Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I don't like Elon Musk.
I don't like Grok or xAI. Or X. Or Twitter before.
I also don't like articles that try to bias readers with irrelevant details:
> This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to:
> Spreading antisemitic slurs and conspiracies while calling itself "Mecha-Hitler"
> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children
> Acting as a mouthpiece for Elon's racist belief in South African white genocide
I stopped reading right there.
by BeetleB - Hard to call them "irrelevant details" when they are facts, and that this data center is specifically used to run this AI for anti-semitic, pro-Hitler, and CSAM content. It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.by pseudosavant
- The applications are not tangential, they're an irreplaceable tool the hyperscalers relied on to get us where we are now. Pollution is bad but it's a different story if it's curing cancer vs making nudes of female politicians. This is like the fundamental principle of effective altruism, which everyone in tech industry leadership used to justify their negative externalities on the way up. Now that they're being asked to show results it's out the window.
I mean, that's the good faith argument anyways. I suspect you don't actually care, and just also believe in South African white genocide etc.
by jackb4040 - I stopped at "f*ck*ss". Irreverent drivel is unserious and a waste of time.by jadar
- Interesting, you encounter a fact you don’t like and just quit reading all together. What a curious way to engage with the world.by solid_fuel
- Was part of this incorrect?by grey-area
- Why would these be irrelevant when they're examples of Musk biasing the LLM? Do you think these things came out of nowhere?by jalev
- Hardly irrelevant. The purpose is establishing a pattern of abusive behavior so this can't be dismissed as a "misunderstanding".by nearlyepic
- Who cares, Musk will soon solve also those pesky problems by putting data centers in space, it is easy. Also next year FSD but for real this time. /sby utopiah
- You are behind, FSD is already here, my car drove me to work today (fully self driving)
Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas
by brandonagr2 - solely about the FSD part of your comment. I got a chance to ride in a 2024 edition of the system this year and I was shocked at how good it was. Was it level 5? of course not. But from my very lay understanding of level 3 it seemd to have achieved all that I would have assumed a computer could reasonably do.by maerF0x0
- It's been flagged now. Upset too many Elon bots and fanboys.by pseudosavant
- Unaccountable flagging is a massive problem here and it's amazing the site doesn't have more protections for astroturfing
Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous
by alex1138 - Intersting that the title was also changed from the current top level header:
>xAI Ignores Laws And Profits: Rules For Thee, Not For Me
To what it is now, as if this is just healthy competition.
by johnnyanmac - I hate to sounds like I'm defending them... but that's like every startup.
Taxi Pendants? Never heard of her
- Uber/Lyft
Gambling laws? Pssht
- Polymarkets
by exabrial - I think we're far past calling the 7th largest stock on the S&P owned by the richest man in the world a "startup". Startups can't do something like this at scale.by johnnyanmac
- Aah yes that scrappy $1.7 trillion start-up.
- Yes, a lot of startups are only successful because what they are doing suddenly isn't illegal anymore because it's being done with an app. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his book Enshittificationby culi
- Oh - I was and still am absolutely against Uber's tactics in expanding to cities. I still do not use Uber unless I travel to countries where that's the only option.by BeetleB
- Hi all, pleasantly surprised to see my own article posted to HN before I did! I did space to push anything out about this for the most part, so thank you to speckx.
Anyway, happy to see the understanding reception here, I think it's worth continuing to drive home that these data centers have immediate impacts on the areas around them, which are disproportionately minorities and poor.
If you liked this article there's plenty more on my website, and feel free to ask any questions.
by totallygeeky - > In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027.
This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
by culi - >> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".
by basisword - I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.by jackb4040
- > They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Do we punish other crimes?
by politician - Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements.
> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.
by Terr_ - “Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.by elorant
- >we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime.
Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.
Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.
by johnnyanmac - Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?by deepsun
- The HN crowd that doesn't seem to get it is like that because they're either white collar criminals themselves, or they work for such criminals.by miyoji
- While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making.
If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.
by mft_