When did America stop dreaming big? On colonizing/exploring Mars and hating on Musk

[concernUrsus]

https://electrek.co/2025/10/13/elon-musks-spacex-and-xai-are-buying-teslas-unsold-cybertrucks/

Space X and X-AI is buying Teslas, specifically Cybertrucks. Not that it is surprising. I do wonder if there is any laws being broken... Also, not that the laws would be enforced anyways.

Oh, it also appears to be done to get government's EV tax credit before the tax credit is gone.

 

[concernUrsus]

How much of that revenue was his own companies buying from Tesla.

Part of the sell/buy is to meet the deadline of EV credit phasing out. So Tesla has also gained government EV credit.

 

[concernUrsus]

It doesn’t take nearly as long as you’d think to hire someone else to play for you just so you can try to seem cool.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-admits-to-paying-people-to-play-video-games-for-him-2000552872

I wonder did he outsource it to China/India/Africa or he used local hire in Texas, USA.

 

[concernUrsus]

The cave incident is also when I have started seeing the problem with Musk. I was going to put in a preorder for a model 3 at the time.

 

[concernUrsus]

He may have paid too much for it, but I think he wanted it as a propaganda platform from the get-go.

I sometime wonder how many of them consider what they are doing it as a propaganda or they are literally that delusional about the reality.

 

[concernUrsus]

There are fair amount of people I know that buy into Tesla's high and its full self-driving ability. I have not tried Tesla myself (and obviously no its self-driving). However, my understanding is Tesla's self-driving is just more aggressive on marketing and have less safe guards. I do not know their opinion on Muck himself (and I do not want to find out anyways).

 

[concernUrsus]

… But why? Can’t you get essentially the same thing by asking ChatGPT or Gemini, or Claude to “Give me a Wikipedia-style encyclopedia entry for [X] person.”? I did that with our organization’s CEO and it’s spot on. What is the benefit of building a persisted encyclopedia of that? In the AI era, who is going to navigate to a persisted encyclopedia to find information spit out by an AI?

It’s reason for existence is to put an infantile middle finger up to Wikipedia because he doesn’t like it.

I do not mind a compete website. I think it is good to diversify even for something like Wikipedia. Not that I would trust anything from Musk though.

 

[concernUrsus]

First off, Twitter, xAI and Grok aren’t fundamentals for a person to live, unlike basic utilities, such as power or water. Secondly, not sufficiently investing in renewables is nowhere near as “asshole-ish” as amplifying white supremacist voices or supporting white supremacist ideas, things Musk has done and continues to do.

If my grocery store was run by neo-Nazis… you bet your ass I’d switch stores to one that wasn’t and I’d make sure that as many people as possible knew about the problems with the first.

Beyond it is not fundamentally for living. Twitter, xAI, Tesla, Grok, etc. are not good enough vs. the competition either. There are many other offerings. In that specific example, the person could just go to the actual lounge company website (or airport map) to verify.

 

[concernUrsus]

It speaks to that people have looked at Grok and found it unfit for purpose. Oh, and it's good as the punch line of a joke from time to time.



That's nice. That and $15 will get you a cup of coffee.



Huh? Bub, if you can figure out how to use LLMs, I'm pretty sure that anyone can figure it out. And the idea that a company must adopt LLMs because everyone else might adopt LLMs is just FOMO, not sound business logic. And right now the ROI just isn't there. LLMs are useful if they're free/exceedingly cheap, but they require constant human supervision. Hard to get an ROI when the tool causes more work than it solves.

Agree. In theory if the computer power (chip + actual power) is cheaper, I can see they are useful. They are certainly better than Microsoft Word's spell/grammar check. They are also fair good at pulling articles. Though I have already caught them being incorrect couple of times. Statements that are not actually supported by the articles or word it stronger than the articles suggest. I have also seen summary report from YouTube AI that is incorrect (not mission critical, just cooking or model train stuff).

It is good enough as a starting point at work when I research options, industry standards, government regulations. However, they is not good enough for me to trust them and put the information in my writing.

I have not tried Grok yet. There are just no reasons too when Copilot and Gemini are doing the same thing. I am going to check their work anyways or it is not important enough to spend my effort.

 

[concernUrsus]

I think Patrick Boyle has some Musk debunk video. He mostly does financial related stuff. I would say for your own mental health, it is best to avoid rage based content creator. Ars also do fair amount of debunking.

 

[concernUrsus]

If you want to hate on cybertruck or FDS, there is always "Just the Bike" or "Ray Delahanty, CityNerd".

 

[concernUrsus]

And that's why I am so disappointed in mythology. It's supposed to communicate these deep cultural truths via its entertaining stories, but when you hold it up to reality, the truths fade into fables, and only the stories remain. So there are no tragic heroes after all... Just villains occasionally getting a random com-uppance.

The world is more like a dark comedy than a epic journey.

 

[concernUrsus]

I think it is ok to acknowledge that Musk has done some good things, whatever his motive is/was. He did help push EV forwards, and he did push commercial space industry forwards. I do think the impact of Starlink is a bit more mixed. We improve our communication but we all put more junks into the orbit. Though it may be how we get better (by doing wasteful stuff).

 

[concernUrsus]

Broken clock or what not. A lot of dictators were nice to their own family or their pets. It does not mean that these dictators are not evil assholes. I can accept Musk did good, but also a lot of negatives.

 

[concernUrsus]

Humans will kill themselves through climate change a long time before Mars colonization.

It is more likely that we will turn Earth into Mars instead of Mars into Earth. I am sure human will survive. However, we may end up with Madmax, Fallout or living in some kind of protective bunkers.

 

[concernUrsus]

If those trends continue there won't be a need for humans to be anywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if people prefer hooking up to matrix over dealing with reality. People who have the option to connect to matrix may even be considered lucky.

 

[concernUrsus]

My idea is to set up a stand selling clown wigs for $15,000 each to attendees.

I am thinking caps/flyers with "Billionaire lives matter more than plebs" I do wonder would people take that unironically though.

 

[concernUrsus]

If he's have a fit because a Black woman is playing Helen of Troy, how epic is the meltdown going to be when he finds out that Whites made up less than half of all births in the US last year?

I mean that is why a lot of people are melting down. This is not just USA. A lot of countries are melting down due to low birth rate and their citizens are complaining about different color/culture immigrants.

 

[concernUrsus]

Are a lot of countries are dealimg with right-wing xenophobes trying to stir up panic about it? Yes.

Is there really that much panic? I don't think so.

I have seen xenophobes from Japan, Korea, Norway, to New Zealand on the news. Honestly, I feel that I should go to a place where I am a majority and can blending in.

Though I have to admit, it may be just assholes who are the louder. The USA situation does not give me much confidence about the world in general.