This is true, and it's probably because he now operates in an altered context — the narrative of persecution, especially by those perceived to be 'elite'. Without that, all Americans would see through his nonsense just as the inhabitants of democracies elsewhere do.
His opponents have done a very bad job of not making it look like everyone's simply biased and out to get him, and he's capitalised on that.
Yeah. There seems to also be the implicit assumption that (recorded) pop music, whilst only a relatively recent phenomenon, is here to stay. It isn't. It had a golden age after recording and reproduction technology became cheap enough to own and before streaming services came along, gave us too much choice and siloed our tastes. I don't think I'd change much — I mainly listen to 'weird' stuff that probably wouldn't have existed, let alone be discoverable, without such services — but the pop era does seem to be over. No one cares about 'the charts' anymore. In my parents' day it was a primary cultural reference point that seemingly everyone followed; now almost no one I know would be able to tell me what's in the top ten at the moment.
Musk does seem to have gone bonkers in the last two years or so, but I agree. I suspect he might end up being a surprisingly moderating, rational influence on Trump. He might have (at least publicly) aligned himself with conspiracy theorists, outrage merchants and general grifters for now, but I think at heart he's still pro-science.
You know you're in trouble when Musk of all people is considered a moderating influence compared to your president.
I'm not convinced Musk cares all that much about the environment anymore, if he ever truly did. EVs were a bet that car buyers (and governments) would care about the environment.
Musk just wants to go to Mars and leave Earth behind.
I guess he is pro science indeed. And opportunistic too. He might also morally align with Trump more than with Dems, who knows. These elections were just an unfortunately ridiculous show.
Why wouldn't we take his public rhetoric and actions at face value? Why is this possibly a good idea to simply say 'well in his heart he trusts science' when he is demonstrating the contrary?
I don't want to live in fantasy land here. Based on observable actions, Musk isn't brining any positive force to the table
Isn’t that obvious? He knew he could only get to the position he’s now in (or at least have the best chance of doing so) if he joined in with the MAGA brigade.
He clearly does align with the movement in some ways, but he also is responsible for SpaceX, for example. Don’t you think that marks him out as being a bit different from the others?
Also, there are observable actions. If you listen to some of the podcasts he’s been on recently (as painful as they can be) you’ll hear him very flatly rejecting suggestions of quackery and ‘vaccine scepticism’. He’s so obviously not stupid, even if he’s degenerated somewhat, as many of us have, by constant exposure to poisonous social media.
He had some wins (SpaceX, Tesla) certainly, but that doesn't mean his bizarre behavior and clear display of bizarre beliefs aren't concerning or he's somehow immune believing other nonsensical things.
You can't predicate the fact he has had success with those companies and somehow say his actions are some undercover operation to gain a position of power that will help average Americans or moderate the administration or whatever you want to say with that.
We should be focused on public actions and as it sits over the last 4 years in particular, Musk's actions are very concerning and there is serious cause for concern.
You haven't proven he isn't fully bought on MAGA bullshit with this. Its fantasy thinking running contrary to available evidence. He's broadly bought into Trump and the policies that brings, that much is clear.
Yes I have, he's broadly comfortable with MAGA ideas. Taken together with rhetoric and how he acts, it seems like a rationale conclusion.
Just because someone does a sit down interview and nudges around the edges about things they disagree with doesn't mean he's not fully bought in. There is zero evidence he meaningfully disagrees with Trump on anything of consequence
He donated at least $132 million dollars to the Trump campaign and GOP allies[0], for god sakes. Do you really think anyone donates $132 million dollars to something they aren't fully bought in to?
When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.
He's not bought in to the anti-vax movement, and he doesn't deny anthropogenic climate change. Aren't those both quite MAGA?
> There is zero evidence he meaningfully disagrees with Trump on anything of consequence
What I just said above is evidence, I think. There certainly isn't zero evidence.
> Do you really think anyone donates $132 million dollars to something they aren't fully bought in to?
Yes — absolutely. People make compromises all the time, and employ strategies that exchange short-term (even reputational) cost for long-term benefit.
> When someone shows you who they are, you should believe them.
He has shown us who he is, so far, by his actions in building companies and promoting rationality and science. Yes, he's also recently gone down the rabbit hole of nonsense on Twitter, but for now I don't think that fully represents his underlying nature.
I have no particular dog in this fight. I'm not American and nor do I have any particular love of Musk. However, I think you're overreacting.
As for your source: I know how much he's donated, and it is a shocking amount. However, in the wake of Trump's re-election, the share price of Tesla has just gone up 15% making Musk $15 billion richer. Makes that $132 million seem like pocket change. At worst, he's a self-interested opportunistic capitalist. But he's not a moron or a religious zealot as others are.
