This excerpt is well worth reading IMO

Back when I first started doing these clean-up projects, I started by just picking up litter that was in my own neighborhood. (Because that was where I lived, and because I had never been to a lot of the other neighborhoods in my area.) But I found that the more that I did this kind of work, the more that I wanted to do it, and I eventually found myself going beyond my own neighborhood and into neighborhoods that I had never been to before. (Including the ones that I had always heard were "bad neighborhoods".)

Then to make things more interesting, I started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new that I had never been to before whenever I picked up litter. And after going through a big stack of monthly bus passes, and walking down just about every street in the city (and doing it alone and without a phone) I want to say that not only has nothing bad ever happened to me, but I've encountered a lot of strangers who were almost "too nice" to me...

Because these clean-up projects involve a lot of walking and lugging around heavy stuff, it seems that no matter where I go, strangers will keep pulling over to offer me a ride. And because I do these projects even during extreme weather, the more intense the weather gets, the nicer people will become. (During the summer on really hot days, strangers will keep pulling over just to ask if I'm going to be OK working outside in the heat and if they can go and buy some cold water for me, and sometimes people will even try to give me an umbrella or an extra coat on days when it's raining or snowing.)

And there were times when I would pick up a penny that was in the middle of road or stuck in a crack in the sidewalk, and I guess that it would give strangers walking by the impression that I must need money, and sometimes people would actually pull out their wallet and start trying to give me money!

Strangers will also come up and thank me for what I'm doing, and sometimes they will end up talking to me for a long time, and I've ended up meeting a lot of friendly people this way.

I have been shown such a good side of people, that it simply wouldn't make sense for me to go back to being fearful of strangers and automatically imagining the worst-case scenarios about them. (Like I tended to do back when I didn't get out much and my view of the outside world was being shaped by watching the News.)

I don't doubt that there is crime in my area. (After all, "littering" itself is a crime, and there are MILLIONS of examples of this crime in plain sight where I live.)

But because I have been doing these clean-up projects, I've spent more time outside and less time looking at a screen in the past few years than I have at any other time in my life. And I know that what I am about to say will probably sound crazy to anyone who did the exact opposite of that and who spent the past few years locked in their homes and being bombarded all day long by the media with stories about crime, riots, racism, sickness, and war, but I honestly have never felt safer going outside than I do today.

I started picking up litter in my neighborhood because I wanted to help make the world a better place, and because it got me to get out more and start to base my view of the outside world on my actual experience in the outside world, the world is a much better place to me now, and that is the priceless treasure that I found while picking up a zillion pieces of litter.

> started using the city bus system for the first time, and I started making it a point to go someplace new

That's a fun thing to do when you move cities, or countries.

I spent several weekends riding every single tram line in Helsinki with my son. We'd pick a number we'd not yet done and ride each both ways to the terminus.

Get out at the end of the line and see what was nearby, have a cake, then come back home.

We had a map from the local transport company and we'd put stickers on the lines we'd done, and the last stops.

A good way to see different neighbourhoods in the same city.

I mean they are being sued for insider trading, not exactly a bad headline maybe it could say alleged?

It seems extremely unlikely to me, a casual observer of the shit show that was Luna/Terra, that the suit would be successful

Yeah I loved the guests he had, but eventually had to stop listening to him

No erasure coding seems like a pretty big loss in terms of how much resources do you need to get good resiliency & efficiency

I was looking at using this on an LTO tape library, it seems the only resiliency is through replication, but this was my main concern with this project, what happens with HW goes bad

If you have replication, you can lose one of the replica, that's the point. This is what Garage was designed for, and it works.

Erasure coding is another debate, for now we have chosen not to implement it, but I would personally be open to have it supported by Garage if someone codes it up.

Erasure coding is an interesting topic for me. I've run some calculations on the theoretical longevity of digital storage. If you assume that today's technology is close to what we'll be using for a long time, then cross-device erasure coding wins, statistically. However, if you factor in the current exponential rate of technological development, simply making lots of copies and hoping for price reductions over the next few years turns out to be a winning strategy, as long as you don't have vendor lock-in. In other words, I think you're making great choices.

I question that math. Erasure coding needs less than half as much space as replication, and imposes pretty small costs itself. Maybe we can say the difference is irrelevant if storage prices will drop 4x over the next five years? But looking at pricing trends right now... that's not likely. Hard drives and SSDs are about the same price they were 5 years ago. The 5 years before that SSDs were seeing good advancements, but hard drive prices only advanced 2x.

