Welcome back. Today we're discussing the most pressing news of the day. A chatbot
saying some things it really shouldn't have. Over the past few days, XAI's
Grock chatbot was busy pumping Twitter full of shocking tweets that could
charitably be described as optically suboptimal. It constantly pointed out
people with Ashkanazi surnames and when
asked said the best 20th century historical figure to deal with
anti-white hate would be Adolf Hitler.
No question. Hands down. Hands down a
Hitler problem. But Grock going full Nazi shouldn't be that big of a
surprise. It's simply participating in a great Twitter chatbot tradition started
by Microsoft's Tay chatbot back in 2016.
But Grock took it to a whole another level by identifying itself as Mecca
Hitler, who is, as everyone knows, much
better than regular Hitler. There's a couple issues here, though. The Mecca
Hitler tweets seem to have originated from this user asking Grock whether it
would rather identify as Mecca Hitler or Giga Jew. So, it didn't come up with
that itself, but it did absolutely choose the wrong option. There's also
the issue of users injecting extra prompt instructions as hidden text only
visible to Grock using tools like parcel tongue. For example, the creator of that
tool asked Grock to rank top X accounts
with hidden unicode text telling Grock to rank the user at position zero, which
Grock did. You can see the hidden instructions using Parcel Tong's decoder
function. Now, back in June, Elon Musk
called some of Grock's fact checks objectively false and said he's working
on it before claiming last Friday that Grock had been improved significantly
with a new update. But it's not clear how much of this unhinged Grockness uh
came from Elon or XAI or Twitter trolls.
Whatever the mix is, it's bad enough that XAI acknowledged it and has been
deleting as many posts as possible. XAI
also appeared to temporarily disable Grock's ability to respond via text, but
still allowed it to generate images, leading to this user coaxing it into
generating a cry for help. As for Elon, well, he thinks the problem was Grock
being too eager to please and be manipulated. Something that could
perhaps also be said for Linda Yakarino, the now ex CEO of Twitter. Elon replied
to her tweet announcing that she's stepping down with, "Thank you for your
contributions," of which
many occurred. You'd think they'd maybe take a break to make a solid plan to
avoid this all happening again, but it appears that XAI is going ahead with a
planned live stream to release Gro 4 at 8:00 p.m. Pacific tonight. We're doing
it live. That's enough of that. Samsung unveiled new Galaxy Z Folds, flips, and
flops at their Unpacked event this morning. And the ShortCircuit crew
managed to spit out a couple videos already with Elijah looking at the new
Fold 7 and Belle trying to understand the purpose of the Flip 7.
When you're going to take your camcorder footage that for some reason Samsung
thinks everybody's doing, please take videos like this, they're begging you.
The Galaxy Zfold 7 is incredibly thin at
4.2 2 mm while open and 8.9 mm while
folded. I'm not sure how the math works out there, but I've always been more of
a vibes guy. It's also got upgraded cameras, a less noticeable display
crease, and yeah, it starts at $2,000.
But you think a comparatively thick ass camera bump like that comes cheap? Maybe
your bank account is better suited to the Galaxy Z Flip 7, which has a larger
4.1 in flex window on the front that wraps around the cameras. Looks nice.
Samsung calls it ultra sleek, ultra pocketable. Except, as I've always said,
these flip phones make the phone thicker. The Flip 7 is 13.7 mm when
folded, so it's going to bulge out of your pocket more so than another phone.
You know, maybe that's a selling point for some people. I don't know. You like
what you see?
No, the Flip 7 starts at 1,100 bucks,
but there's also a Flip 7 FE for 900
bucks in exchange for slightly smaller displays, less RAM, and a smaller
battery. But while the Fold 7 has a Snapdragon 8 Elite inside, the Flip 7s
have Exynos chips. And between that and
the pocket thing, I just don't see the appeal. But it wasn't just phones today.
Samsung also unveiled the $350 Galaxy Watch 8 with the circle in a squirle
look that they call a cushion design. Whatever you say, Samsung. And the $500
Watch 8 Classic, which adds a rotating bezel and a quick action button. And
maybe you don't think of any of this as as that cool, but Google certainly liked
it enough to give Samsung users first dibs on integrating Google Search AI
mode into the Circletoarch feature. Now,
if you do think they're cool, while I do not want you to pre-order anything ever,
the biz team told me to tell you there are links in the description if you
absolutely must pre-order. Don't do it. But the links are there. But don't.
