I'm departing from my own policy for a moment and make a political statement.*

Floppy 💾

Elon Musk doing the fascist salute is not okay. It means he is either ignorant or up to no good. In both cases that means that a person in his position is dangerous.

His behaviour should not be handwaved and at the very least be watched very carefully with a very critical eye.

This covers only one specific public appearance, but there would be much more justification for stronger statements.

Floppy 💾

*I normally try to keep politics out of this account and keep some thematic focus. Mostly to maintain my own sanity and mental health, but also because I got other outlets for this.

However, one should never forget and not be mistaken: Technology with societal impact is always political. That means responsibility and accountability.

Floppy 💾

Maybe you don't see the point in talking about politics when you push your backup script to Github. That's okay. But that's not what this is about.

To use a prominent example, ChatGPT is a technological artifact and has very much had and has an impact on society. And because of that it became a political factor.

By extension OpenAI and Sam Altman are now political factors too. (See also recent news on project "Stargate".) If you talk ChatGPT, you are always also talking about politics.