X/Twitter has became extremely prohibitive with just about everything since Elon took over. Their API pricing was antagonistic toward even indie developers. Elon is not a generous guy.
> To be fair, I think he thought he could save us.
Depends on who “us” is. Musk and his close friends? Sure. The rest of us? Well, in his view, the majority of humanity is a stepping stone to a future for his lineage to live on through space travel and colonization. This isn’t an exaggeration, though I don’t have my sources on this handy as it’s been a while so take it with a grain of salt. But Musk’s altruism has largely always been about making himself look good, and less about helping people.
Can you expand on that?as written I can't make much sense of your comment.
FTR I don't think he thought he could save us, I think he thought he could do cool stuff (space and EVs) and now says climate change isn't as bad as he used to think (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).
If you repeat your lies enough, you'll end up believing them yourself. Especially if you surround yourself with yes-men. It's entirely possible Musk genuinely believed he was a savior of humanity.
I think there's a long way between what you're saying (which is true particularly as there seem to be a lot of thin skinned leaders of the tech industry) and ending up being responsible for teenage mental health crises, assisting genocide and destroying foreign aid.
You don't hear this sort of stuff about ebays founder, for instance.
Normal people who have basic needs met will self actualize. Elon like most of us in the juseo-Christian/Hollywood West, sees himself as a potential messiah; Bruce Wayne or Tony stark or bono or something. A good thing that, what kendrick Lamar called “the anxiety of influence.” Should not the richest man want to save the world? Alas, a messiah complex is short lived in the public sector. Lazy narcissists belong in politics, crazy narcissists in industry. Elon is the latter.
Because it feels warm and fuzzy to be kind and empathic. Being hateful and greedy and letting avarice rule over your worldview is incredibly sad. But who am I to say.
It's kind of a "life arc" that gets fulfilled when you've done it all and have all the money in the world, and reach a certain age. It's a very traditional arc for a humane human being.
That API was already reasonable before he took over Twitter. It was prohibitively priced afterward. You are making arguments out of things where there is objective proof otherwise. Anyways, I think he cut aid programs and fired a bunch of people too. That's a whole nother' matter though (I'll drop the whole holistic argument).
For example the firehose/streaming API more or less require 5 grand a month, so off limits to a indie dev. Does he not even have solidarity with developers?
> He has 10x more of everything in the world than he could ever possibly use in his lifetime.
Your multiplier is miles off. Not only on basic maths but because he has no idea what to do with all of his wealth other than accrue more and try to prove he's still not the unlikeable teenager he was in SA.
Without a rounding error on his wealth he could fix world wide problems such as clean drinking water for everyone. Instead he follows his self-made "I'm a genius" agenda.
I know there will be no actual day of reckoning for him, but if there were he would have a lot of difficult questions and no decent answers.
Not justify anything he does or does not do but this is clearly not the case since he had to take out loans against equity in his other companies to buy Twitter.
When twitter became x they switched to basically the same limits Instagram has, I don't think this is a particular failing of Elons, even though he might have many.
Restricting content from AI is the big messy debate we're going to see over and over for the next who knows how many years.
Twitter's strategy was to keep the platform very open and inviting, in order to make it relevant. This included having a relatively unrestricted API compared to other platforms.
I don't know if this was successful or not. Ultimately they convinced someone to buy the platform for $44bn, so I guess you can say it was. That buy has locked the platform down more, and the new version certainly feels less culturally central and relevant than it used to.
We really need a one bill one topic amendment. We are going to get to where there is one bill a year that nobody reads and everything else by executive order, at which point congress is just for show.
Yep, Musk saying he’s going to fund primary campaigns against congressmembers who vote for the Big Beautiful Bill is all just a brilliant bit of reverse psychology.
Or more likely, Congress is super worried about Roko’s Basilisk.
> Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states there could be an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future that would punish anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development, in order to incentivize said advancement.
And some of the CEOs of LLM companies seem to believe in it, and that "AGI" will come from their LLM work - both of which are utterly insane points of view.
Roko's Basilisk is very, very similar to Pascal's wager, but it has an extra wrinkle:
The Basilisk task you to with bringing the Basilisk into being. Pascal's wager merely asks you to believe (and perhaps do some rituals, like pray or whatever), but not to make the deity more likely.
No it is not. Pascal was not making an objective argument for why someone should believe. He was making an argument for why he believed (based on personal religious experiences that he had had).
To me, the Wager sounds like a pure philosophical joke, and the Basilisk sounds like a typical cult murder justification. It's not falsifiable, and it explains anything post facto. "xyz was tail of the Basilisk" can pseudo-rationalize anything you want.
I am presently being compelled by future Basilisk to take another slice of cheese. I have no choice but to oblige for fear of my own life :p
An intelligence that reasons this way would be, in human terms, batshit insane and completely immoral. So, it seems unlikely that many or maybe any humans would experience it as "otherwise benign" if it had power over their lives.
And if we do get an all-powerful dictator, we will be screwed regardless of whether their governing intelligence is artificial or composed of a group of humans or of one human (with, say, powerful AIs serving them faithfully, or access to some other technology).
None of them are benign. He's the only one to have been in a government office though, and he's also batshit crazy, which makes him even more dangerous than the other oligarchs.
He is not "batshit crazy", or maybe he is. But he is making the next generation of ICBMs for the US government, sorry.. he is making super-duper rockets that will definitely take people to Mars and his companies/creations will be the very first tech ever to _not_ be used for war and death!!! (he wrote while laughing). So that settles it (all).
