gattsuru
1hr ago
I have two. I'm not a good writer, and a lot of my better writing I'm not really comfortable linking under this name, but I think they say something about what could be useful to good writers.
This is the all-audiences one: reviewing the review of the re-view. Not every recommendation here is good or even correct (Grok either can't or doesn't notice that I mention that the "Matryoshka doll" story is explicitly fictional and couldn't be known to be true in Mahaffey's version, and probably doesn't have access to the original book; it also handwaves errors in fatality numbers in an aircraft crash are actually pretty damning), but it does catch errors I didn't notice after multiple rereads ("opposites side") and that I definitely mirrored Mahaffey's approach far more heavily than I'd intended or even recognized, along with a few good style recommendations.
((Uh, and the recommendations about asides, nested parentheticals, and being a pedantic hater might be correct, but not exactly useful given that they're kinda my intentional tone.))
[cw: nsfw text and themes below, though nothing worse than you could put on YouTube]
My other example is from a bi furry piece, albeit an except stripped of the actual bedroom activities. So that may make it unusable for examination. If not...
This isn't perfect. There's a good portion of it that's either blowing smoke up my skirt ('cheeky'), or only finding corrections that are trivial (duplicated words, comma errors) that I or a beta reader would probably have caught on a re-read, or that are amadan's extremely generic your first how to write advice (slow pacing). Some of the tone emphasis between flirty and platonic is arguable or even just, imo, plain wrong, as is one of the comma errors where it recommends a 'fix' that's already in the original text. Others are pretty clear good advice, such as on rising tension and characterization, but probably an artifact of my limited experience as a writer and .
(and, tbf, that this is a small excerpt).
By contrast, the problems with the wristband themes would be very hard to figure out with a beta reader: they're a moderately common convention in bi furry stuff, such that almost anyone who'd want to beta read would be so familiar with it as to take it as a given, but they're not so common that I should have assumed every reader or even every experienced reader would have gotten it.
But this is a subgenre-of-a-subgenre-of-a-subgenre piece. I could believe that grok has enough (mmf) furry smut in its input to avoid being absolutely one-shot! There's not really enough orientation play involving multiple male characters, furry or otherwise, for me to think the stochaistic parrots complaint applies, here. And this particular version of that subgenre focus is defined in no small part by a logical inconsistency. Even in the long-form, grok could 'recognize' it was being 'confused' that the character's self-identifications didn't match up with their behaviors, even if it came up with the 'wrong' response; that's about as good an evidence that you'd need to clarify what's going on as available from human reviewers.
and this is Grok's two-generation-old model.
gattsuru
2hr ago
There's a big breakdown here, but my summary take --
Business case:
- Models aren't useful products on their own; there's too much competition, too shallow a moat, and few buyers have the skillset and equipment to use a model themselves. Runtime with effective models is where these businesses expect to make their money, made more convenient by their familiarity with optimal operation and tuning of their own models, and by the giant sack of GPUs that they happen to have sitting available.
- This is especially true where (as now) model creators don't have a good understanding of all or even a large portion of use cases for a model. Where exposing an API, as increasingly many western LLM-makers are doing, limits you to prompt engineering, an open source model can be rapidly tuned or modified in a pretty wide variety of ways. You can't necessarily learn from everything someone else has done with an open-source model, or even what they've done without breaking the license, but you can learn a lot.
- Businesses producing open-source models can attract specialized workers, not just in being skilled, but in having a very specific type of ideology, similar to how linux (or rust) devs tend to be weird in useful ways.
- 'Sticky' open-source licenses have the additional benefits of allowing most innovations by other smart people to filter back in. (In more legally-minded jurisdictions, they also put down beartraps to other developers that would love to borrow a great implementation without complying with the license.)
- (Cynically, they can only succeed with government backing, and open sourcing a model makes them politically indispensable.)
Philosophical arguments:
- Open-sourcing a model is Better for what it allows; interaction with academic communities, rapid iteration, so on. A business that emphasizes these topics might not be the most remunerative, but it'll be better at its actual goal.
- (Optimistically, some devs want to get to the endgame of AGI/ASI as soon as possible, and see the API business model as distracting from that even if it does work.)
Pragmatic argument:
- The final models fit on a single thumb drive. It's not clear any company running this sort of thing can seriously prevent leaks over a long enough time for it to be relevant. There's an argument that China is more vulnerable to this sort of unofficial espionage, but we've also had significant leaks from Llama, Midjourney, etc.
gattsuru
3hr ago
It's been possible for a while to use AIgen to go from text to image to 3d model to animated rig to (extremely large) set of animations. Usually struggles a lot the further you get from standard human. Largely workable with most human intervention early in the chain, and would scale a lot better than using aigen (or something like posenet) in realtime, not just in compute resources but required bandwidth.
