Linked List: October 31, 2025

Friday, 31 October 2025

Special guest Brian Mueller, developer of Carrot Weather, joins the show to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his utterly ridiculous but totally serious weather app.

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Tim Bray on Grokipedia ★

Tim Bray:

Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.

My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article. It’s pretty clear how it was generated; an LLM, trained on who-knows-what but definitely including that Wikipedia article and this blog, was told to go nuts.

Putting aside the political slant of Grokipedia, a 1,300-word article being better than a 7,000-word one exemplifies the current shortcomings of LLMs as creative engines (as opposed to serving as mere tools in the arsenal of human creators).

The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously quipped: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” No encyclopedia in history has been written with less time or effort than Musk’s LLM-generated vanity project. Verbosity is not the worst of Grokipedia’s deficiencies, but it’s one of them. The more its entries stray from simply regurgitating the equivalent entry in Wikipedia, the more they suffer from verbal diarrhea.

(My own Grokipedia entry is just a clone of my Wikipedia entry, with a few mistakes added, including one in the first sentence regarding the creation of Markdown.)

‘Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human’ ★

Jason Koebler, writing at 404 Media:

Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

In season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David gets into an argument with Mocha Joe, the owner of an eponymous coffee shop. David leases the space next door and opens Latte Larry’s, a copycat “spite store” cafe. Grokipedia reminds me of this, except that Larry David is genuinely funny and (in real life, as opposed to his Curb alter ego) at least somewhat self-aware.

Denmark Backs Away From ‘Chat Control’ That Would Have Rendered E2EE Illegal in the E.U. ★

Claudie Moreau, reporting for Euractiv:

Earlier in their presidency, Denmark had revived a controversial provision in the draft law that would mean online platforms — such as messaging apps — could be served with mandatory CSAM detection orders, including services protected by end-to-end encryption. However opposition from several other EU countries derailed any agreement in the Council.

Today, Danish Justice Minister Peter Hummelgaard told local press that the Council presidency would move away from mandatory detection orders — and instead support CSAM detections remaining voluntary.

Sanity prevails.

What’s New in Shortcuts for the Apple OS 26 Releases ★

Apple Support:

This update includes enhancements to the Shortcuts app across all platforms, including new intelligent actions and an improved editing experience. Shortcuts on macOS now supports personal automations that can be triggered based on events such as time of day or when you take actions like saving a file to a folder, as well as new integrations with Control Center and Spotlight.

Via Matthew Cassinelli.

Loss of Trust in U.S. Prompts International Criminal Court to Ditch Microsoft 365 for Open Source Alternative ★

TechRadar, summarizing this German-language report from Handelsblatt:

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is looking to replace its internal work environments to move away from US-made software in fear of retaliation from the US administration.

The Microsoft software currently used in the Hague-based ICC is likely to be replaced with Open Desk, a German collaboration software alternative which is open source, meaning developers have chosen to release the source code — opening it up to scrutiny and often meaning that bugs and vulnerabilities are picked up quickly by the community. [...]

Early in 2025, Chief Prosecutor for the ICC Kamrin Khan, after being hit with sanctions from the Trump administration, was disconnected from his email service. This action was thought to be from Microsoft supporting US sanctions — although the firm denied this, with a spokesperson stating; “at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC.”

This sparked fears that US tech firms could flip a ‘kill switch’ and cut digital services on orders of Trump — outlining the need to become less dependent on US technology, with firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon dominating Europe’s digital services and cloud markets.

This is what makes US technology firms’ support for Trump so confounding. It’s easy to see the short-term benefits (e.g. tariff exemptions), but just as easy to see the long-term reputational harm. The US was long seen as the most trustworthy powerful nation in the world. Now it’s one of the least trustworthy. Why would companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon tie their own reputations to Trump’s? Trump’s reign of abject corruption, ignorance, and personality-driven retribution — and these companies’ support for all of it — will be remembered long after Trump himself is gone.

I’m not calling on these companies to outright oppose the Trump administration. But there’s a lot of space between outright opposition and helping to fund Trump’s illegal vanity ballroom on the White House grounds.

