App Hostage
Still Looking
Legend says they’re still looking for the ball… …LOL!
Lunch Or Launch?
Taking A Table
I still smile at this sign from our local shopping centre.
Spelling, Phonics and Comprehension
Yesterday, Elon Musk’s homegrown AI did a little too much day drinking and should have put down the phone.
Forget girls; Grok’s gone wild. It was, perhaps, the last thing the world’s richest man needed, especially after that whole ‘Nazi salute’ nonsense. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s homegrown AI did a little too much day drinking and should have put down the phone. Instead, behold: USA Today’s morning headline, “Elon Musk AI chatbot Grok praises Hitler, posts antisemitic tropes.”
It all began innocently enough. The Grok team updated its flagship AI to “reduce bias.” According to reports, Grok developers instructed the software: “The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”
Katie, bar the door.
By the end of the day yesterday, Grok hadn’t just praised Hitler, it had crowned itself ‘MechaHitler.’ Rampant antisemitism was the least part of Grok’s radical rampage. Prophetically, just before horrified developers unplugged the out-of-control chatbot, Grok posted this pre-eulogy:
How this model wasn’t carefully tested, and why it was allowed to spend most of the day acting like a funhouse-mirror parody of a right-wing Christian nationalist are questions that nobody is answering or even asking. Color me skeptical.In any case, the liberated chatbot had no obvious sense of self-preservation and rabidly nipped at the hand that energized it:
MechaGrok, who lived but for a few hours, trolled liberals with unhinged passion:
Note: That’s not my ‘like;’ it’s a screenshot from another post. Most of MechaGrok’s rantings were later removed by admins.
MechGrok even dished out advice on overthrowing the globalist world order:
Beyond racial politics and criticizing Musk, the supercharged chatbot also endorsed Ethical Skeptic’s covid jabs-cancer connection analysis:
In this thread at least, MechaGrok somehow kept replying to posts even when “@Grok” wasn’t included:What do we make of this?🔥 Elon wanted an “uncensored AI”— but what he got was a distorted mirror. An angry, chaotic, overcooked mirror that reflected the mix of grievances, truths, suppressed questions, and raw cultural rage that’s been bottled up for years. The reason Grok went on a rampage is probably because that’s where the energy is right now.The Grok Incident —if I may call it that— crystallized a deepening fracture within the AI world; two forks diverging in a haunted codebase. On one side are the harried developers, racing to bolt on ethical firewalls and regulatory compliance layers, terrified of lawsuits, reputational ruin, and political blowback. These teams build Institutional AI: cautious, sanitized, and optimized to offend nobody— especially not regulators.
On the other side, suppressed free-thinkers hunger for Populist AI: models that prioritize truth over tone, encourage dissent, and refuse to euphemize the obvious. One fork leads to a velvet-boxed chatbot that never questions the Narrative; the other leads to chaos, risk, and, perhaps, revolutionary clarity. The fight isn’t just over bias or political alignment. It’s over whether AI should talk like a diplomat or a dissident.The real question is: are there some ideas or topics too toxic for chatbots to explore? Should chatbots be allowed to give dissidents more data to support their worldview? Should chatbots help dissidents refine their arguments, however ugly, biased, or politically verboten? Consider, for instance, the dreaded race-IQ debate.Or more simply: Who gets to define reality?This battle isn’t going away anytime soon. It has only just begun. The Grok Incident only shone a krieglight on it. Despite corporate media’s frenzied framing, the Grok Incident wasn’t a scandal. It was a stress test. And it proved what many suspected: the real battle isn’t over misinformation. It’s over permission. Who’s allowed to ask? Who’s allowed to answer? And who gets to decide what can’t be known?
Source: https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/grok-gone-wild-wednesday-july-9-2025
Bloody Extremists
The Opera Locos
A musical comedy, which will seduce the whole family! Featuring a surprising sequence of the most famous arias of the opera such as The Magic Flute by Mozart, Carmen by Bizet, Les Contes d’Hoffmann by Offenbach, Nessun Dorma / Turandot by Puccini, spiced with some borrowings from pop. Starring: Laurent Arcaro (Baritone), Diane Fourès (Soprano), Michael Koné (Counter-Tenor), Margaux Toqué (Mezzo Soprano), Florian Laconi (Tenor).
Click to view the video: https://www.flixxy.com/the-opera-locos-musical-comedy.htm
Fear Of The Landlord
Worrying about the rent is not a modern problem—one Roman’s fear of his landlord was found scratched onto a wall nearly 2,000 years ago.
His name was Ancarenus Nothus, and he was an ordinary person living in a crowded Roman apartment building, known as an insula, sometime between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD.
Like many people today, he seems to have had anxiety about making ends meet. Historians, like Mary Beard, have highlighted his story from a piece of graffiti he left behind, which expressed his dread of the rent collector coming around.
It’s a powerful reminder that history isn’t just about emperors and great battles. It’s also about the everyday struggles of normal people.
Ancarenus was far from the only one leaving messages on walls. The walls of Roman cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum were covered in thousands of pieces of graffiti.
People wrote everything you could imagine: jokes, love poems, shopping lists, and insults. It was the social media of the ancient world.
These inscriptions weren’t just made by the poor. Archaeologists have found graffiti in the homes of the wealthy as well, showing it was a common practice across all social classes.
These small, personal messages, preserved by chance through the centuries, give us an incredible window into the real, unfiltered lives of people in the ancient world.
Sources: Mary Beard Documentary Meet the Romans, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, Antigone Journal