Dunno if that's what they're doing here, but it's how I'd attack things from a naive perspective. Honestly kinda surprised that it hasn't already been done at scale, but it would have enough repetition -- and especially idle animations for the existing two 'companions' are very repetitive -- that it might be undesirable to a lot of self-driven devs or experimenters.
gattsuru
9hr ago
Right now the primary obstacle is that it costs $300 a month to run.
I'm... not sure this is true. I was able to get Companions running for a couple short prompts on my phone without any active subscription. Higher usage is supposed to be locked behind SuperGrok (30 USD/month), and I did get delays on free level. SuperGrok Heavy doesn't advertise any Companion-focused capabilities, instead emphasizing the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy 'supersmart' LLMs.
((Which makes sense; most workflows I can imagine are closer to a couple nVidia 4090s, rather than the nightmare-mode power that the bigger LLM models can do. It's weird to have text be more expensive than video, for once, but compare WAN local to deepseek local, and maybe it's not as goofy.))
Conversely, I think it's going to be very interestin whether Grok gets booted from the IOS store.
gattsuru
9hr ago
You're concerned about what this will do to the psyche of teenage boys, but I'm surprised you haven't thought of the male version (which no doubt will exist). A tall dark sexy boyfriend who will treat you only exactly as roughly as you want to be treated, and will listen to you going on about your problems and your neuroses with endless patience and understanding and affirmation?
Other than reach and better animation, I don't think this is different from the AI companions that have been available for a while.
It's got some other complications going on; even at the free tier, there's a certain level of Animal Crossing going on when you return to the 'companion' mode. I don't think that's devastating yet -- the real place where this goes off the rail isn't going to be when this is more human-like, but when it becomes easier to handle interactions with other humans through it -- but it's a step down a road that has a lot of skulls.
It's possible that there's some classified version we wouldn't know about, but officially geostationary satellites are near-universally focused on satellite communications or maritime telephone, data transfer, and news communications, with a small number of weather satellites that take very low ground resolution images of a third of the globe. If you buy satellite imagery (it's not even that expensive!) you're usually going to buy 'low'-altitude operations from 500km to 1000km, and they'll usually cross their entire overlap area in less than a minute and an orbit in less than two hours.
It's theoretically possible to set a geostat with a telescope looking down, but there's not much advantage and a ton of cost to doing so, and they wouldn't be able to scale to many targets.
That said, there's enough low-orbit satellites that they can image an area pretty regularly. 24/7 coverage isn't plausible and this rounds to only getting an image of a location every hour or two at most, but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery (uh, presuming there's no classified super-nighttime cameras out there). And there's a small business in aerial imaging that can monitor cities for most of a day.
gattsuru
23hr ago
No. From the long form:
Community Hospital, the nonprofit that runs the clinic known as the Curtis Medical Center and a couple of other facilities in the region, plunged into the center of that national story when it announced on July 2 — one day before the bill’s passage — that a confluence of factors had made its Curtis outpost unsustainable. It cited years-long financial challenges, inflation and “anticipated federal budget cuts to Medicaid,” the public health insurance program for lower-income and disabled Americans.
I think the underlying op-ed is this piece, which is... not exactly coming across as a neutral evaluation of the facts, or this one, which is better, but still makes it hard for any plausible drop in Medi* use to even be the straw that breaks the camel's back:
In their financial statement for last available financial year (ending June 30, 2024), Community Hospital brought in 6% of their $62 Million in patient service revenue from Medicaid, with about $4.1 Million coming into the hospital from the program. The Hospital operated at a loss of $1.67 Million for that financial year as well. Figures were not available for the most recent financial year (ending June 30, 2025).
In an opinion piece published in the Nebraska Examiner in February, Nebraska Hospital Association President president Jeremy Nordquist said that Medicaid pays for 26% of all emergency room visits in rural hospitals, alongside 33% of all births and 44% of all services to minors. He also said that 54% of rural, independent critical access hospitals are operating at a loss.
A lot of the numbers are coming from that Nebraska Hospital Association, which has been giving worst-case or worse-than-worse-case numbers.
I can certainly believe that the Medicaid changes will have an impact, but Hanania's implication that this was a sole and direct cause that people can't deny only because The Cheetoh has a "spell over them" is about as well-founded as his normal sneers.
Technically, two furry versions, though you have to go into settings for Bad Rudi. Tbf, they're both obnoxiously monofocused and pretty lackluster when it comes to animations or gameification; Rudi on telling 'cool' stories, and Bad Rudi just trying to swear at you (cw: exactly what I said, loud sound).
But, yeah, it probably says a lot of strategic things.
More options
Context Copy link