>Their expertise will be used to improve Grok Build coding agent.
Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?
Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.
I've been teaching myself physics lately and have found Grok to be one of the best both at coming to a correct answer and helping me to understand how to get it myself. It also seems a lot better than other models at saying "I don't know" or pointing out when my question doesn't make sense.
I'm just trying to get it to help me learn physics. If my topic of interest shifts to mid-20th century European history I'll keep what you said in mind.
If you're going to use the model to learn history you're going to learn the version of history that the model teaches you. A little bit of digging around grokpedia should give you some idea of what that model thinks
I'm a heavy Cursor user, I spend hundreds of dollars per month in overages above my $200 subscription, and I'll be switching away. I have zero interest in Musk's AI.
The CEOs ideology matters due to the fact it impacts the product design. The reason people don't want to use Grok is because it's bad, and it's bad because the team behind grok have to spend cycles crowbarring in far right white genocide conspiracy theories so that it doesn't embarrass their boss on twitter. One of the things we learned with Anthropic is that you have a lot more success being focused on the core product - coding agent, than trying to do that and chase internet chatbot users.
As someone that trains LLMs, even if grok does have a "avoid ""woke""" fine-tuning, adding that needs a few thousand examples SFT and a system prompt. It costs nothing extra to do it to coding agents and is not the reason why grok sucks at coding. It's just not in the same league in general - it's 0.5T parameters only and not trained specifically for coding at all.
Even if the way they are doing it did damage coding performance, it is a simple matter of serving another model without that fine tuning in the enterprise API preferably only to the grok coding harness (or cursor, now). Coding performance for subscription plans don't move the needle in terms of revenue anyways and quality there doesn't matter as much.
Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud (not to be confused with Agentforce, which will have basically the same goals and the same target market, until they kill off Salesforce Einstein™ Agent Cloud eventually).
>The mainstream parties are not offering alternatives,
This part rings a little hollow when it's one of those mainstream parties that's doing the demagoguery.
>can you blame those who are disaffected by this rapid societal change from reaching out to support the first name that voices critique at policies they dislike?
Yes and no.
Can I blame people for recognizing that something in their life isn't working? No. Can I blame them for willfully accepting claims that offer no attempt at proving themselves with evidence, and that consist almost entirely of "people who look different than you are the only reason you have any problems"? Yes, because the average person shouldn't be so easily duped, and if they are, it's generally because they already wanted a reason to blame "those people" and anyone offering the faintest excuse ought not be "good enough".
>more people will be peaked by the discontent it can sow,
I think this is sort of begging the question a bit, in the sense of assuming a specific conclusion is true when asking the question of whether it's true.
In particular, I don't think it's demonstrably true that immigration sows discontent. I do think that it can be shown based on the US example that far-right parties looking to sow discontent often scapegoat immigration as the cause for societal problems that may have nothing to do with immigration (like the classic "your cost of living has gone up coincidentally at the same time that corporate profits are at an all-time high and regulatory capture is widespread; it must be immigrants to blame for things being expensive!")
>All things being equal, if a person works remotely, apparently they're more likely to trend reclusive.
The existence of families and housemates reveals this to be a false dichotomy: either you're spending in-office time with coworkers or you don't like being around any people, seems to be the claim.
Part of the study specifies remote workers living alone. So it appears the focus of the study excludes those fortunate enough to have family or housemates.
But I do agree that the claim being made is the false dichotomy you point out
This reminds me of growing up as a homeschooled kid and hearing people ask my parents "but how will they socialize?", generally while we were at the youth soccer field or at the playground or somewhere else that the irony should have caught their attention.
Homeschooled kids can be isolated more because they don't have the forcing function of mandatory group settings, but often there are other opportunities available for socialization beyond just the one normally-compulsory (and,
often miserable) environment.
Similarly, remote work for the last near-decade for me has given me a lot more time to be engaged socially with my family and other local communities – time that used to be entirely lost to a long commute. My mental health is drastically better than when I was working in-office, largely because I don't have over an hour of traffic each way to deal with, and especially because I get to be engaged with my family more and be much closer and more involved with my kid than I would otherwise.
The question is whether you are the norm or the exception. Others may not have that social structure outside the job available or may not be motivated to use it (the "forcing function" of the office being removed)
Exactly, WFH and home schooling both require you to proactively seek out relationships. A lot of people haven’t developed this habit/skill, and without school or work to provide social time they don’t really develop relationships. Losing that “forcing function” means ripping off the bandaid of how few real relationships they actually have.
There have personally been times in my life where I’ve lost that bandaid (workplace, academic extracurricular activity, etc.) and thankfully I’ve usually been able to respond by realizing that I had a problem and proactively doing something about it.
