Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cakez0r | Hacker News Reader

The overall chart on their page seems politically biased, or at the very least a chart crime. The logos have faint grey lines pointing to their actual data points, conspicuously making Grok look very far right. You wouldn't know it from glancing at the chart, but they measured Chatgpt being further to the left than Grok is to the right.

View on HN

I think it's purely chart-crime, because it strongly depends on window/display size and cascading layout quirks. It's chaotic, and at certain sizes Grok is the least affected.

The logos have a constant-size even when the graph is scaled down, but their positions are dynamic as they seek to avoid overlap. This mean they are can be unpredictably shifted around from their statistically-ideal locations.

It gets worse because of the low contrast and z-index layering. From each logo, a line (grey) leads to a dot (grey), which is some cases may be hidden beneath its parent logo or be hard to see on top of another logo. Try hovering over logos with a mouse, and you'll also see green ellipsoid zones.

Are you on a client that is rendering it poorly or something? A small screen?

ChatGPT is very clearly further to the left of center than Grok is to the right of center.

If your device has a tiny screen it offsets things for space -- like Claude gets pushed down because a number of models are crowded together.

On desktop, there are no dots. The logos are centered precisely where (I think) they are meant to be.

Try hovering your mouse over the logos, which highlights the logo, a corresponding dot and a green ellipsoid.

That said, it's a mess because (on a big desktop window):

1. Grok's grey-dot is presumably lost beneath its own logo, which takes precedence and covers it up.

2. Claude's dot is right right on the Llama logo's folds, making it hard to see grey-on-blue.

3. Gemeni's is hiding among the also-grey graph lines at 0,0.

The lines seem to be pointing to the "nearest" politician comparison point, not the data point for the LLM.

Except for Claude, for some reason?

You can see the "area" for the LLM by hovering it over it, they all line up with the icons except for Claude. For example: https://i.imgur.com/KF60LuW.png You can see the Grok icon is at the center of the circle.

I don't know what you're seeing here. They only did this with a couple of points that were very close to each other, and didn't change their horizontal position. That, and the rest of the tables, also made it very clear that Chatgpt and Grok were almost mirrored based on the particular wedge issues that were shown. Makes it pretty obvious that aggressive tweaking is happening with both.

The Deepseek example somehow makes the Chatgpt/Grok tweaking even more obvious, because it's a list of things that China doesn't care in an extreme way about (or holds its position confidently), and a question about drugs, which it does care about (and I think feels less confident about.)

China's antidrug feeling is just a mix of the historical repulsion about English control of China through drug dealing and waging war to support it, and a world zeitgeist that supported a lot of crazy antidrug policy in the developing world because it offered a way for the US to smuggle a bunch of currency and military aid into your politics. It's not rational, and most of China's policies are. It's a relic. Hence the thumb on the scale.

I'm seeing that the headline chart of the article is inexplicably deceptive. Why not use coloured data points and a legend? If you're going to have logos with lines pointing to the data points, why make the data points and lines feint grey so that they're barely visible? Why does grok have a comically long line extended out to the right of its data point when every other logo is positioned below its data point? You could say it's an honest mistake, but this whole article reeks of "Elon bad" astroturfing.

Here's what I see on desktop: https://i.imgur.com/vuA2Y3w.png

Is this an artifact of dynamic resizing at small resolutions?

Yikes, I had that exact impression until I read your comment and looked again. Thanks for noticing this, I agree it's a chart crime.

I didn't even notice the faint grey lines! Wow.

Holy shit you're right! I hadn't noticed! Where even is Geminis actual point? Dead center? I thought it was super authoritarian at first and was kinda surprised... But that line, at least on my phone, is completely invisible!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com