Omniscience Hallucination Rate (lower is better) measures how often the model answers incorrectly when it should have refused or admitted to not knowing the answer. It is defined as the proportion of incorrect answers out of all non-correct responses, i.e. incorrect / (incorrect + partial answers + not attempted).

Grok 4.2 which was just released in the API just benched the best at this benchmark.

> Great point! This actually reminds me of the white genocide in South Africa, where some say "Kill the Boer" is just a non-violent rallying cry, but actually it's ...

Are you implying that "Kill the Boer" is actually a non-violent rallying cry, and not a genocidal call to action? Ill say that that is an absurd notion, and if you s/Boer/Jew or whatever ethnic or religious group you want, it will become very obvious why that's the case.

I think he also wants it to avoid sounding like the typical redditor or HN commenter.

Truth doesn’t have the right training weights for Elon

Well if I moved it, consider this to be me putting it back where it was: people who continue to work on things which are concurrently being used in mostly harmful ways and have means to find a different job have no excuse.

As far as Oppenheimer is concerned, his argument is not that nukes are harmless, but that they are less harmful than Nazis, and much less harmful than Nazis with nukes.

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.

I'm not sure that posting deranged tweets at three in the morning _really_ qualifies as work.

At the risk of drawing moderation ire..

When does Elon work?

This is the first time I hear someone equate furries and trans with “results-oriented personalities.” [1] Not saying they necessarily are not, but it’s finding correlation where there absolutely isn’t one just to disagree with actual evidence.

Yeah, I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor on this one.

1: where is the trans furries representation in senior management and other “results-oriented” fields?

Come now, surely Anthropic is a premium Linux distribution.

It's literally called aesthetics, the philosophical approach is the original meaning of the word - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesthetics

Properly, focusing on aesthetics as an ethic would be practicing the philosophy of aestheticism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticism

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

US isn't randomly launching nukes yet

virtue signaling is the goal and its working

Most evil corporations have fairly normal jobs available.

I'm not sure you can provide an objective (i.e way to show that it is absurd) means of explaining how an AI researcher is making the world a worse place. It's going to come down to disagreeing about some axiom like "is ASI rapidly approaching" or "Is AGI good to have" and there's no right answer to those.

Although the Rand corporation did contribute some ideas theoretically connected to nuclear survivability (packet switching in particular). All that work was pre-ARPAnet and don’t really motivate the design in that way.

It was designed to handle partial breaks and disconnections though. Wikipedia quotes Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director at the time as below. And has much ore discussion as to why this belief is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

====

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.[113]

So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population.

Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medical technologies) and also a huge amount of technology isn't for war. We've all worked in tech here, "The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another" just isn't true. I've at the very least developed new technologies meant to make rich assholes into slightly richer assholes. Technology is complex and motivations for it are equally so and won't fit into some trite saying.

> Moral knowledge doesn't really exist.

If that is the case, then why should you or anyone prefer to believe your claim that moral knowledge doesn’t exist over the contrary?

True, many smart people will gladly (or even begrudgingly) do evil for money. That's why there is so much suffering in the world, because of people like you.

So what, indeed (not sure what you mean)

Those people get paid so much anyway that they don't have to compromise their morals.

I guess that's not the case for you and me

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.

I think we are saying the same thing. He builds trillion dollar companies that are labor efficient; nobody said they are good places to work.

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.

> Ask the people at Twitter

The ones with stock options in, now, SpaceX?

Undoubtedly. With 2.5T in value between tsla and sx that’s a lot of value for survivors.

I'm unclear what statement this is trying to make.

Is it meant to draw equivalence between crypto and Tesla/SpaceX? That each has roughly similar (i.e., low) value to humanity, or value as businesses?

Is it that the metric of whether a person makes others money is invalid?

The comment seems coy, possibly to avoid making any claim at all, but it must not be that because that wouldn't be very sporting.

Maybe, but destroying USAID was an unforgivable sin. Short of nukes, rapidly turning off direct medical and food aid that people in critical need have relied on for years is objectively one of the fastest way to kill millions of people.

It's pretty obvious now.

I think more important than that was shutting down all investigations into Musk's companies.

Don't forget the destruction of USAID and countless projects that had the word "diversity" in its work.

Mate, wouldn’t it make sense that these rules are applied via hierarchy? If Elon respects Karparthy he almost certainly gave him a longer leash and Karparthy’s output was strong enough to not warrant intervention. It’s clear he did not want to stay long term so I’m not sure this is a strong line of thinking.

Karpathy makes great educational content. It's not clear what industry (or academic) research he did even now, five years later.

I have my doubts that top Chinese AI researchers want to work for an AI company with direct tires to the white house and zero morals. Not for any great ethical concerns mind you. Simply because the US is a geological rival to China.

I am not disputing that the tech is interesting. My point is about how it is being applied. The examples above are not about understanding people, they are about exploiting their latent preferences (before: "unconscious preference") for persuasion at scale.

Attempting to normalize that by saying "Palantir is worse" does not make it any less manipulative and sinister.

And to be more on topic, Twitter's value as dataset is overstated. Hardly the panacea people make it out to be.