I wasn’t homeschooled but I have been working from home for good part of last two decades. And I have not felt any negative effects of it.
In fact, it forced me to go out seek friends in local communities like meetups and various clubs. I have a feeling that people who feel isolated due to WFH would be same people who don’t interact with anyone in the offices as well.
I have a feeling that people who feel isolated due to WFH would be same people who don’t interact with anyone in the offices as well
i am experiencing this from a different angle. i am shy in certain situations so i don't easily socialize. what helps me is forced/formalized socialization, like pair programming. forced in the sense that i don't have to ask someone to make it happen. (although asking gets easier as i get older)
so what makes me feel isolated is working alone on a task. the fact that there are dozens of other people around me doesn't help much if i can't talk to them all day unless i need help.
working from home doesn't make things much worse. but, it allows me to avoid social isolation through other means. the advantage of going out to seek friends is that you can choose where to go, and you can go to places that are more open to interaction than the people at work. still i would prefer work where i have to cooperate with others, and not just work on my tasks alone.
Well if you are shy, you have two options. Support going back to the office so everybody commutes there and you can easily talk to people without putting much effort... Or take it as a growth opportunity for yourself, take advantage of the extra time that you have saved in that useless commuting, and try to talk to people outside work and make friends as everybody else does.
you didn't understand or even read what i wrote. my point was that talking to people in settings where talking is required is easier. and that is NOT the office, unless we are actually working on something together, but then i can also work together remotely, which works just as well.
try to talk to people outside work
you mean like what i wrote?:
working from home doesn't make things much worse. but, it allows me to avoid social isolation through other means. the advantage of going out to seek friends is that you can choose where to go, and you can go to places that are more open to interaction than the people at work
Homeschooled people just assume others must be unhappy in those places where they dont go, but that is not the case and not shown in statistics.
Also, those people asking the question you find weird were asking about the experiences and kind of socialization that they consider big deal and was not going on in that place.
As someone who was public schooled six years and homeschooled six years, public school definitely made me more unhappy, and was worse for me socially.
Of course, I wouldn’t assume everyone in my shoes would have the same experience. But it definitely cemented my positive opinion about homeschooling generally.
>Homeschooled people just assume others must be unhappy in those places where they dont go, but that is not the case and not shown in statistics.
I hear you. I grew up in the "homeschool evangelical separatist" bubble, where sending your kids to public school was seen as a sin. I know I still have some unconscious biases left over from that that I'm still working out, and having never been in the public school system myself, I can't speak from any experience there.
I mostly speak from the hearsay of friends/family who did go to public school, some of whom did both models and were generally unhappier (bullied, left unhelped by overburdened teachers) than when they were homeschooled.
My point was not that the unhappiness is a universal experience, but rather than the mandatory nature of repeatedly returning to the same place for school makes unhappiness, when present, inescapable. Thus, yes, there's socialization happening in those cases, but it's negative, and it's inescapable without major changes (like changing schools, which for many requires moving, given the high cost of private school).
>Also, those people asking the question you find weird were asking about the experiences and kind of socialization that they consider big deal and was not going on in that place.
This is the part where I think you're trying to speak to my experience from a place of assuming you have more knowledge about my life than I do. I know the conversations that happened with us as kids and with our parents. The assumption was that if you weren't around other kids in school, specifically, that you were missing something important that these other adults described as "socialization", but often couldn't actually define beyond just using that term without a good understanding of what it means.
As another commenter points out, "socialization" is different from "socializing"; it's an actual sociological "shaping" process (like how some environments can socialize children towards learning that you shouldn't steal, while other environments can socialize children towards learning that they should do whatever it takes to get ahead, including stealing). Socialization is a process, not a goal; it's how community norms and standards are instilled through both negative and positive reinforcement, but those community norms and standards (like "the biggest kid on the playground gets their way through threats", as in one family member's case) can be negative.
The adults asking these questions, when asked what they meant, could never articulate what they were afraid we wouldn't be socialized towards. Just that we "wouldn't be around other kids", which both wasn't a direction of socialization (but was instead a means of socialization) and was demonstrably untrue by the fact that these questions were being asked at soccer practice, at the playground, at the local YMCA, etc.
There’s a lot of assumption in that statement. I was never homeschooled but I hated public school so much that I decided to homeschool all 4 of my kids. They love the freedom and they are honestly over socialized
What aasumption in which statement? What I see is homeschool crowd framing schools like a place everybody hates. Overall, that is definitely not the case. That is literally what I reacted to.
Also being "over socialized" is not a thing. You can be introvert tired of social interactions, but I dont think that is what you mean. If that is the case ease up on kids.
