The president of the United States, on his blog:

Seth Meyers of NBC may be the least talented person to “perform” live in the history of television. In fact, he may be the WORST to perform, live or otherwise. I watched his show the other night for the first time in years. In it he talked endlessly about electric catapults on aircraft carriers which I complain about as not being as good as much less expensive steam catapults. On and on he went, a truly deranged lunatic. Why does NBC waste its time and money on a guy like this??? - NO TALENT, NO RATINGS, 100% ANTI TRUMP, WHICH IS PROBABLY ILLEGAL!!!

The funny part about Trump wildly flailing that Late Night With Seth Meyers is somehow “probably illegal” is that the very sentence of the segment that so upset Trump begins with this: “Donald Trump called criticism of his trip to Asia ‘almost treasonous’ and threatened to send active duty military into US cities. For more on this, it’s time for ‘A Closer Look’.”

Paul Lukas, founder of Uni Watch:

Due to a perfect storm of negative developments, I have reluctantly come to the unfortunate conclusion that continuing to publish Uni Watch is no longer viable. This will be the site’s final post.

Yes, I’m serious. And no, this isn’t a Halloween-related prank. Uni Watch is shutting down, for real.

I realize this news probably comes as a shock and that you no doubt have lots of questions, so let’s shift into Q&A mode. [...]

Will the site’s archive remain on the web?

No, unfortunately. Most of the archive — everything but the past few days’ worth of content — has already been taken down. The rest of the site, including this post, will be taken offline soon, probably around next Wednesday.

26 years is a hell of a run (dating back to 1999, a few years before Uni Watch became a standalone site), but I don’t understand why sites don’t leave their archives standing when they close down. It shouldn’t cost much to keep the domain name registered and a static version of the site’s archive online.

Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch was there. For a good long stretch, there seemingly was a blog (or two or three) dedicated to just about everything. That’s starting to wane. New sites aren’t rising to take the place of retiring ones.

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:

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.)

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.