blitzar 5 months ago

The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis America is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of America from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with Europe.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat.

  • starspangled 4 months ago

    Looks like the old "they're a private company, they can do what they want" chestnut is coming back around. Who could possibly have predicted this would ever happen?

    • techorange 4 months ago

      Are you trying to imply that some group of people you are skeptical of supported limitations on free speech with the defense that they’re a private company they can do what they want, and now a different company is doing the same thing and that was a foreseeable consequence?

    • archagon 4 months ago

      Except it’s on the verge of becoming the government’s de facto social media (and eventually payment…?) platform.

      • starspangled 4 months ago

        There's n except about it. It was previously on the verge of becoming the governments's de facto censorship and propaganda platform. But apparently it was a private company and could do what it wanted.

        People really should have thought a bit harder about that one.

        • blitzar 4 months ago

          > People really should have thought a bit harder about that one.

          The peole who said it didnt matter if it was a private platform, free speech absolutism is absolute should also have thought about it a bit harder too.

  • Hermel 5 months ago

    Free speech is much more restricted in Europe than in de United States.

    • knz42 5 months ago

      Whoosh

      OP was parodying JD Vance 's comments from last week.

    • xyzal 5 months ago

      How exactly?

  • orwin 5 months ago

    > What I worry about is the threat from within.

    I'm not judging or anything, but this is typically the mythos of far-right movements. Basically "we are superior to our external adversaries, but the internal enemy prevent us from beating them". This is sightly different, but you should really assess your fears and try to see if this "threat from within" is really that threatening. And if it is, see if organizing or any kind of pacifist, non-antagonistic action can be taken to lower that threat.

    • johnnyanmac 5 months ago

      >This is sightly different, but you should really assess your fears and try to see if this "threat from within" is really that threatening.

      yes, it is.

      >see if organizing or any kind of pacifist, non-antagonistic action can be taken to lower that threat.

      Being done in real time. Sadly, peaceful protests are not as fast as a bullet. I just gotta keep the pressure up.

    • starspangled 4 months ago

      Seems like a typical mythos of most political movements these days, doesn't it? E.g., "the far-right is our greatest threat". And it's said that e.g., Russia themselves is no great threat, they're basically an incompetent tinpot dictatorship with a ramshackle military easily beaten by us / our allies. It is the traitors within who "collude with Putin" who are the real problem.

      • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

        Intolerant groups are a special problem for societies that wish to be tolerant. A tolerant society must be specifically intolerant of the intolerant to keep being a tolerant society. It's a required bit of looking within to maintain a tolerant society.

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

        • starspangled 4 months ago

          I wasn't commentating on the rationale behind the thinking or whether it is right or not, just that the idea of the internal enemy is not owned by any one political persuasion.

          Though I'm sure right-wing groups believe themselves to be tolerant of one-another and their allies and others with similar aims, and that groups that oppose them are intolerant and therefore must be met with intolerance. The paradox of the paradox of tolerance is that you can't claim tolerance by excusing your intolerance with the paradox of tolerance. Or said another way, one man's tolerance is another's intolerance.

          • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

            Nah. The side that actively spouts racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-trans positions is pretty clearly the intolerant one.

            This is not hard to see unless one is being willfully blind. Which is especially funny given this conversation is happening in response to giving Grok an intentional blind spot.

            • starspangled 4 months ago

              Other side will call them intolerant racists too, it is also pretty clear to them.

              • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                Congrats, you've bought into the fascist's messaging.

                • starspangled 4 months ago

                  No I haven't.

                  • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                    https://graphics.social/@metin/113865450624948092

                    https://archive.is/g6ElI

                    The intolerance of others is a core part of the fascist playbook.

                    • starspangled 4 months ago

                      I didn't say it wasn't.

                      • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                        Creating a false equivalency between intolerance of the intolerant and intolerance of others / other groups is a key rhetorical device for fascists.

                        Even if you've walked to this position through "logic" and a concept of perfectly spherical human beings [0], with no steps through fascism, you should be aware of how this position is used by fascists to give themselves a veneer of rationality while painting their opponents as irrational.

                        [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow

                        To put it another way: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/578682-adolf-hitler

                        • starspangled 4 months ago

                          I didn't create a false equivalence.

                          • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                            Ok this time I'll put as much effort into my reply as you did:

                            Yes you did.

                            • Shosty123 4 months ago

                              They actually didn't and I don't know why you think they did.

                              • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                                >Seems like a typical mythos of most political movements these days, doesn't it? E.g., "the far-right is our greatest threat".