Except that you don't own the things you buy on steam

That is true for all media purchases since the invention of copyright in 1662.

You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.

Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.

Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.

This is true. But it doesn't matter to me.

Most media for me is a one and done. A book, a movie, a computer game. Granted a computer games version of "done" might mean "played on and off for a year".

There are exceptions to this - books I read again, shows I'd watch again, but games seem to age poorly by comparison. Original Syndicate or Deus Ex - while playable - is not what I remember it to be and I'd rather keep the nostalgic memories than shatter them with a replay.

This rarity of exceptions means that I wouldn't lose much if my Steam account disappeared - mainly just "whatever I'm playing now". Create a new account and go again, or buy off GOG or something.

However in return for using Steam I get a lot of convenience - updates, propogated save files, easy chat and "Right click -> Join Game" with friends. That "Right click -> Join Game" is almost worth it on it's own for ease of social gaming.

Most people consume like this, but some like the warm fuzzies that hoarding gives them.

I would like to see change there for sure. That said, DRM is optional for publishers on Steam. Once you've downloaded a game without DRM (steam's or otherwise) you can back it up and play it without Steam.

This is true for all digital purchases, video games or otherwise.

There is no such thing as "owning" a game unless you're the company that developed the game (or bought the company that did).

With respect to winning a game of chess?

With respect to playing a game of chess.

Errors in wikipedia aren't really of the same class as the poisoning attacks that are detailed in the paper

Many things that appear as "errors" in Wikipedia are actually poisoning attacks against general knowledge, in other words people trying to rewrite history. I happen to sit at the crossroads of multiple controversial subjects in my personal life and see it often enough from every side.

Fnord

you're ignoring that both sides are doing poisoning attacks on wikipedia, trying to control the narrative. it's not just the "radical right"

Not to mention that there is subset of people that are on neither side, and just want to watch the world burn for the sake of enjoying flames.

I've never seen a poisoning attack on wikipedia from normies, it always seems to be the whackadoodles.

> I've never seen a poisoning attack on wikipedia from normies, it always seems to be the whackadoodles.

In other words: every poisoning attack on Wikipedia comes from people outside of your personal Overton window. [1] :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

very true. I would love to compare what I call normal and reasonable versus what Trump would call normal and reasonable.

> As of 2024, SpaceX's internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated between $15 million[186] and $28 million,[185] factoring in workforce expenses, refurbishment, assembly, operations, and facility depreciation.[187] These efficiencies are primarily due to the reuse of first-stage boosters and payload fairings.[188] The second stage, which is not reused, is believed to be the largest expense per launch, with the company's COO stating that each costs $12 million to produce.[189]

From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Pricing

Do yourself a favor and skip what Gary Marcus has to say on this and read the METR study it's self

Really concerning that what appears to be the top model is in the family of models that inadvertently starting calling it's self mechahitler

I don't know why anyone would bother with Grok when there are other good models from companies that don't have the same baggage as xAI. So what if they release a model that beats older models in a benchmark? It will only be the top model until someone else releases another one next week. Personally, I like the Anthropic models for daily use. Even Google, with their baggage and lack of privacy, is a far cry from xAI and offers similar performance.

i like grok because i don't hit the obvious ML-fairness / political correct safeguards that other models do.

So i understand the intent in implementing those, but they also reduce perceived trust and utility. It's a tradeoff.

Let's say I'm using Gemini. I can tell by the latency or the redraw that I asked an "inappropriate" query.

They do implement censorship and safeguards, just in the opposite direction. Musk previously bragged about going through the data and "fixing" the biases. Which... just introduces bias when companies like xAI do it. You can do that, and researchers sometimes do, but obviously partisan actors won't actually be cleaning any bias, but rather introducing their own.

Sort of. There are biases introduced during training/post training and there are the additional runtime / inference safeguards.

I’m referring more to the runtime safeguards, but also the post-training biases.

Yes we are talking about degree, but the degree matters .

That’s what the Anthropic models do for me. I suppose I could be biased because I’ve never had a need for a model that spews racist, bigoted or sexist responses. The stuff @grok recently posted about Linda Yaccarino is a good example of why I don’t use it. But you do you.