IMO home education is usually better for social development because you typically meet a greater variety of people in different settings. I think its more likely to be a problem for some adults. Remote work can be bad for a large group of people. If you live alone and do not have existing local communities you will have to make an effort. How easy that is depends on where you live.
Remote work (especially as I have been self employed) has definitely allowed me to spend more time with my children (and allowed me to home educate them!) but they are grown up (the younger one will start university this year), I have divorced and moved house so i do not automatically have the family and social network you have. It does not mean I am isolated, but it does mean its not automatic. I can imagine many people do slip into isolation.
Socially, there might be a benefit to local communities from more people engaging. AT long last a replacement for the role stay at home mum used to play in many communities?
Can I get a version of this without the over-the-top misanthropic "don't reproduce" comment?
I hate it when you quote the AI at me because you stop treating both yourself and me like humans who are communicating. I want to pull you up out of that dehumanization, not drop down into it myself in retaliation.
>You're claiming that there is some arbiter of truth out there that is immune to bias, which is completely nonsensical. Bias creeps in everywhere because at the end of the day someone has to pay the salaries of these "fact-checkers" and the people paying them want to see a certain narrative upheld. Pretending that isn't the case is absurd.
This is just epistemological nihilsm.
Maybe it should've been clear from your username, but it doesn't seem like you believe in the concept of truth itself in any useful way.
Consider: perhaps this is the product of your own biases? What then? Does that invalidate or prove your theory of the world? Or is it impossible to tell once you've adopted the notion that nothing can be verified (because that includes the claim that nothing can be verified)?
In any case, I'm sorry. That sounds like a really stressful way to live a life.
Where did I say nothing can be verified? I'm strictly talking about the internet, which is a curated source of information. Are we going to pretend that search results Google doesn't like aren't returned by a query? Why can I go to an alternate search engine like Yandex and get completely different results? Which set of results holds the truth?
I don't need your pity - I'd much rather be a discerning individual that questions mainstream narratives than one who blindly accept what some "fact-checker" tells me is true because they've been deemed reputable by the organizations that pay their salaries, and provide the propaganda to them that will reaffirm the narrative they want to be perceived as true.
As Gerald Massey said -
They must find it difficult... those who have taken authority as the truth, rather than the truth as authority.
You're getting downvotes because the target of this particular lie was a known liar, so people probably feel like it's some sort of poetic justice (or they know it's just in-kind retaliation and are cathartically satisfied by it).
I don't think the right answer to widespread disinformation campaigns is retaliatory disinformation campaigns (even if they're couched – pun not intended – in a just-barely-thin-enough veil of "wink wink we know this is a joke").
The right answer is to create systems and measures that actually limit disinformation.
I’m with you. The net effect actually is something akin to honking one’s horn at a guy who honked at you. You think you’re giving him a taste of his own medicine, but walking by I only see two people honking their horn and I’d ideally prefer not to be around the horn honkers since they’re unpleasant.
Is this a meta-joke about links that don't prove what they are supposed to? If so, I don't really get it.
Most of the 2010s section is about some drama about managers/hosters. The only thing that is even remotely applicable is they fact checking a satirical website, and needing to add a "Labeled Satire" tag to clear up confusion around the intensions of the linked site (as opposed to combating people who use the article as an argument without labeling it as such).
Okay, so you're linking a known tabloid whose sensationalized headline is still not about the actual content of the Snopes website being inaccurate, and instead is leaning hard on ad-hominems derived from legal drama between the then-divorcing husband-and-wife team who ran the website originally (with the husband continuing to run it after the wife had stopped working on it years ago).
The only thing in the Wikipedia section you linked that's actually about the content on the Snopes website is the thing where they had to create a label for "Satire" after people got mad that a right-wing satire site (literal, actual, intentional "fake news" but for comedy purposes) had its knowingly-false stories labeled as "false".
(don't come at me with "it was bias"; I lived in the right-wing evangelical bubble through my whole childhood and young adulthood all the way through to the early 2010s; I know the boy-who-cried-persecution complex that lives there, and I also know what the Babylon Bee both was and is quite well; they were never trying to be a real news source, so getting mad that their comedic fiction was labeled "false" is really a stretch).
You haven't exactly shaken my faith in their ability to do the thing they do: find primary sources, present them, and give a verdict based on those primary sources.
Is Grok not a toxic enough brand (by association with Musk) that people who would use Cursor wouldn't avoid Grok?
Like, the assumption seems to be that all the goodwill that Cursor users have towards Cursor will now apply automatically to Grok, which seems like a pretty significant leap.
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