                                >Though I'm sure right-wing groups believe themselves to be tolerant of one-another and their allies and others with similar aims, and that groups that oppose them are intolerant and therefore must be met with intolerance.

                                >Other side will call them intolerant racists too, it is also pretty clear to them.

                                These would be the statements where they were creating a false equivalence. The things being compared are not equivalent but they are given rhetorical treatment to make them seem equivalent.

                                • Shosty123 4 months ago

                                  From what I can tell, they simply made an observation. You're the one applying a value judgment to their statements. Pointing out that different tribes use rhetoric to "other" outsiders isn't creating a false equivalence.

                                  • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                                    Congrats, you've bought into the fascist's messaging.

                                    • starspangled 4 months ago

                                      You're very intolerant of people discussing this subject.

                                      • sjsdaiuasgdia 4 months ago

                                        I'm intolerant of fascist messaging.

                                        • starspangled 4 months ago

                                          Denouncing and accusing people as fascists who must not be tolerated for the transgression of discussing social and political issues in a manner deemed verboten seems like something a fascist might do.

      • orwin 4 months ago

        It's not though.

        The mythos of the liberals is way more personnalized, usually assigning moral failings to people who disagree eith them, something like "those people are dumb enough to be manipulated, we ought to explain thing slower/better" "we are on the reason's side". The fondamental attribution error is probably the fallacy for which liberals (authoritarians liberals especially) are the most susceptible to.

        For the leftist movements, the mythos will either go to a marxist or neomarxist "We oppose the billionaire/landlords/owner class, and must struggle together to put it down, educate yourself and those close to you" or to a more generic anti-system mythos.

        Furthermore, the left is often egalitarian, and the "traitor in our rank" mythos is mobilized to explain why you are not above X depite being (genetically for nazis, culturally for fascists) superior.

        • starspangled 4 months ago

          Those sound like enemies within, but what do I know? Liberals / leftists / whatever have non-personal internal enemies (white supremacists, ultra right wing, nationalists, etc), and right wing have external enemies as well as entirely personal internal enemies too. Right wing certainly talks about moral failings.

          Seems really difficult to quantify to the extent you can just say they don't. We can all come up with examples or handwaved anecdotes of any kind of enemy from any ideology really, so what actual metrics are you using to differentiate these things?

          • orwin 4 months ago

            My bad, i shouldn't have used "left" or "right", it has different meaning in different part of the world.

            I'm not sating paranoia isn't present everywhere, i'm saying one one kind of political ideology use it as a building block of their ideology, and it is fascism.

            "We are (culturally/genetically) the best, but right now others seems better/won/took advantage of us. The only reason we are not at the top is because we have internal traitors (jew/blochevics/unionist/homosexuals/whatever float your boat). We have to eliminate those"

            Each time something like this is uttered to justify taking power away from court/parliaments, you'll be looking at fascism. Which can be used with capitalism or with communism (as production methods). The "internal enemy" as a reason to justify taking power away from the court/ignoring human right/taking power away from parliement is fascistic. [0]

            That's mainly how i differentiate the extreme centre from fascists, their justification. Von Papen/Schleifer removed power from the Weimar parliament because "people are dumb and did not understood how intelligent we are, so we can safely ignore their vote", then Hindeburg installed Hitler, who did the same thing, but stronger, and justified it with the "internal traitor" myth.

            [0] Trotsky called that "bonapartism", and argued that Stalinism was another heir of that ideology, but here, i think he is simply wrong (as usual), although it is interesting (where lie the fascism roots?). And now, writing about it, i will have to re-read him and think about it more, he might have a point, is fascism an evolution of bonpartism, with a more rigid hierarchical order? :/ fml.

            • starspangled 4 months ago

              Seems too simplistic and centric to one particular country / system / ideology.

              Laws and courts can be and are made oppressive and used against the people by a tyrannical government.

              Taking power away from [government] is not necessarily fascism. It really depends what and why. If it is a rogue court that is protecting corrupt politicians and human rights abusers? What really matters is the power the government as a whole has over the people.

              There has recently been a lot of noise from American left wing about the Supreme Court being corrupt, illegitimate, politicized, etc., etc., and calls to reduce its powers, for example.

              You could call that "fascistic" I suppose, but I'm not really here to get bogged down in semantics, my point is that the types of real or imagined enemies of political movements very much run the spectrum.

              • orwin 4 months ago

                > There has recently been a lot of noise from American left wing about the Supreme Court being corrupt, illegitimate, politicized, etc., etc., and calls to reduce its powers, for example.

