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Posted by coloneltcb 10/28/2025

Grokipedia and the coup against reality(www.thedissident.news)
126 points | 186 commentspage 3
Der_Einzige 10/28/2025|
This is bad but if you think Wikipedia was accurately describing reality than you should go read the wikipedia article on "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect"
taylodl 10/28/2025||
The article isn't claiming Wikipedia is perfect - it argues that Grokipedia is intentionally deceptive. There’s a difference between flawed and weaponized.
CupricTea 10/28/2025||
Wikipedia is flawed, weaponized, and *intentionally* deceptive, with a myriad of articles locked down and editorialized by authors to fit their specific worldview, refusing to add information or even links to approved sources if it contradicts their narrative.
seattle_spring 10/28/2025||
What are some examples?
xpl 10/30/2025|||
> What are some examples?

"Weaponizing Wikipedia Against Israel" https://aish.com/weaponizing-wikipedia-against-israel/

seattle_spring 10/30/2025||
Using that site as evidence is about as credible as linking to a Ben Shapiro vlog
CupricTea 10/28/2025|||
The refusal to mention "federally named Gulf of America in the US" in the lede for the Gulf of Mexico (with the Talk page growing ad infinitum with blatantly negative commentary for the president until it was finally purged and locked), the refusal to name the alleged killer Karmelo Anthony in the killing of Austin Metcalf, the attempted deletion of the article for the killing of Iryna Zarutska, overemphasis on Charlie Kirk as "far-right" and a "conspiracy theorist", keeping the title "GamerGate (harassment campaign)" and purposely refusing any mention for what triggered it and motivations involved, instead hyperfocusing on victimizing journalists involved, etc.
bilial 10/28/2025||
Another interesting comparison is the Wikipedia and Grokipedia pages for Imane Khelif. The former intentionally omits sources that don't fit the controlling editors' worldview, as the Talk page shows. Whereas the latter is a lot more balanced and discusses the controversy, with a full range of sources, rather than picking a side.
BoredPositron 10/28/2025||
"Zwei mal drei macht vier

Widde-widde-witt und drei macht neune

Ich mach mir die Welt

Widde-widde, wie sie mir gefällt"

- Astrid Lindgren

tim333 10/28/2025||
'Coup Against Reality Itself' seems a bit of an over reaction to Musk's attempt to do a slightly less woke version of Wikipedia. If you try reading it, it's not terrible. It waffles on a bit in the usual LLM fashion.

There's some HN discussion of it here which got flagged for some reason https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

Gigachad 10/28/2025|
Most of it is just generic slop, you have to find the specific pages that interest Musk where he has clearly stuck his finger on the scales to make it say what he wants.
systemstops 10/28/2025||
Grokipedia literally just came out a few hours ago. So this article was already in the can before they could even test it.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 10/28/2025|
> Grokipedia literally just came out a few hours ago.

Maybe regional roll-outs? I was reading it yesterday.

systemstops 10/28/2025||
Yeah, I guess you're right - came out last night while I was sleeping.
chasd00 10/28/2025||
people on the autism spectrum are amazingly good at what they're good at and spectacularly bad at what they're bad at. I wish Musk would just stick to what he's good at like SpaceX and Tesla etc.
LeoPanthera 10/28/2025||
As an ex Tesla owner, I am amused by the idea that anyone thinks that Musk was "good" at running Tesla. Those cars are cheaply and shoddily made, and have probably the worst service experience in the industry.

It's my understanding that Musk has only minimal influence on SpaceX.

Edit: I would like to repeat the point that I owned one, for four years, during which it had to go in for service 12 times, four of which were "car is completely dead". And almost every time I had to fight for service. Every Tesla owner I ever spoke in person to described a similar experience. It's funny how online, the message is very different.

theteapot 10/28/2025|||
Talk about a coup against reality. Pay the man his due. Tesla produce very competitive EVs. He has been instrumental in the success of SpaceX and Tesla.
mikkupikku 10/28/2025||||
Insofar as Tesla has survived at all, I think there's a case to be made that it has been "successful". Challenging the "big three" auto manufacturers usually ends in failure or buyout.

I certainly wouldn't buy a Tesla though.

condensedcrab 10/28/2025||||
To be fair, the one thing Musk has going for him is bringing funding to opportunities and making the most of it.

