Hacker News: notthemessiah

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:25:45 +0000

Elon was not invited, and he still insisted on showing up. That makes Elon the asshole.

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:35:56 +0000

I guess not being able to yell fire in a movie theater is censorship too. There's good reason most civil people agree that there's a time or place for certain words and actions, and incitement is frowned upon.

It says a lot that the only "free speech" you care about is the hate speech that infringes on others civil rights and creates a chilling action on civil participation for minorities, yet you seem to not care one bit when Erdogan cracks down on opposition to his authoritarianism and Musk helps out, you welcome that government censorship.

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:27:24 +0000

Vernon wasn't an official, but he's the first guy the officials called to help and come up with a plan. Elon Musk wasn't trying to help, he was trying to get publicity. Had anyone listened to Musk, the children would have died. I think someone who doesn't know what they are doing wedging themselves in a life or death situation while arguing with the experts with the knowledge and experience wasting their time with cockamamie plans is a villain in my eyes. Elon Musk is basically Syndrome in the Incredibles movie: angry and jealous that he isn't the center of attention.

And if it isn't clear today, Musk is clearly a villain. The Thai cave rescue was when he showed his real face to the world by being a total and utter jerk to the real heroes.

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:26:22 +0000

Which is why I said "one of". And by "one of" I mean one of the leaders of the whole operation, someone who lives in Chiang Rai and has extensive knowledge of the cave complex, who coordinated Thai government working with the British Cave Rescue Council.

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:36:16 +0000

You're confusing moderation with censorship. Censorship is when governments tell Twitter to silence people, this went up by 66% under Musk if you can read the link I posted (try reading something longer than a tweet, you might learn something). Less moderation means people can say slurs, post deepfakes of children, and make the place an extremely hostile environment filled with racists, slanderers, bots, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy nutjobs, which you seem enthused about.

Maybe you don't know about the Grok deepfake story because you don't see far outside your filter bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok_sexual_deepfake_scandal

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:26:26 +0000

In 2014, he fired his PR person when she asked for a raise (she was very good at her job).

In Spring of 2018, investigative reporters at the LA Times found that Elon acted like a tyrant removing yellow hi-vis safety tape at Tesla factories because he didn't like the aesthetic, which lead to more workplace accidents. This was when Elon started getting extremely adversarial with the press.

https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-tesla-factor...

A few months later, during the Thai cave rescue, he flaunted some kind of coffin made from spare rocket parts as his plan to save children who were trapped in a Thai cave, and when one of the actual rescuers Vernon Unsworth told him the cave was too narrow for that to be of use, Elon called him a "pedo" (note, Elon also begged to go to Jeffrey Epstein's parties).

It all went downhill from there.

New comment by notthemessiah in "X Is Bad, Though"

notthemessiah — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:14:06 +0000

> Algorithm is much improved.

I can't see anything past all the blue checkmarks who pay for visibility. I've had to run the "block the blue" userscripts for hours just to make the site usable.

> WAY less censorship.

You could power a datacenter with how fast Orwell is spinning in his grave, as Elon's Xitter approved 83% of censorship requests by authoritarian governments (compared to pre-Elon Twitter's 50%). But I guess letting Grok undress children means "less censorship" for you specifically.

https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

> Community notes are the best "fact check" type implementation I've yet to see.

This is the only thing I agree with.

> Better bot control

Elon just crashed out when Ukraine bombed a Russian data center, and right-wing account activity dropped on Xitter.

> More responsiveness to technical issues.

Things breaking and then getting reverted isn't better than things not breaking in the first place

> And some of the most insufferable voices seem to have moved to Bluesky.

It probably would have been better if Twitter itself had moved to AT Protocol, as it's the future. But I'm happy to leave the people using Grok to undress pictures of children on Xitter.

New comment by notthemessiah in "US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report"

notthemessiah — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:17:00 +0000

It was of course Palantir's Project Maven which lead us to drop a $2.5M missile on over 120 schoolchildren:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/

New comment by notthemessiah in "AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US Military attack"

notthemessiah — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:13:09 +0000

There's a big difference between "AI is creating misinformation and intelligence failures that could compound, especially given the fact that in a pre-AI world we came to the brink of nuclear warfare" vs the AI Doomerism of "Super-intelligent AI will kill us all in some mysterious way" of the AI "safety" TESCREAL cult, often used to hype up their own product capabilities.

