Always fascinating to see Grok marketing in the wild. Always the same pattern of mentioning it innocently at the beginning of the message, then doubling down with a specific praise at the end. Well it's rare enough that it could also be a set of users who organically made it their mission to get HN to care about Grok.
You replying to Simon Wright, creator and owner of whirlpool.net.au [0], which is a Australian version HN / Reddit. It was the major Australian discussion forum in its heyday. The odds of him doing paid spruiking for Grok, or anybody really, are pretty low.
I don't think he is paid but you can look through his comment history and find that his opinions of Grok and its affiliated entities are definitely slanted.
Or maybe your opinion of Grok and its affiliated entities is slanted, and mine is straight. Without an objective reference point from which to measure deviation, all you're measuring is the relative angle between our opinions.
It's also worth noting that, living in an unfavourable time zone relative to most HN activity, I'm rarely here to offer the opening opinions in a discussion. More often I'm arriving 12 hours into a conversation, where everything I'd want to say has already been said. I end up contributing only where I think a different perspective is missing. Naturally, that means my comment history will disproportionately reflect the rare instances where my opinions buck the prevailing HN orthodoxy.
If you disagree with a particular claim I've made, by all means challenge it on its merits. That could be the basis of a much more interesting conversation than this fatuous one.
I don't actually care that much for Grok the model because I think they are more or less homogenous with like, a small house spin on how "smart" they are and some other features like their behavior in a harness etc. Personally I have no problem believing that it might be good at doing what you ask directly instead of wandering or trying to be independent or whatever. I wouldn't call it out as paid marketing and I also just don't really think about this topic very much.
However, the comment I did reply to seemed to think that just because you ran a forum that you would be unlikely to be biased. This is like obviously false, if anything you have major internet brain where you spend enough time on the internet where you come up with a whole complex about how you are contributing the uncommon opinion the site needs to hear or whatever, when it's just the same dreck from the rest of the internet sprinkled in here when it hasn't been posted enough by someone else. That is not directly "I used Grok and thought it was good at x" but, like, it's clear that it's something that is at the periphery of a whole network of positions you hold that are aligned this way.
I don't necessarily think this is bad and in fact I think most people on the internet at least basically post in this way but I do think it's important to be aware of it at least. I'm not sure you are. I can tell you more or less where my slop opinions come from and I don't think it would be accurate in any capacity to describe them as bucking "the prevailing HN orthodoxy". I, uh, think you should probably describe your comments differently.
I sincerely tried to read your response but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Is this speech to text? Were you inebriated at the time? Can you rewrite it for me?
idk - I had good experiences with Grok. At least before Gemini 3.7 flash came out it was one of the best fast and cheap models. Back with Fable 5.0, I was having issues with fuzz testing because I kept hitting the security safeguards. Grok ended up being the best model at the time I could get to do what I wanted
Always fascinating to see someone so allergic to the idea of an opinion differing from their own that they immediately invent a covert marketing operation to explain it. Someone liked a model you don't like? Impossible! Clearly, there must be a conspiracy.
Of course, it should go without saying that my comment was a genuine, good-faith account of my real world experience with these models. Not that a public reputation seems to count for much these days, but for what it's worth I have over 25 years of public involvement in the tech sector, and I'm posting under my real name and real identity.
I mean, it's just more comforting to think that there's a shadowy cabal out there controlling things. Otherwise the planet is just a bunch of monkeys screeching at each other and everything is up to random chance.
Pretty cool. I have my own setup for presentations, and I also use revealjs, but I made the choice to have the content be sourced from a markdown to be able make presentation contents as indexable and reusable as any other content produced by my team.
I really enjoyed Roadwarden. Interesting take on an old fantasy genre and gave me “this is ancient history” vibes. I’m not usually into visual novels but beat this game. It’s available for under $3 right now, I am showing 20 hours played, totally worth it.
I don't follow this system per se, but for me the unlock was to build a a map of my life from the get go, following the PARA system (projects, areas, resources, archives). It has been a game changer because now I willingly take more notes, snip more quotes etc as it's never a struggle to know where they fit.
I also use Logseq, not Obsidian, which encourages a journal like workflow. Specifically, using templates is almost like a simple interactive prompt:
/template > decide if it's work project or personal area or whatever > get a pre-filled note starter, with suggested tags (I delete the ones I don't need rather than think about the ones I have to add) .
It's just so easy.
Once you got the habit of writing down a lot of stuff, and putting them in the right bucket, a lot of things become easier, and LLMs make some of those even easier.
It's essentially a table layout with a plus button at the bottom. When you click it adds a new step as a row, then you pick the operation, the input columns and output column name.
If you want to add another step you click the plus again and add another row the same way. Each row can access any table field or output field defined above it in the DAG.
Then in Python a for loop runs over the steps in order and updates the data frame in place (well, in function, returning the new one). It uses a dictionary of function mappings and resolves input fields with kwargs.
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