You probably know better, and I probably should know better than to bother engaging, but...

Why would you conflate giving a computer an objective command with what is essentially someone else giving you access to query a very large database of "information" that was already curated by human beings?

Look. I don't know Elon Musk, but his rhetoric and his behavior over the last several years has made it very clear to me that he has opinions about things and is willing to use his resources to push those opinions. At the end of the day, I simply don't trust him to NOT intentionally bias *any* tool or platform he has influence over.

Would you still see it as "censoring" a LLM if instead of front-loading some context/prompt info, they just chose to exclude certain information they didn't like from the training data? Because Mr. Musk has said, publicly, that he thinks Grok has been trained on too much "mainstream media" and that's why it sometimes provides answers on Twitter that he doesn't like, and that he was "working on it." If Mr. Musk goes in and messes around with the default prompts and/or training data to get the answers that align with his opinions, is that not censorship? Or is it only censorship when the prompt is changed to not repeat racist and antisemitic rhetoric?

The handwringing over an LLM creator shaping a narrative is somewhat absurd compared to the alternatives we had prior to Grok: LLMs that literally erased white people from history to align with their creators far-left progressive politics.

The difference here is many techies are more comfortable with LLMs censoring, or even rewriting history, as they align with their politics and prejudices.

Musk has attempted to provide a more balanced view I don’t consider just censorship. If he’s restricting the LLMs from including mainstream media viewpoints, I would consider that to be censorship, but I haven’t seen evidence of that.

and don't forget that Grok is powered by illegal cancer-causing methane gas turbines in a predominantly black neighborhood of Memphis that already had poor air quality to begin with

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...

It's a result of the system prompt, not the base model itself. Arguably, this just demonstrates that the model is very steerable, which is a good thing.

It wasn't not a result of system prompt. When you fine tune a model on a large corpus of right-leaning text don't be surprised when neo-nazi tendencies inevitably emerge.

It was though. Xai publishes their system prompts, and here's the commit that fixed it (a one line removal): https://github.com/xai-org/grok-prompts/commit/c5de4a14feb50...

If that one sentence in the system prompt is all it takes to steer a model into a complete white supremacy meltdown at the drop of a hat, I think that's a problem with the model!

The system prompt that Grok 4 uses added that line back. https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1943171871400194231

Weird, the post and comments load for me before switching to "Unable to load page."

Disable JavaScript or log into GitHub

It still hasn't been turned back on, and that repo is provided by xAI themselves, so you need to trust that they're being honest with the situation.

The timing in relation to the Grok 4 launch is highly suspect. It seems much more like a publicity stunt. (Any news is good news?)

But, besides that, if that prompt change unleashed the very extreme Hitler-tweeting and arguably worse horrors (it wasn't all "haha, I'm mechahitler"), it's a definite sign of some really bizarre fine tuning on the model itself.

What a silly assumption in that prompt:

> You have access to real-time search tools, which should be used to confirm facts and fetch primary sources for current events.

xAI claims to publish their system prompts.

I don’t recall where they published the bit of prompt that kept bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa at inopportune times.

These disgruntled employee defenses aren't valid, IMO.

I remember when Ring, for years, including after being bought by Meta, had huge issues with employee stalking. Every employee had access to every camera. It happened multiple times, or, at least, to our knowledge.

But that's not a people problem, that's a technology problem. This is what happens when you store and transit video over the internet and centralize it, unencrypted. This is what happens when you have piss-poor permission control.

What I mean is, it says a lot about the product if "disgruntled employees" are able to sabotage it. You're a user, presumably paying - you should care about that. Because, if we all wait around for the day humans magically start acting good all the time, we'll be waiting for the heat death of the universe.

or pr department getting creative with using dog whistling for buzz

Where is xAI’s public apology, assurances this won’t happen again, etc.?

Musk seems mildly amused by the whole thing, not appalled or livid (as any normal leader would be).

Is it good that a model is steerable? Odd word choice. A highly steerable model seems like a dangerous and potent tool for misinformation. Kinda evil really, the opposite of good.

Yes, we should instead blindly trust AI companies to decide what's true for us.

Isn't this kind of stuff something that happens when the model is connected to X, which is basically 4chan /pol now?

Connect Claude or Llama3 to X and it'll probably get talked into LARPing Hitler.