New comment by notthemessiah in "AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US Military attack"

notthemessiah — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:04:17 +0000

In other cases, use of Palantir's AI-powered Project Maven lead to us using our long range $2.5M Tomahawk missiles to blow up an Iranian school along with over 100 schoolchildren, and humans in the loop did nothing to stop the accumulation of intelligence failures from the overreliance on AI. Palantir-funded politician JD Vance said he's doing God's work and "if that leads to the end times, OK".

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/

New comment by notthemessiah in "AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US Military attack"

notthemessiah — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:49:17 +0000

It's the same pattern we see in predictive policing where "AI" is being used to manufacture probable cause, but instead of just using it to harass minorities as cops do, the people doing the policing are people actively trying to start Armageddon and the end times because they believe they are doing God's work. So they spend our long-range missiles stockpile to blow up schools because AI told them to.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/02/jd-vance-god...

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-iran-school-attack/

New comment by notthemessiah in "US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons"

notthemessiah — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:37:23 +0000

The only reason why Putin is there now is because we strongly backed Boris Yeltsin despite his unpopularity, we interfered with the 1996 election in order to prevent Communist Party challenger Gennady Zyuganov from winning re-election amidst disastrous liberalization policies and lowering life expectancy, and then Boris Yeltsin ended up appointing Putin, who did war crimes in Chechnya in an effort to appear tough as a strongman against the separatist threat. In 2001, the NYT had op-eds from Thomas Friedman that were "Rootin' for Putin". Had we not interfered, we probably would have had another Gorbachev.

New comment by notthemessiah in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

notthemessiah — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:22:32 +0000

Good:

The Open Web

Bad:

Insta requiring login Facebook requiring login Xitter requiring login

New comment by notthemessiah in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

notthemessiah — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:17:01 +0000

Yes, you want a space only for those who think the same as Elon Musk, with his thumb being pressed down on the algorithm which you have no choice but to use.

On Bluesky/ATProto, I am free to chose my own algorithm or my own client software and affiliate with the people I want to. My data is always my own because I can host it on my own PDS. On Mastodon, I have similar freedoms, and you can opt into bridging ATProto with ActivityPub through Bridgy Fed. I like the freedom of the open web, but I guess not everybody thinks the same as me.

New comment by notthemessiah in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

notthemessiah — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:03:54 +0000

Bluesky, like Mastodon, is built on an open network on open source code. Run your own data server and moderation services that cater to your needs. Many are already doing it: Northsky, Eurosky, Blacksky, etc. If you want to live in a safe space isolated from the mainnet and its allegedly toxic users, you can do that too: Roundabout is built on ATProto but run on its own network, also Truth Social and Threads are forked versions of Mastodon but federated with nobody (Threads used to have opt-in Mastodon federation before Facebook decided they no longer want users to be able to do that).

New comment by notthemessiah in "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"

notthemessiah — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:56:12 +0000

Meta also including CSAM in their ads, computer generated in the US and real abuse materials in South Asia:

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-failed-to-catch-hundreds-of...

New comment by notthemessiah in "Julia 1.13 highlights"

notthemessiah — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 03:51:28 +0000

I love Julia, but I feel two annoyances right now with the ecosystem.

Interactive programming seems to be having a schism between Pluto, a reactive notebook like Observable, and Bonito, a more imperative notebook like Jupyter from the creator of plotting library Makie.

The other annoyance is that the packaging ecosystem is tied very closely to Github and Gitlab as the only alternative, in an era where Microsoft is killing Github reliability, and many new projects are moving to Tangled (on the AT Protocol network) and Forgejo (with Codeberg as the flagship), which has no packaging support from JuliaHub.

New comment by notthemessiah in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

notthemessiah — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:50:03 +0000

If he salutes like a Nazi, pushes antisemitism like a Nazi, and promotes Nazi policies, he's probably a Nazi (or at best, functionally indistinguishable). Plus, his parents had close ties to Nazis:

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/27/elon_musk_south_afric...

New comment by notthemessiah in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

notthemessiah — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:46:05 +0000

Looks like data/account portability is in the works: https://swicg.github.io/activitypub-data-portability/lola

But at ATProto/Bluesky, account portability was a consideration from the start.

New comment by notthemessiah in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

notthemessiah — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:44:07 +0000

Bluesky Social is more useful for news. I can use custom clients such as https://sill.social/ which just aggregate the links and commentary from my feeds, and catch up on what news is important to the ppl I'm following.

Whenever I check X, it's always just misinformation, and it's impossible to see what people actually say because bluechecks are always the first to show up in the algorithmic ranking. On political commentary: they were dying hard for Graham Platner saying he was the only option, but then Troy Jackson who replaced him did better in the polls.