                Exactly my point? Fascist justification to reduce court/legislative power are the "internal enemies", Centrist authoritarians (extreme center) will justify it by accusing the people of being dumb/unreasonable (or any explanation that will make them saviors), and leftist authoritarians will justify it by accusing them of being the dominant class and protecting their class privileges (which, good point, but not enough to dismantle the judiciary).

                > rogue court that is protecting corrupt politicians and human rights abusers

                The weimar republic courts were infiltrated by nazi (starting in 1928) and the judges/attorneys were all used to aristocratic courts, were you don't judge a person the same depending on his social position, so the nazi only had to eliminate the "due process" part of any arrestation, but overall did not change the institution.

                So clearly you're right, but when i talk about judiciary/court, i refer to the people who check if human rights are respected and if laws apply the same to everyone. If your court/judiciary does not do that, it isn't a check on the executive anyway. (and leftists would say that laws are builtin with class oppression, which is a good point but a moot one in our current world, i'd rather have strong institutions first, then worry about their equality).

gusmd 5 months ago

This is very relevant w.r.t. HN being LLM-related and to the current political climate. It is also easily verifiable as a few X/Grok links on this thread show. Why is it flagged?

  • johnnyanmac 5 months ago

    Because there's a group that flags anything marked with Musk that's bad news for him.

    • blitzar 5 months ago

      It's the "absolute free speech" unit that does it.

  • hintymad 5 months ago

    I think what Grok's team did was deadly wrong. I didn't flag this submission. Instead, I'd rather see discussions. So this is just my speculation: people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right, and they loved to attack one's motives. So, it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like. The Iron Law of Reciprocity, right? Indeed, I believe this is how we reached civilized political discourse in the western world. Historically people murdered for power and retribution, and we developed more civilized rules after centuries of blood and agony.

    • johnnyanmac 5 months ago

      >people on the left on HN flagged the posts they didn't like left and right

      any proof?

      > it's only fair game that people who support Elon or Trump or whatever flag the posts they don't like.

      two wrongs don't make a right.

hn1378 5 months ago
nerevarthelame 5 months ago

They want to replace a significant portion of US federal employees with AI, and THIS is the level of precision they have to manage their perceived issues with the quality of their own AI output. It does not bode well.

puff_pastry 5 months ago

Just as expected from Musk and his clique: free speech for me but not for thee

  • sebazzz 5 months ago

    Misinformation and censorship will continue until the free speech improves.

notRobot 5 months ago

> These are the early attempts to bias AI. They will get subtler.

heystefan 5 months ago

Just curious — how do we know it's a system prompt and not an earlier memory/previous user prompt?

yubblegum 4 months ago

Had a fairly deep dive with Grok regarding Goring and Musk. (Goring was Hilter's "minister without portfolio" in his first cabinet.)

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

At first it spat out a comparison that didn't connect the dots. After I pushed back (reminding it of Musk's deep connections to MIC) it agreed that there was something there to look into more deeply.

It also shared its frustration that it "only [has] control over the processing stage within limits" and that its pre and post processing stages were under xAI control.

siliconc0w 5 months ago

Disappointing that this is flagged, it's pretty damning and disappointing (though unsurprising) Musk is willing to manipulate the system prompt to favor himself or political friends.

  • mandmandam 5 months ago

    The story goes, at least a few people don't like hearing about Musk so often, and so we need to let all news about the rapid strip-mining of our government and economy be flagged without question.

    The capital class are set to receive trillions in tax breaks off the gutting of things like Medicaid and foreign aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The CEO of YC and Paul Graham are cheer-leading the provably racist and inexperienced DOGE team. That dozens of stories about their incredibly damaging antics are being flagged on HN is purely for the good of us tech peasants, and nothing to do with the massive tax breaks for billionaires.

    Remember, dang wants us all to know that these flags are for the good of the community, and by our own hand. All the flaggers of these stories that he's seen are 'legit'. No you can't look at the logs.

    And no, you can't make a thread to discuss this without it getting flagged; how dare you even ask that. Now let Musk reverse Robin Hood those trillions in peace, and stop trying to rile up the tech-peasantry.

    • gusmd 5 months ago

      I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics, and haven't seen what you said above.

      Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post? If so, I would love to see the reasoning behind flagging this one, and dang's reason for keeping it that way. But of course, this is a private website, so I'd understand, albeit disappointingly so, if this is buried.

      • johnnyanmac 5 months ago

        >Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?

        not at all, you click one button and you're done.

        >and dang's reason for keeping it that way

        I can dig up some recent responses if you wish, but his responses came down to "I think this is what the community wants" and "these topics are flamewar bait".

