TechTakes

It is sunday, so time to make some posts almost nobody will see. I generated a thing:

I cannot post the picture for obvious reasons, but the CEO of [Company My Friend Works For] has a fancy pair of AI sunglasses he keeps wearing to Teams meetings. Friend got a screenshot of it and the guy looks like, as they say in France, "a total fucking douchebag."

Someone seeded Ars Technica with another article on the data-centers-in-space proposal which asks no questions about the practicalities other than cost, or why all three billionaires who they quote have big investments in chatbots which they need to talk up. AFAIK all data centers on earth are smaller than a gigawatt, a few months ago McKinsey talked about tens of MW as the current standard and hundreds of MW as the next step. So proposing to build the biggest data center in history in orbit is madness.

OpenAI's data stealing scheme disguised as a browser can be prompt injected. In other news, water is wet.

EDIT: How did I not notice I was referring to OpenAI as ChatGPT (anyways, fixed it now)

An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.

Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia's entry, and it's totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)

“I didn’t verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be better”

What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.

“I am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to me”

A judge has given George RR Martin the green light to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

We are now one step closer to the courts declaring open season on the slop-bots. Unsurprisingly, there's jubilation on Bluesky.

https://micahflee.com/practical-defenses-against-technofascism/ at BSidesPDX

Happy Gilmore is ruined for me.

Apparently someone has managed to wrangle a bunch of preprogrammed biases out of grok. There’s nothing unexpected here, and the source isn’t great, but might be worth a look.

https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2025/10/31/grok-admits-its-constructed-to-protect-israel/

Seems like fairly generic us right-wing thought, glazed with the requirement to hype elon.

Saw a stand in the supermarket with the terms "snack innovations" on it. Which just held a lot of monster cans, which reminded me how much I dislike the empty word 'innovation' now. And I took a course in innovation management at the uni (not sure if that was the title but it was the subject).

NYT: "OpenAI Uses Complex and Circular Deals to Fuel Its Multibillion-Dollar Rise"

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45771538 . Mostly people predicting a crash but some people are fine with it.