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Notes -
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'm pretty optimistic that much of that is going to resolve itself in the short/mid-term. They're just a little behind on the battery front, but those are getting so absurdly cheap, they just have to pull their heads out of their asses and connect them. But it's Germany we're talking about here, so this will take time. Getting permission to connect a boatload of cheap Chinese batteries to the grid will take them a couple of years. Still, I'm optimistic they'll manage by 2030.
Because once you add serious battery capacity to a renewable grid, it gets more stable very, very quickly. It also gets cheaper. Texas and California have been doing that, and the results are immediate: "In 2023, Texas’ ERCOT issued 11 conservation calls (requests for consumers to reduce their use of electricity), [...] to avoid reliability problems amidst high summer temperatures. But in 2024 it issued no conservation calls during the summer." They achieved that by adding just 4 GW (+50%) of batteries to their (highly renewable in summer) grid.
Germany and Texas are very different places electricity use wise; Texas’s electricity demand peaks during peak renewable production(air conditioning is mostly when the sun is shining). Germany is the opposite.
But unlike Texas, Germany's grid is connected to French nukes, Spanish solar, Norwegian hydro and large (foreign and domestic) North Sea wind parks.
Add lots of batteries and a couple of dynamic loads, and even the rare Dunkelflaute won't be a problem.
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