Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
@floatingbones is gonna hate this ep. He loves grok 
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The decision by the German Supreme Court (BGH) @13131313:06 was spellbinding. “Thus constituting unlawful reproduction and modification,” is indeed chilling. The example I thought of outside of Ad blockers was Apple’s distraction control feature, which was released in December 2024. Hide distracting items lets you stop rendering any items that you do not wish to see on webpages; a simple database keeps those hidden items invisible on any future visits to the webpage. Webpages frequently give you controls to dismiss these distractors. Apple’s feature is better, because the websites are not notified that you have hidden the item. My hiding of distractors is none of your #!$$ing business.
The feature embodies a deeply-rooted principle of personal computing: what gets rendered on my computer [in a browser] is my personal business. The fact that the BGH gave this high-level decision and bounced the details back to the lower court indicates they do not agree: someone else owns what gets rendered on my personal computer. I’m sure Apple is paying attention to this dubious decision in Germany.
Oh, I love this ep, and Grok is fine. It gives great answers, and Grok is well-integrated with X/Twitter to make it a really functional AI-assisted social media platform. Is there any social media that comes close with this wonderful conversational interplay between users and an AI?
The comments @iFish refers to were chit-chat with Steve in a transition. Steve didn’t mention Grok in his show notes, and he didn’t comment on Leo’s assertion. Here’s the interaction:
You know, I don’t think Elon, no one wants to use Grok. And those who do use it maliciously in my opinion, it is not a good AI. It might be a smart AI, but it is not a nice AI.
There’s no evidence that the vast majority of Grok users have ever used it maliciously, and there’s no evidence that it’s “not a nice AI”. Grok works well, it’s “ludicrous mode” is a riot. That style of answering provides a good way to remember its answers. I like it, and I’m fine if others do not like it. FWIW, I certainly like ChatGPT, but I’m less of a fan of Google Gemini.
In the IM #827 discussion, Leo commented:
What use is the “smartest AI in the world” if you can’t trust it?
I don’t know what Leo’s point is. All of the AIs give excellent answers, but none of the AI’s can be trusted to provide mission-answers to any question. The comment fails to explain why anyone would view Grok as a “bad” AI. The best approximation we have to an AI expert on the TWiT network makes an assertion that simply does not ring true.
Anyone paying attention in early July knows there was an active effort to sabotage the rollout of Grok 4. I spelled out some of the details in that IM #827 comment chain; I won’t repeat them here. My expectation is that a comprehensive TWiT show about AIs and Intelligent Machines would have taken a deep dive on what happened during the rollout. That didn’t happen in the IM discussion; the rollout of Grok 4 was trivially dismissed. I come here to learn things; I learned nothing from IM #827.
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And this thinking brings us back around to the realization that the greatest mega ad-blocker ever conceived and created is the emerging success of AI. AI presents its users with exactly what they want, which is completely ad-free content that was originally obtained from advertising laced and supported websites. How should we feel about that?
Respectfully to Mr. Gibson, this is a terrible take. How can you verify that the information being spat out at you is, in fact, the page you requested? At the very least I know I’m securely connected to this forum right now because of signals in my browser. AI presents no such signals to the user. If I asked Gemini to write this post onto this thread for me, how can I know it was done other than through blind trust?
I have Gemini writing code for me every day, but that’s mainly because I’m able to “trust, but verify”. I wouldn’t have the same level of trust asking it why my wrist feels funny.