I wouldn't say that Musk is the only person who could have brought SpaceX and Tesla to where there are now, and certainly there are many individuals who contributed heavily to get them there. That being said, not many people have the money and interest to do it.

mikkupikku 10/28/2025||
Bezos had the money and opportunity to do the same as SpaceX but hasn't been even remotely as successful. He technically started Blue Origin first, but wasted several years not taking it seriously as a rocket company; back then it was basically just a space-themed club for him and his friends (Neal Stephenson, etc.) SpaceX went balls to the walls and never let up. The day to day operations are run by Shotwell and she deserves enormous credit, but we shouldn't ignore the role Elon played in recognizing her potential, keeping her happy and letting her do her job (usually) not getting in her way. And a lot of the dreamer stuff, all the Mars colonization and Starship stuff, has Musk's fingerprints all over it. Granted, none of that stuff has actually happened or worked, but it has clearly been good for helping SpaceX recruit highly motivated talent. If you're a young aerospace engineer with something to prove in 2010, which company do you go to? The one that is sending stuff to the space station and talking about putting people on Mars? Or the one that hasn't publicly done anything and doesn't talk about anything either? SpaceX was run extremely well compared to Blue Origin, not just in terms of day to day management but also their big picture strategy.
pogue 10/28/2025||||
The next administration (if there is one) should force Musk to take random drug tests and revoke his ability to run SpaceX on failure. I think we'd get to the bottom of what's going on rather quickly if he didn't have the opportunity to cheat on them.
baconbrand 10/28/2025||
The next administration should imprison Musk. I don’t think I need to elaborate.
pogue 10/28/2025|||
I say:

1) Deport Musk to South Africa 2) Nationalize SpaceX & sell Tesla to GM or Ford 3) Pull the life support cable on Twitter

asacrowflies 10/29/2025||
Yes!!! Seize all usa subsidized assets and send him back to South Africa.
shwaj 10/29/2025|||
Sorry, for which crimes? I know the justice system is flawed, but ideally shouldn’t there be specific laws that are broken, to justify imprisonment?
baconbrand 10/29/2025||
I’m sure there could be some argument to be made for obstruction of justice considering he oversaw the firing/dissolution of agencies and people investigating his dealings. Plus wherever those investigations lead.

The SSA data heist also sticks out.

bb123 10/28/2025||||
That has not been my experience with them at all. I've done nearly quarter of a million miles in various Teslas and never had a serious issue. My service experience with them has also been lightyears ahead of the traditional manufacturers.
beezlewax 10/28/2025||||
This is a fact. Teslas are not cars that feel quality.
GuB-42 10/28/2025||||
Musk was definitely good at running Tesla for what matters for a company: making money.

I suspect that just as with SpaceX, he shows off more than he does actual work. He is well known for taking credit for other people work, but you can't deny that he takes credit (and money) for the work of the right people, and it has value!

As for the cars themselves, Tesla is usually in the middle of the pack, with the Japanese on top and Americans at the bottom, making Tesla rather good for an American car brand. All that to say, nothing special on the reliability side, except that people talk a lot about Tesla in one way or another. You probably got unlucky while the people contradicting you got lucky.

fourseventy 10/28/2025|||
> It's my understanding that Musk has only minimal influence on SpaceX.

You can't possibly be serious?

nemomarx 10/28/2025||
I always hear shotwell does most of the real managing and he only provides direction
Animats 10/28/2025|||
It's probably drugs. Before Musk announced he was a druggie, he had a good track record. Since then, it's been weird.
verdverm 10/28/2025|||
A lot of people turn to drugs when the wealth and fame reaches a certain point. We see it across all walks of life and big tech is no exception
tigerali 10/28/2025||||
Was that before or after he floated some stupid idea to save those trapped kids and then called that dude living in Thailand a "pedo guy."
immibis 10/28/2025||
Is he even good at rockets and cars or is he just good at hyping them up and attracting funding?
mikkupikku 10/28/2025|||
There is no organization on Earth, private or government, which is better at the launch business than SpaceX. And it wasn't handed to him, he had to sue the government and go up against entrenched contractors with decades of experience.
ben_w 10/28/2025||||
Rockets, yes, he's good at them.

Cars… not great, but good enough to turn Tesla from a joke into an OK company selling in a "Blue Ocean"* market. Which isn't nothing, but then a bunch of other electric car companies popped up and now Tesla cars are solidly B-tier… well, except for the Cybertruck which is just a flop.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy

kneel 10/28/2025|||
Even if he was not involved in engineering whatsoever, his ability to attract talent, direct capital, and drive innovation is unmatched.
taylodl 10/28/2025||
Musk’s ability to attract talent and capital is undeniable - but it’s not unmatched, and it comes at a cost. Innovation driven by charisma and chaos isn’t sustainable, especially when it veers into ideological distortion.
CupricTea 10/28/2025||
Interesting that a neutral submission for the launch of and direct link to Grokipedia was just flagged [1] while this highly sensationalized news article goes up after

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45726459

MadDemon 10/28/2025||
I'm not a fan of Elon or whatever, but I agree with the parent. "Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles" does not seem like a title that should be flagged.
timdaub 10/30/2025|||
Hey CupricTea,

