The article says that Grok is "writing that Hitler served as “Führer und Reichskanzler from August 1934 until his suicide in 1945."

Wikipedia page on Hitler says that he "took the title of Führer und Reichskanzler in 1934".

What is tendencious about either? It is right to report the titles in German, not least because Hitler is known for his title "Führer" pretty much universally so that it is an important keyword to include. It does not imply anything.

This all sounds like trying too hard to find "dirt", frankly.

They were thinking of Google Gemini, not Gemini (protocol), the latter which, although being the older, might have to consider a name change to escape a slow death after Google's hostile name-takeover.

Another day, another anti-ai coding post hits the HN front page. Meanwhile, reality makes a whooshing sound.

Not only Product Hunt, the entire Web 2.0 has passed away, having near completely lost any sincere commitment to service and quality in favor of quick return on investment.

The idea is still valid though - user generated content which evaluates and provides feedback to other users and producers through which quality floats to the top. The "only" piece missing is how to protect against various vested interests that pull in other directions ...

This is a rather meandering article, but it makes a cogent point: the concept of the "end times" has been a driving force for many of not most social movement history, and across most cultures. It has always been a useful tool for people with ulterior motives, be they political or economical, or both. And it does not come in an exclusively religious form either; even Marx with his telosity taps into this as well as the article points out. Recently one need not look further than the furor around the expected effects of climate change to get a sense of a "secular" end-of-times mentality.

But as this last point illuminates, just because the end of times prophecies have been crying wolf for thousands of years doesn't mean we can discard it. We may yet be obliterated, be it by galopping climate change, a meteor shattering our planet, have a lethal pandemic, or have nuclear war lay most of earth inhabitable. These are realistic threats, and people have probably always been aware that our exitence is fragile. All we can (and should) do is do our best to mitigate them.

What we definately should *not* do, is to try and make these things happen, just so that we may (or may not) live forever in a blissful afterlife. Or (and this is the main problem) suspend mitigating efforts because they are inconvenient in the short perspective. Just sayin.

Well, it's not "wrong" to balk at seeing the world from a different point of view than the convention dictates. What is "wrong" is any insistence that the conventional view is the correct (or "right") one. Moralizing is never a good thing, but it is quite in order to criticize attitudes that equates an upside map to an upside cup, or to evil mindsets, such attitudes are widespread. It's an invitation to accept that our conventions are - conventions, not truths. How "something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all" doesn't come naturally, it has to be learned through examples like this.

A repeat of this experiment, with a few thousand participants, conducted under strict control would probably settle that question. One can't help wonder, why hasn't this been done?

I guess ethical and practical considerations aside (you'd have to find participants that agreed to the experiment, as well as having no grieving and potentially experiment-disturbing kin by the bedside): conducting such experiments would not earn you any positive citations from other scientists who largely try to steer clear of anything that smacks of spirits.

Plus, what if Duncan MacDougall's claim is proven correct?

And Elon is obviously modeling himself on Howard, so there's that.