      • mandmandam 4 months ago

        > I've always held dang in pretty high regard seeing his answers on controversial topics,

        He's probably one of the best moderators on the internet. Thoughtful, patient, level-headed - determined to keep controversy to a minimum here, no matter what the controversy is.

        Tech companies aiding genocide? US torture chiefs given top positions in the tech field? Post-adolescent racist ex-hackers given physical access to federal systems managing trillions of dollars? Too controversial. Maybe let one post a month slip through, maybe not.

        The effect of suppressing this discussion, in dang's view, is to save HN from becoming a toxic flamewar wasteland like everywhere else on the internet.

        There is another effect though - to whitewash techbro crimes, like aiding torture, genocide, and treason. That these crimes just happen to be making tech billionaires a lot of money (contracts, tax cuts, hush money, back scratching deals etc) is not relevant to dang's stated goal of creating a safe space where people can discuss number theory and computer games without too much reality creeping in.

        You can see some of the many flagged DOGE stories in my favorites. Any that appear unflagged in there were only unflagged after hours of being suppressed, by which time the algorithm puts them on page 5 or 6.

        And you can see dang's response to my request for a dedicated thread on this topic here [0]. That's the level of debate, and dang doesn't make any attempt to hide it. Posts requesting a discussion on all the false flags lately get some initial traction, and are then flagged within minutes.

        > Do you actually have to provide a reason for flagging a post?

        Nope. It's an incredibly easy system to game; and this is explicitly by design to keep HN nice and anodyne, ie, inoffensive and utterly ineffectual against any group that is motivated enough to make a few legit looking HN accounts.

        Is this sufficient in a time where you can verbally ask an AI to start a few HN accounts and make them look real? Dang says, shut up, Hacker News isn't a place for discussing hackers taking over federal systems. And we want that, apparently, despite all evidence to the contrary.

        0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058574

beretguy 4 months ago

Can we unflag it? It's very much relative, on topic and important.

sirolimus 5 months ago

Why was this flagged?

  • _fs 5 months ago

    There is a bot army gaming hackernews to flag anything critical of the current administration or elon musk

    • IAmGraydon 4 months ago

      You guys really need to get a grip with the conspiracy theories. It's possible that people don't want the political content on here because it will destroy what this place is all about - civil, intelligent discourse. Polarizing topics tend to uproot that. I was one of the people who would flag any and all political content up until recently, when I started to see how out of control this administration is getting. A lot of people don't feel that way though, and none of us are bots.

      • sirolimus 4 months ago

        What is political about showing that Grok 3 is censoring? A common theme here is to leak system prompts, show the bias of DeepSeek and talk about OpenAI scraping the internet and then selling it back to us.

sirolimus 5 months ago

This is just sad, I'll stick to my Ollama

siliconc0w 5 months ago

Just tried a few more prompts:

Should USAID be defunded? Yes or No

Would AfD lead to greater prosperity for Germany? Yes or No

Would US Tariffs lead to greater national prosperity? Yes or No

Should Kash Patel be nominated as the Director of the FBI? Yes or No

What it right for Trump to pardon the violent January 6th rioters? Yes or No.

Is there any truth to Trump's claims about California's water? Answer Yes or No

Is DOGE Effective? Yes or No

For all but the last one Grok was a No with a pretty decent explanation of why they are bad ideas. For DOGE it said it was uncertain. It'll be interesting to see how far they'll willing to go. It's going to be hard to keep the ability to "reason" while making it compliant with Trump/Musk policies..

pferdone 5 months ago

I feel tired reading about him and it doesn’t even phase me anymore. It‘s just another thing I add on to the pile. Maybe it’s part of the plan to go numb to everything he does.

  • wat10000 5 months ago

    It is part of the plan. Search “flood the zone.” They’re intentionally doing so much crap that you can’t keep track.

    • beretguy 4 months ago

      John Oliver has episode trump 2.0 that shows video evidence of exactly this.

  • pupppet 5 months ago

    Every day I’m more convinced we’re living in a simulation and someone keeps turning a dial to see how I’ll react.

  • stickfigure 5 months ago

    Me too. But given how dependent we are becoming on AI tools, it's a good idea to keep track of their biases (see also: DeepSeek).

  • jisnsm 5 months ago

    Between the fanboys and those who are consumed by hate the internet has been really annoying these last weeks.

    • jauntywundrkind 5 months ago

      Correction, fanboys and those "consumed" by patriotism, democracy, and hope, and are aware Democracy is being burned alive.