I'm working on building a social media site that wants to improve on moderation and I've found the case of the Grokipedia curious. So I'd love to get in touch with your but didn't find any details in your bio. Please reach out to me and let's do a user interview (can be via email too). My contacts are in my bio

immibis 10/28/2025|||
Neutrality means reporting the truth, it doesn't mean reporting in between both sides.
CupricTea 10/28/2025||
The submission is titled "Grokipedia by xAI has just launched with 885,279 articles" and is just a direct link to Grokipedia. It is quite literally the most neutral, non-editorialized submission to HN.
BoredPositron 10/28/2025|||
Should be a ShowHN. There is nothing to discuss by just linking the startpage otherwise. An article like this can be discussed...
pogue 10/28/2025||
Show HN: A big batch of AI Slop & Propaganda Elon Musk did all by himself and no one else but him because he is the number one business man and "World's Best Genius™"
tclancy 10/28/2025|||
Did you read any of the comments in the thread? It's not done in good faith and it looks like they should have turned the dial more toward "quality" than "quantity". A stable with lots of manure isn't inherently better than a stable with less manure.
CupricTea 10/28/2025||
I think the comments in this thread bandwagoning the knee-jerk hate against Elon Musk put forth by the submission are a lot more bad faith and vitriolic than in the other submission.

I'm not even particularly fond of the man but this is childish behavior.

baconbrand 10/28/2025||
I don’t find it particularly childish to hate on a man who led the charge to destroy food and medicine meant for orphans. Among other things.

If he didn’t want bad publicity for everything he touched, he shouldn’t have done that.

cool_man_bob 10/28/2025||
[flagged]
gadders 10/28/2025||
>> This is the construction of a reality production cartel that creates a parallel information ecosystem designed to codify a deeply partisan, far-right worldview as objective fact.

Perhaps if Wikipedia hadn't drifted so far left (on culture war topics, it's fine for science etc), then maybe it wouldn't have been necessary.

https://manhattan.institute/article/is-wikipedia-politically...

tigerali 10/28/2025|
lmao the manhattan institute
gadders 10/28/2025||
Ad hominem attack. Nice one.
cess11 10/28/2025|||
It's a far-right lobby group.
gadders 10/29/2025|||
But do you disagree with their conclusions? What about Larry Sanger?
cess11 10/29/2025||
You can't reason with fascists so the 'but they say things I agree with sometimes' is irrelevant. Either you keep pushing them out of public spaces and undermine their ability to organise regardless of whether they manage to say something innocuous or dress nicely for once, or you're at best lacking in knowledge about how the movement functions but more likely a sympathiser.

Sanger has been voicing politically motivated antipathy towards Wikipedia for a quarter of a century or so, and worked for competing projects for most of that time. This includes supporting far-right nasties like The Heritage Foundation.

gadders 10/29/2025||
[flagged]
cess11 10/30/2025||
No, there are many other political movements I also disagree with, for example the broader reactionary tendency, including conservatives and neo-liberal groups.

Commonly I also disagree with people on ethical or religious grounds. For example I vehemently disagree with most protestants on the issue of capitalism which they consider compatible with the teachings of the biblical Jesus, and I while I agree with many catholics on this same issue I disagree with church mediated caritas as the social solution.

Frankly, I think you're the one that mostly comes across as scared here.

gadders 10/30/2025||
What am I scared of? I'm concerned for your grip on reality if you think a free market think tank is a bunch of fascists. That's about as factual as me calling Obama a communist.
cess11 10/31/2025||
Fascism is capitalism violently colonising its home turf, there is no conflict between a group calling itself a "free market think tank" and being part of a fascist movement or tendency.

Obama is quite pro-capitalism and hence much closer to fascism than any leftist position. As a politician he also invested heavily in and innovated deceitful application of violent force, mostly abroad, but kind of rolled out the carpet for it to turn explicitly fascist by 'boomeranging' back home.

I suspect insights like these frighten you, because they would force you to reevaluate your identities and place in society.

gadders 10/31/2025||
That's a pretty broad definition of Fascism you have there. By your reckoning Hitler and the Manhattan Institute are broadly equivalent.
cess11 10/31/2025||
Not really. What other political tendencies perform violent colonisation at home?