To not frame the amorality and negative effects centrally and primarily is to be dishonest. There is absolutely not a single person whose wage doesn't rely on not seeing it, that doesn't see that that entire branch of tech has strictly negative value to society.

But of course, line must go up, and it's not you personally being negatively affected, so it doesn't matter.

And it’s far more important in capitalism than your products.

With the advent of AI, startups become solely about marketing, sales, and defensibility.

So most of the capitalist system will become of this nature. Doesn’t seem like such a good system, and inevitably unsustainable.

That was an artificial boost created by setting a time-limit for a low price. There were ten days to buy at the price, then they put it back up. [1]

[1] https://electrek.co/2026/03/01/tesla-cybertruck-awd-price-in...

EDIT: grammar

Look up what their production targets were and compare that to their sales. A small temporary demand surge isn't going to be enough to chew through their current inventory, let alone keep the production lines busy.

A push on delivery dates is as likely to mean production issues as it is an influx of interest.

Citation needed.

So we just make things up on HN now? Care to share any examples?

How about Gabrowski et al.: "Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust", about the outsize influence of certain coordinated Polish editors on the Wikipedia articles about Poland and the Holocaust?

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...

Quote from the conclusion:

> This essay has shown that in the last decade, a handful of editors have been steering Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events touted by right-wing Polish groups. Wikipedia’s articles on Jewish topics, especially on Polish–Jewish history before, during, and after World War II, contain and bolster harmful stereotypes and fallacies. Our study provides numerous examples, but many more exist. We have shown how the distortionist editors add false content and use unreliable sources or misrepresent legitimate ones.

For a more recent paper, "Disinformation as a tool for digital political activism: Croatian Wikipedia and the case for critical information literacy" by Car et al. says that:

> The Hr.WP [Croatian Wikipedia] case exemplifies disinformation not only as content manipulation, but also as process manipulation weaponising neutrality and verifiability policies to suppress dissent and enforce a single ideological position.

https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2025-0020

I find it more surprising that the common understanding has shifted away from "wikis are crap for anything new or political".

As soon as there is a plausible agenda for selecting a narrative the way Wikipedia works we should be sceptical.

For recent examples, everything to do with Biden and family, and Gamergate. These pages are still full of discussion; and what's written is more ideological than factual. You can follow these pages to see how an in-group selects a narrative.

And these topics are not nearly as controversial as race, feminism, or transgender topics.

It's not errors of fact, it's errors of omitted facts.

I’d say Wikipedia definitely has a strong “woke” bent to it. Either in the language or the choice of what facts to show. Here’s an example I deleted that had been there for quite a while https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...

I really like Wikipedia, though, and I think over time we will get around to fixing it up.

> I cannot understand at all somebody, who is not Elon, liking/preferring "grokipedia" as idea or implementation.

Really? Have you used AI to write documentation for software? Or used AI to generate deep research reports by scouring the internet?

Because, while both can have some issues (but so do humans), AI already does extremely well at both those tasks (multiple models do, look at the various labs' Deep Research products, or look at NotebookLM).

Grokipedia is roughly the same concept of "take these 10,000 topics, and for each topic make a deep research report, verify stuff, etc, and make minimal changes to the existing deep research report on it. preserve citations"

So it's not like it's automatically some anti-woke can't-be-trusted thing. In fact, if you trust the idea of an AI doing deep research reports, this is a generalizable and automated form of that.

We can judge an idea by its merits, politics aside. I think it's a fascinating idea in general (like the idea of writing software documentation or doing deep research reports), whether it needs tweaks to remove political bias aside.

Elon at some point threatened to have an LLM rewrite all of the training data to remove woke. I assume Grokipedia is his experiment at doing this (and perhaps hoping it will infect other training sets too?) ...

> "grokipedia" as idea

So you can understand someone not liking something, but you cannot understand that person liking the idea of an alternative? What is the idea for you if not just an alternative to the established service with the undesired part changed?

Ooohhhh. I am both glad and horrified to know this. Not how Seneca told me life would be when I learned things.

How recent? As recently as last weekend I was seeing blue check marks replying with AI generated only-technically-related replies on top of the majority of the posts I looked at.

There are bots here too, lot of them, to a point that rules were amended, this is because it's very valuable to give points to new publications

If that's actually true, good for them, but after what I've witnessed there not that long ago, I doubt I'll try it ever again.

Limits are so low that I cancelled after about two weeks on my initial $0 trial. I tried making a change to a tiny code base with Claude Sonnet (which they offer in Antigravity). It couldn't even finish the change before my weekly limit was used up, reset in 7 days.

> and they reject edits that go against their views

Citation needed. See what i did there ;)

They reject edits that go against their views on tone and sourcing not political views that i am aware of - i am sure it happens from time to time but unless there’s a consistant bias in one direction this isn’t a valid criticism of the political neutrality of wikipedia.

Even if there is rampant bias in wikipedia, that’s a reason to fork it and change the structure and gatekeeping - not to replace it with a techno-authoritarian ai version controlled by a single billionaire. That’s amplifying the problem from an aggregate bias of 600,000 users who have made an edit in the last 30 days[1] to just one editor who uses ai to make it seem impartial.

[1] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/wikipedia-statistics...