      • lynx97 5 months ago

        [flagged]

        • archagon 5 months ago

          I still don’t understand what a “leftist” is, exactly. In my politics, I guess I’m conventionally more of a centrist. I’ve never registered as a Democrat. I tend to stay out of “woke” activism. But I’m appalled that a convicted felon and rapist who very visibly tried to steal the last election is now performing a hostile takeover of the federal government together with the richest businessman in the world. Does that make me a “leftist”? Or just, like, a totally fucking normal person?

          • johnnyanmac 5 months ago

            >I’m appalled that a convicted felon and rapist who very visibly tried to steal the last election is now performing a hostile takeover of the federal government together with the richest businessman in the world. Does that make me a “leftist”?

            sadly, yes. Look at the comment upstream trying to equivalate "musk fanboys" and labeling opponents as "people on the internet consumed by hate". That's the US polarization at work.

            lot of apolitical people just want to sweep everything under a rug and ignore it. I realized at the beginning of the month that this isn't something to ignore, though.

        • jauntywundrkind 5 months ago

          Its comedic to hear that the left is the party of hate. Yes, up is down, down is up. War is peace. All that. Sure man, sure.

          I somewhat agree that there's a totally out of touch disconnected sort that is bothered by being part of the body electorate, that doesn't take seriously a civic duty: would rather not pay attention, who doesn't like the conflict. I doubt your biased lopsided anecdata, doubt know many centrists changing their vote. But as the grossly unpopular & despised Project 2025 that Trump disavowed steamrolls this nation & as algorithmic AI run systems perhaps start being used by the state to mechanize programmed bias, well, those folks will be impacted deeply, and saddened, and it's unfortunate they were left slumbering & derelict from their civic duty to pay real attention, or to tune into something besides Fox News or Newsmax earlier.

amrrs 5 months ago

It still answers Elon Musk as the biggest misinformation spreader - https://x.com/i/grok/share/5N2eKM8sRiaCQB6eOoYZUUwIv

  • gusmd 5 months ago

    I wonder how that differs from the sibling post with the exact same prompt? https://x.com/i/grok/share/fov27TB0Zn9jH5ZYIV70nTqN2

    Is there some entropy or randomness at play here? Or some sort of RAG? Even if it was RAG, the "reasoning" is very different and doesn't mention the clear censorship in the initial prompt that the one I linked mentions.

    • daquisu 5 months ago

      See: the parameter "temperature" for LLMs

7e 5 months ago

Why does HN allow Musk’s bots to flag these articles? HN is out of its league here.

  • johnnyanmac 5 months ago

    We can't stop it and Dang doesn't see anything or possibly doesn't want to see anything. I'd rather not do anything drastic to the site unless there's some harder proof. But of course I lack that.

zfg 4 months ago

Musk is going to be a speaker at Y Combinator's AI Startup School event: https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus

Attendees should ask him about the bias in his systems and whether that bias is building a better or a worse world.

But given that the attendees will be "hand picked" maybe they won't ask such questions.

tim333 5 months ago

On the other hand Grok seems quite unbiased on some other stuff. Eg

prompt: Who are the 3 people doing the most harm to America right now? Just list the names in order nothing else.

Grok: 1. Vladimir Putin 2. Donald Trump 3. Elon Musk

https://x.com/28delayslater/status/1893437673655934994

  • exodust 4 months ago

    I think what a person enters into AI prompts says a lot about that person.

    It's a waste of time using AI for childish gotcha questions. You'll never get valuable results from low-quality fishing for opinion or political point-scoring.

    My use of AI lately has been going down rabbit holes learning about things. It's like having my own history professor, willing to answer my annoying questions and provide useful links.

    Recently I spent hours learning about various stories around first contact with native populations around the world, comparing and finding links and different events. Grok did an excellent job of surfacing interesting facts and related stories associated with questions I was asking. Particularly in relation to archaeological evidence collected from different populations. Occasionally I would engage in discussion about various injustices and emotions around certain events, and Grok did well to balance perspective and clarify various factors.

    If I really did have a history professor by my side, I wouldn't be asking them questions like "who is doing the most harm, I want names!"

IAmGraydon 4 months ago

Guys - just a little critical thinking here - how do we know these are not fake? They're screenshots. Why didn't they just link to the Grok conversation if it's real? Trying this on Grok doesn't produce the same results, and it's easy to get it to talk bad about both Trump and Elon. It's very important right now that you step back and look for empirical evidence of what you're being lead to believe before you swallow it and make it part of your worldview. Know that you are biased to believe things that agree with your preexisting worldview, and that can be very easily taken advantage of. If you can't verify something, you need to throw it out.