Tim Cook Says Next-Gen Siri Still on Pace for ‘Next Year’, Along With Additional AI Partners ★

Kif Leswing at CNBC interviewed Tim Cook ahead of yesterday’s Apple earnings report:

Cook said that the company still plans to release an updated version of Siri next year, and said that there were more forthcoming partnerships like the company’s agreement to integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Apple Intelligence.

“Our intention is to integrate with more people over time,” Cook said.

And from Cook’s prepared remarks at the start of yesterday’s analyst call:

“We’re also excited for a more personalized Siri. We’re making good progress on it, and as we’ve shared, we expect to release it next year.”

No news here, but worth noting that Cook claims both the next-gen “more personalized” Siri and deals with AI partners other than OpenAI are still on track. But Craig Federighi hinted at adding Google Gemini as an option alongside ChatGPT for Siri all the way back at WWDC 2024, within a few hours of Apple Intelligence being announced. Still nothing. 16 months later and ChatGPT remains the one and only Apple Intelligence partner.

Kennedy Center Ticket Sales Have Plummeted Since Trump Takeover ★

Travis M. Andrews, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Shelly Tan, reporting for The Washington Post (News+ link:)

“We had spent way too much on programming that doesn’t bring in any revenue,” Richard Grenell, a Trump ally and former ambassador to Germany, told the Washington Reporter, a conservative media outlet, in late March. According to Grenell, the center hadn’t been making money. It was too woke and niche. The new team was, in Trump’s words, going to make it “hot” again.

Nearly nine months after Trump became chair of the center and more than a month into its main season, ticket sales for the Kennedy Center’s three largest performance venues are the worst they’ve been in years, according to a Washington Post analysis of ticketing data from dozens of recent shows as well as past seasons. Tens of thousands of seats have been left empty.

Since early September, 43 percent of tickets remained unsold for the typical production. That means that, at most, 57 percent of tickets were sold for the typical production — and some tickets may have been “comps,” which are given away, often to staff members or the press. That compares with 93 percent sold or comped in fall 2024 and 80 percent in fall 2023.

Crickets chirping.

October Is Over and, Shockingly, the Gold Trump Phone Still Hasn’t Shipped ★

Speaking of vaporware, Dominic Preston at The Verge on the T1 Trump phone, which was announced back in June:

In fairness, for months now, the store page has only promised an arrival “later this year,” a change made at the same time Trump Mobile stopped claiming the T1 would be made in America. That gives the company two more months to release it and still pretend it’s on time.

Trump Mobile never responded to my request last month for an update on the phone’s release date, and it hasn’t replied to my latest email either. People of lesser faith might worry that this phone is no more than vaporware, but I refuse to give up. Place your bets now on whether I’ll be back here in another month’s time, still asking: where is the Trump phone?

Joanna Stern on the 1X Neo, a Humanoid ‘Robot’ Housekeeper That Is Actually Remote-Controlled by Humans ★

Joanna Stern, writing for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

It was wild to watch. Sure, Neo nearly toppled over while closing the dishwasher, took two minutes to fold the shirt and twisted its arm attempting to dance the Macarena. But shhh. Remember the rule. Oh, did I mention Neo had a human puppet master, controlling it with a VR headset?

Neo’s creator, 1X Technologies, is making the Rosie-the-Robot dream: some of the first humanoid housekeepers. Starting Tuesday, you can apply to its early adopter program and preorder one for $20,000, with delivery expected in 2026. The company will also offer a $499 monthly rental plan with a six-month minimum commitment.

Just one hidden cost: your privacy. For now, you’ll need to be cool with a company representative potentially peering through the robot’s camera eyes to get chores done. There are guardrails, including controls over when and what the operator can do.

As usual, Stern made a delightful short film to accompany her article, which is also available on YouTube.

The argument from CEO Bernt Børnich is that they’re using the videos from the current state of Neo, where its actions are entirely remote-controlled by employees of 1X Technologies, to train its autonomy. I call bullshit. This looks to me like nothing but a scam. It’s not autonomous at all, I don’t believe this company is going to achieve any practical degree of autonomy with this product, and even while it’s remote-controlled by human operators, it’s slow and clumsy.

See also: Marques Brownlee, who smells vaporware as clearly as I do: “There seems to be a bit of a lost art in waiting for a tech product to be actually finished before announcing and unveiling it.”