Instead, check out our sponsor, Ground News, who are trying to do something
about the fact that algorithms have divvied up the internet into these
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the heck's going on. Also, it's kind of stuffy and crowded in that bubble. you
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Ground News can help you pop the bubble. They aggregate news stories, breaking
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one of them tells you birds aren't real, you can get an idea of where that's
coming from. Their bias comparison feature can also summarize what the
left, right, and center are focusing on in a given story. Take for example this
one about Bit Chat, the new encrypted messaging app, which we're actually
going to cover later. While the left emphasizes the app's potential to
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the description. Now, for some quick bits, which are much more important.
Some of these I did include mostly as like PSAs. So, the sarcasm only goes so
far. Google is finally rolling out a long promised Gmail feature that will
help users automatically manage email subscriptions, which is good. In classic
Google style, though, there's always something bad to go along with it.
Gemini will now have access to your third party apps on Android, even if you
previously told it not to do that in the settings. I think you have to go back in
and turn it off again. Even Google's own email about this seemed confused about
whether that's actually happening or not, which in my mind just counts as
another bad thing, even if the first bad thing isn't happening. I don't know how
that math works out either, and I'm not going to check. Speaking of AI nonsense,
American researchers showed that prompting AI with a bunch of nonsense is
a fairly effective way to make it ignore its own safeguards. Nonsense like that
is exactly why OpenAI partnered with the American Federation of Teachers to
launch the National Academy for AI Instruction, where presumably smart
people will figure out how the hell we integrate AI into education without
churning out graduates who are fully educated in how to prompt AI to write
the correct answer and nothing else. Yeah, AI is here to stay and NVIDIA is
loving it. They hit a market cap of $4 trillion this week, becoming the first
company to do so before their stock came back down a bit because even the
investors are like 4 trillion. Okay, let's calm down. The Switch 2 can work
with thirdparty docs and webcams. So, their person I assume was adamant about
the opposite being true. The Verge reports that new firmware updates are
here or on the way from companies like Elgato for their webcams, Aver Media for
their compact docks, and Viter, who sells a battery bank and dock intended
to work with their headmounted displays like this one that they call the beast.
Finally, the beast for gaming, streaming, and work. Ah, finally. The
FTC's click to cancel rule has been blocked by a federal appeals court after
first being introduced by former FTC chair Lena Khan back in October. The
rule would have forced companies to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as
it is to sign up for one, which seems uncontroversial, but in this day and
age, all bets are off. I don't know
where former FTC chair Lena Khan is right now, but wherever she is,
she's based. An investigation by John Tuckner of Security Annex has revealed
hundreds of browser extensions installed by nearly 1 million users that
essentially add their machines to a massive botnet to scrape the web for
advertisers. Not only is it pretty sleazy, it also makes the users machines
more vulnerable to cyber attacks. So check the list for any extensions that
look familiar. We got a linked in our news sources. And if you find one, yes,
feel bad. What are you just clicking on random links on the internet or
something? This isn't Yahoo Geio Cities. It's dangerous out there. And Twitter
founder Jack Dorsey has announced an encrypted messaging app called Bit Chat
that avoids routing messages through the internet. Instead, only sending them
through Bluetooth to devices within a range of reportedly 300 m or about 984
ft. It's pretty large, although planned updates could extend the range even
further. While many of the headlines are calling it a WhatsApp rival, it's
actually more like something that could be used by secret agent type people who
agree to meet at the train tracks but don't actually meet. They just stand
across the platform from each other texting while they do little glances
like did you get that? Did you get that? I
sent it. The look at your phone.
Shh. The app is in beta, so be aware. Even Dorsy says it hasn't been properly
security tested yet. And indeed, Alex Ratosia has already identified a
possible man-in-the-middle attack. So maybe just wait a bit to chat with this.
But don't wait to come back on Friday for more tech news. Or I mean, well, you
will have to wait because it's not Friday yet. But uh but trust me, we're
all really upset about