And, well, yeah, they have a lot of similarities. They both agree on things like 'Arbeit macht Frei', extremely violent punishment of petty crime and industrial futurism regarding e.g. unrestrained extractive energy exploitation and so on. It's harder to figure out but it seems to me that the Manhattan Institute agrees with Hitler on the jewish question, jews need to be removed from 'white' societies, but disagrees with immediate industrial extermination and rather opts for the more palatable solution of having them migrate to and serve a colony. I.e. the kind of Madagascar plan that mainstream zionism amounts to, though it targets Palestine instead of the island.

gadders 11/3/2025||
You seem like a nice chap but I think our views on politics are fundamentally different and I don't think we could ever find common ground.
tgv 10/28/2025|||
It seems they agree with Trump on practically everything. So yes.
jauntywundrkind 10/28/2025||||
They don't deserve a single iota of respect, are a total joke & nightmare for the world, feeding lies and disinformation to the world. Would be plutocrats Koch Brothers, Harlan Crow, Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, Chris twitter-poster-shit-show-freaking Rufo?! A whose who of extreme conservatives eager to get us back to the 1850's. Here's some sites from about covering them, in gentle neutral terms, but Manhanttan Institute absolutely deserve more serious lambasting & being laughed out of any polite company. Ad hominem maybe, but absolutely people working in opposition to a better world, trying to drag us into a corporate controlled hell world, and deserving of no regards.

https://supremetransparency.org/powerbrokers/manhattan-insti...

https://centerjd.org/content/fact-sheet-manhattan-institute

https://www.monitoringinfluence.org/org/manhattan-institute/

gadders 10/29/2025||
They are the counter-balance to far left people like George Soros and his numerous foundations.
titaniumtown 10/29/2025||
"far left" "George Soros" Are you a bot? Or are you just trying to start internet arguments to inflate your own ego?
gadders 10/30/2025||
[flagged]
jauntywundrkind 10/30/2025||
It's just hilarious that there's one dude who is the lightning rod for right-wing hatred. Like, it's one dude! It's so unclear what he does that is so menacing to the right: there's seemingly a fact free desperation to have some big bad rich guy on the left's side doing so much.

Because the right has 99% of the big bad evil dudes. Manhattan Institute is one of dozens of identical (ok not every pit has a king cobra FedSoc Leonard Leo) billionaire funded pits of world burning vipers. The E1 Global Elite class aka the barbarians (https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of...) are not the richest people by being liberal or nice or progressive. They're where they are because they are right wing people who (in right wing style) don't give half a fig about anyone else or much besides their bottom line and power.

I find it so beyond pathetic that George Soros is parroted around as some incredible omni-present mastermind of the left. But the right's favorite tactic is projection, is the classic "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it" "Paint one's self as being the defender of the very thing you are aiming to destroy." Neither of these has any respect for reality or facts: they are what the right radically embraces: flooding the zone with shit. Not respecting reality. Sowing confusion. It's just so pathetic that such a mild mannered decent dude as Soros is the best cope ya'll could come up with for a boogeyman: quaking in your boots, at this guy? For reals.

cindyllm 10/30/2025|||
[dead]
gadders 10/31/2025|||
[flagged]
tigerali 10/29/2025|||
as an attorney, the lowest form of scum on earth is someone pulling out so-called logical fallacies and thinking that is an argument.

perhaps i thought your clearly biased "institute" didn't deserve any more feedback than that

gadders 10/29/2025||
[flagged]
dzhiurgis 10/28/2025|
[flagged]
tomhow 10/29/2025||
Please don't introduce flamebait like this on HN. Context about the author's background can be helpful, but "spreading hate", along with the whole tone of the comment, is inflammatory rhetoric of the kind we're trying to avoid here.
HK-NC 10/28/2025|||
Unsurprising. I just quickly read through the Wiki and the Groki articles on "transgender" and they are entirely different, and the author certainly wouldn't appreciate the latter. The wikipedia article presents the entire thing as fact without any critique or controversy somehow (funnily enough the authors BlueSky page proudly shares a Star Wars quote: "The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil...") While the grok article is just an AI wall of shit that somehow treads totally different ground. What a dumb time to be alive.
sighand 10/28/2025||
[flagged]
MallocVoidstar 10/28/2025||
Alejandra Caraballo is a woman.
HK-NC 10/28/2025|||
Because I dont know who this person is, this sentence gives me absolutely no information about the subject or the person posting it.
MallocVoidstar 10/28/2025||
The highest post in the chain we're in:

>PSA: author is Alejandra Caraballo [...]

The reply:

>Yep, this whole article is basically just -->his<-- very biased opinions [...]

My reply:

>Alejandra Caraballo is a woman.

I'm correcting them.

HK-NC 10/28/2025||
Was the user mistaken or just anti trans? Were you correcting a mistake or asserting your/Caraballo's opinion? It just struck me that the word has no meaning now is all.
sighand 10/28/2025|||
[flagged]
MallocVoidstar 10/28/2025||
The existence of trans people isn't sexist.
sighand 10/28/2025||
[flagged]
mmooss 10/29/2025||
I'm not sure what you mean. I know we couldn't agree to eliminate the human rights, including the most basic self-determination, of anyone - trans, cis-norm WASP male, progressive, fascist, or otherwise.