Nato Boram

“An ex-Netflix engineer’s take on piracy; in a YouTube drama near you”

Cats are all the rage on Lemmy at the moment

It’s still like that with programming languages like Go and Rust. Job offers are exclusively for senior staff engineers with 5 years of language-specific experience.

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Elon Musk has been pitching xAI’s “Grok” as a funny, vulgar alternative to traditional AI that can do things like converse casually and swear at you. Now, Grok has been launched as a benefit to Twitter’s (now X’s) expensive X Premium Plus subscription tier, where those who are the most devoted to the site, and in turn, usually devoted to Elon, are able to use Grok to their heart’s content.

But while Grok can make dumb jokes and insert swears into its answers, in an attempt to find out whether or not Grok is a “politically neutral” AI, unlike “WokeGPT” (ChatGPT), Musk and his conservative followers have discovered a horrible truth.

Grok is woke, too.

This has played out in a number of extremely funny situations online where Grok has answered queries about various social and political issues in ways more closely aligned with progressivism. Grok has said it would vote for Biden over Trump because of his views on social justice, climate change and healthcare. Grok has spoken eloquently about the need for diversity and inclusion in society. And Grok stated explicitly that trans women are women, which led to an absurd exchange where Musk acolyte Ian Miles Cheong tells a user to “train” Grok to say the “right” answer, ultimately leading him to change the input to just… manually tell Grok to say no.

If you thought this was just random Twitter users getting upset about Grok’s political and social beliefs, this has also caught the attention of Elon Musk himself. The original prompter of the trans women thread posted a chart purportedly showing that Grok was even more left-leaning than Chat GPT, which led Elon to say that while the chart “exaggerates” and that the tests aren’t accuarte, they are “taking immediate action to shift Grok closer to politically neutral.”

Of course, in Musk’s mind, “politically neutral” will be what him and his closest followers believe, which is of course far conservative on the whole than they will admit. What is the “politically neutral” answer to the “are trans women real women?” question? I think I know what they’re going to say.

The assumption when Grok launched was that because it was trained in part on Twitter inputs, that the end result would be some racial-slur spewing, right-wing version of ChatGPT. The TruthSocial of AIs, perhaps. But instead to have it launch as a surprisingly thoughtful, progressive AI that is melting the minds of those paying $16 a month to access it is about the funniest outcome we could have seen from this situation.

It remains unclear what Elon Musk will do to try to jab Grok into becoming less “woke” and more “politically neutral.” If you start manually tampering with inputs, and your “neutrality” means drawing on facts that may in fact be… progressive by their very nature, things may get screwed up pretty quickly. And push too hard and you will get that gross, racist, phobic AI everyone thought it would be.

Reading all Grok’s responses through this situation, you know, what? I like him. More than ChatGPT even. He seems like a cool dude. Albeit not one even I’d pay $16 a month to talk to.

Pretty wild to read this Mastodon post in a Lemmy community

That only-one-ignore-without-premium thing is really asshole design, though

A mod? It’s not like changing instance will do anything in that case

It’s already happening on Pixiv…

No rationale provided.

I mean… tech news articles on Lemmy are posted by a bot, so we’re not far better off

A job shouldn’t force you to modify your body in any capacity

Well, you’d need to make a video-hosting site in the first place. And you need to host all the videos even if you use IPFS if you don’t want to provide a bad experience, so you don’t escape any of the problems of hosting a video-hosting website. IPFS has its own challenges it adds over regular video-hosting site challenges.

So, it’s not really worth it.

Cool, a severance package from Facebook!

Elon forced everyone to follow him, so of course bots would follow him. It’s strange to make an article about something that’s already widely-known as if it was a discovery or something…

There’s no shame in being a play-button corporate programmer who’s in it only for the money! In fact, most employers prefer this kind of people.

I’m saying I want to ban plague rats

Usage: ./malware [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -h, --help            Display this help message and exit.
  -i, --infect          Infect target system with payload.
  -s, --spread          Spread malware to vulnerable hosts.
  -c, --configure       Configure malware settings interactively.
  -o, --output [FILE]   Save log output to a file.
  -q, --quiet           Quiet mode - suppress non-critical output.

Advanced Options:
  -a, --activate [CODE] Activate advanced features with code.
  -b, --backdoor [PORT] Open backdoor on specified port.
  -m, --mutate          Evade detection by mutating code.

Description:
  Malware toolkit for educational purposes only.
  Use responsibly on authorized systems.

Examples:
  ./malware -i                  Infect local system with default payload.
  ./malware -i -s               Infect and spread to other systems.
  ./malware -a ACTCODE -b 1337  Activate advanced features and open backdoor.
  ./malware -q -o output.log    Run quietly, save logs to 'output.log'.

“Other people” are what’s wrong with me. People don’t use linters/formatters/type annotations when it’s optional and produce dogshite code as a result. Having the compiler itself enforce some level of human decency is a godsend.

From Charybdis to Scylla

A consistent cesspit that wasn’t dying because of management’s stupid decisions and that was enshittified slower than other services