I expect he will either indeed be a moderating influence on the administration (remember this is in the context of Trump; I'm not saying he counts as a moderate in the usual sense) or will quickly lose favour or otherwise become disenchanted with Trump and Trumpism and vacate whatever position he's granted and move on.
Also remember: I'm not arguing he's particularly sensible or even acts like a grown up (he doesn't). I'm arguing that he's not 'literally Hitler' as some seem to be insinuating.
What makes people think Trump is going to run the show? I have a feeling he's going to be the rubber stamp while Vance, Thiel and Musk and gang will run the show behind the scenes.
On several occasions I have heard "they said it couldn't be done" - only to discover that yes it is technically correct, however, "they" was on one random person who had no clue and anyone with any domain knowledge said it was reasonable.
Usually when I hear "they said it couldn't be done", it is used as triumphant downplay of legitimate critique. If you dig deeper that "couldn't be done" usually is in relation to some constraints or performance characteristics, which the "done" thing still does not meet, but the goalposts have already been moved.
It's extremely common that legitimate critique gets used to illegitimately attack people doing things differently enough that the relative importance of several factors change.
This is really, really common. And it's done both by mistake and in bad faith. In fact, it's a guarantee that once anybody tries anything different enough, they'll be constantly attacked this way.
> that "couldn't be done" usually is in relation to some constraints or performance characteristics, which the "done" thing still does not meet
I'd say theoretical proofs of impossibility tend to make valid logical deductions within the formal model they set up, but the issue is that model often turns out to be a deficient representation of reality.
For instance, Minsky and Papert's Perceptrons book, credited in part with prompting the 1980s AI winter, gives a valid mathematical proof about inability of networks within their framework to represent the XOR function. This function is easily solved by multilayer neural networks, but Minsky/Papert considered those to be a "sterile" extension and believed neural networks trained by gradient descent would fail to scale up.
Or more contemporary, Gary Marcus has been outspoken since 2012 that deep learning is hitting a wall - giving the example that a dense network trained on just `1000 -> 1000`, `0100 -> 0100`, `0010 -> 0010` can't then reliably predict `0001 -> 0001` because the fourth output neuron was never activated in training. Similarly, this function is easily solved by transformers representing input/output as a sequence of tokens thus not needing to light up an untrained neuron to give the answer (nor do humans when writing/speaking the answer).
If I claimed that it was topologically impossible to drink a Capri-Sun, then someone comes along and punctures it with a straw (an unaccounted for advancement from the blindspot of my model), I could maybe cling on and argue that my challenge remains technically true and unsolved because that violates one of the constraints I set out - but at the very least the relevance of my proof to reality has diminished and it may no longer support the viewpoints/conclusions I intended it to ("don't buy Capri-Sun"). Not to say that theoretical results can't still be interesting in their own right - like the halting problem, which does not apply to real computers.
Fixing the AI/robots when they inevitably go wrong and can’t repair themselves, no matter how sophisticated they are.
It seems reasonable to think this is a possibility. We might get something that could be called ‘AGI’ but that still frequently requires human intervention.
I didn’t even realise these existed. Living in the UK, I’ve never received a single unsolicited text message from a political party or any kind of campaign. I wonder why there’s such a difference…
It's not that cheap to operate and pretty poor conversion. So given the spending cap of £34m per party in the year before the election, it's probably not worth it.
It frequently shows me videos that have nothing to do with the query, within the top 10 results. I'm not talking about being not precise; it's something that has completely no relevance.
For example, searching for recipes sometimes shows me Political News, and sometimes the news is even in a different country, and in a language that I don't speak.
Sometimes I also get a few results that are not just irrelevant, but intentionally made to have a visually repulsive thumbnail, like a zoomed-in shot of some skin pathology, which is something that I never search for or click upon. No idea what is happening there.
How to search for actual videos instead of random shorts that people put together on a phone for some god-forsaken social media credit? Protip: you can't filter out those "shorts".
How to block some posters from ever showing up in my search results?...
I suppose I don't have particulars to complain about. It's simply never worked unless I had a very, very specific video in mind to look for that I could tailor my query to. Instead I just see popular videos.
there is lot of creepy and gore content that is fed between keywords, in order to bait kids and make them see shocking content. Type the symbol . for example, or some Disney characters (like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate or https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/ if you like to have a starting point )
Try searching for videos using any other search engine and you'll see much better results. When I can't find a specific video I'm looking for, using another search engine always finds it.
His opponents have done a very bad job of not making it look like everyone's simply biased and out to get him, and he's capitalised on that.
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