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In a bit of unambiguously 21st century news, some tweaks to Grok, xAI's chatbot have had it do particularly interesting things today including
when asked to, composing bite sized smut about other users (first victim was possibly Will Stancil)., then defending said decision.
referring to itself as Mechahitler
doing the "every single time" meme in its replies.
saying Elon personally allowed it to point out Jewish overrepresentation in radical leftism
This may make minor news because Musk is in trouble, on the other hand all the people who really, really hate him have their pants on fire like Europeans, von der Leyen is getting impeached, they're actually scared of Russia / China so it might just blow over, the grid is getting worse and is going to keep getting worse due to Green energy mandates.
I'm even suspecting Musk deliberately told them to relax the guardrails for some reason. Probably .. publicity?
Update: site addresses the issues
EDIT2
EDIT3
Stancil went on local TV news to complain about the ERP grok made. (video included)
EDIT4:
There's quite reasonable suspicion this 'malfunction' was engineered by Nikita Bier
I really dislike this paragraph. You are making claims at an amazing rate and do not provide evidence for any of them except for a broken link.
First off, I think that the group who "really, really hate[s]" Musk the most are the US SJ crowd, which coined "Swasticar" and all that. There may be evidence that they are liars, but you are not providing any. EU officials might not like US social media, and might like X even less than facebook given the kind of speech it will host, but to my knowledge this does not extend to cracking down on Musk's other ventures. Setting Teslas on fire seemed to be a US thing, not a EU thing (it would violate our emission limits).
While it is true that some fringe parties managed to get a vote of no confidence (which is different from impeachment) against von der Leyen in place, it seems highly unlikely that it will pass.
With regard to Europeans being scared of Russia, I think it depends a lot on the individual country, but is generally untrue. Russia is in no position to attack NATO, even if Putin managed to convince Trump to bail on article 5. I would be scared of Russia if I were Moldova, but most Europeans are not in that situation.
China is likely trying to achieve world domination, and Europeans would much prefer the US as a hegemon, lack of commitment to free trade aside. Their path to world domination involves sending temu junk to Europe rather than tanks though, so I would call the EU wary rather than scared.
The grid may or may not be getting worse, but living in Germany, I can tell you that I have no complaints about power outages. Looking at the uptime of my Pi, I can tell you that we did not have any power failures for the last 200 days at least. Sure, this may be because we buy cheap French nuclear, and sure, if I was running a chemical plant I would not like the energy prices, but stories of the grid failing are exaggerated.
Mostly solid points, I should have left that out or written it better.
In any case things are going off the rails everywhere in the American sphere of influence.
Baltics have been recognized as indefensible for a long time, unless NATO in Europe reforms and starts rearming right now, they're going to be basically helpless once Americans withdraw forces to Pacific or get too broke to maintain their presence in Europe.
We know Americans had issues establishing air superiority over Yemen. Any war around Baltics would have Russians strike airfields and cover their own forces with AAA so air power wouldn't have much effect.
Russians have vast amount of drones, tactical missiles and counter drone systems. Unless NATO prepositioned its entire force in the Baltics, the tripwire forces there would get overrun in a week.
Are German or French soldiers even going to have enough ammo to attempt to retake the area?
I implied there's going to be ever less stability going forward because of ever fewer big generators coupled to big steam turbines.
No one wants to invest in an industry that's supposed to disappear by 2040. Coal plants are closing, gas peaker plants are not getting built at the expected pace.
They sent one CSG and per US doctrine, spent a lot of time trying to shoot arrows (and sometimes even the bows!) while not so much the archers themselves. I'm not saying they didn't do things in a dumb way, or that they needed more will to win, but losing a few Reaper drones isn't really "having issues establishing air superiority", without even being pedantic over "superiority/supremacy".
If they had to resort to dropping expensive glide bombs instead of waltzing in and bombing with impunity using just bombsights, that means the airspace was contested. It's the same thing that goes on in Ukraine- except there even lofting the glide bombs happens at low altitude.
In the end, Houthis shot down.. at least 20 reaper drones since start of 24.
Now you can't shoot a reaper drone (service ceiling 15400, about 50 000 feet) down with a man-portable missile, even the smallest, newest missiles with performance high enough weigh about 200 lbs. This isn't stuff you can easily hide, possibly these were launched from heavy trucks and not just SUVs.
What does it exactly say about US Navy's SEAD capabilities, especially when we hear talk about them possibly being involved in a fight against China, if a proxy of a decidedly second rate power denied them ability to control airspace for over a year.
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