I compared Grokipedia's entry on the band "American Football" [^0] to Wikipedia's [^1] and they are _almost_ the same. While Grok does attribute Wikipedia in the footer, they added this to their article:
> On July 2, 2025, the band released their first live album, American Football (Live in Los Angeles), recorded during the anniversary shows at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles with guest appearances by Ethel Cain and M.A.G.S., accompanied by a concert film documenting the performance.
If you go to the source [^4] for this claim, you'll see that:
- They dropped a film of the same name alongside the album release.
- The "guest appearances" are actually interviews in the film.
- The entry excluded the female artist that was cited in the source.
I, then, compared Grok's entry on United Airlines [^2] against Wikipedia's [^3]. Grok's seemed to be autogenerated this time.
I skipped to the section on MileagePlus since I know a bit about how that program works. It has a few inaccuracies:
- It only lists the four published MileagePlus tiers: Silver, Gold, Platinum and 1K and omits the two unpublished, but well-known, tiers above 1K: Global Services and Chairman's Circle.
- The 2025 premier qualifying point (PQP) redemptions are actually from 2024.
- Some of the language it uses wouldn't meet Wikipedia's editorial standards, like the nebulous "priority everything" benefit from obtaining 1K status (whose source is unclear, as neither of the two sources cited use this phrase).
- "The current logo features a stylized "U" incorporating a world map outline, symbolizing global connectivity" That's United's old logo. They absorbed Continental's logo when they merged.
- The article opens with the claim that United has 1018 aircraft in its fleet as of APR 2025, then, later, states that it has 1,001 active aircraft as of OCT 2025. The source for the 1,001 figure states 1,055 on the page with 1,003 in revenue service.
So I wouldn't use Grokipedia as a source for anything, just like Wikipedia, though I'm sure some will try.
> At the end of July, Amazon reported second quarter results which beat Wall Street expectations on several counts, including a 13% year over year increase in sales to $167.7bn (£125bn).
There's this hardcore punk album from 1981 called "This is Boston not LA." On it, there's a track called "Radio UNIX USA" by the FUs.
I can't find ANY origin stories about the title. The lyrics have nothing to do with UNIX either, weirdly enough. However, this band is from Boston, and MIT was doing UNIXy stuff at around this time.
Anyone have any clue as to the origin for this track?
The lyrics include the lines "But you got / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls / No balls no balls no balls no balls no balls", so "Unix" is very likely a pun on "eunuchs". I'm not very familiar with US radio station naming conventions, but it seems like 4-letter call signs are common? So the origin could be as simple as converting "eunuchs" to a radio station call sign.
All US FM radio station call signs start with either W or K (depending on location, mostly); an acronym starting with U wouldn't look like a call sign at all to me
If it isn't on the Internet, it didn't happen right? Maybe we can change that...
Unix _is_ a play on "eunuchs" but that fact wouldn't have sold well during the mini computer [ https://www.britannica.com/technology/minicomputer ] wars, especially in the later 1980s [ https://youtu.be/IRpKHFfsH3A ] when Unix was exiting the exclusive world of academia and Bell Labs. This was an era when everyone for the prior thirty years had come up with mainframes and data centers were stocked full of "heavy iron" (IBM and IBM-clones like Amdahl) or at least very large "mini" computers from companies like DEC, which was so well run from the late 1950s on that its leader has been declared to be one of the greatest in the history of Corporate America and was studied at Harvard and Wharton for decades. The Unix technology "specialists" on the other hand were super-nerds: ghastly, feral, mostly pear-shaped, plain clothed technicians only BARELY tolerated in their own settings. [Ok, maybe all of them except Eric Schmidt heh.] Realize that the vast majority of American engineers in the 1980s still wore suits and ties --but not if they had anything to do with Unix. (Ken Olsen fer sure wore suits, but also drove a Ford Pinto, BTW.) When the demo dollies tasked with pushing any number of alternate hardware platforms up against IBM and DEC in the constant battle for those massive "heavy iron" budgets were asked to pitch UNIX (System 3, System V, System 7, BSD) up against bedrock OS/MVS and VMS, at first they would answer the obvious question (of what UNIX stood for) with "UNIX is not UNIX". That pretty much stuck in the period literature (COMPUTER MAGAZINE RAGS) too --no way they were going to answer "eunuchs"!
Also worth noting in this context: This was the era of "Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM" and the amount of money your company spent on "iron" was seen as a marker of its success AND YOUR PERSONAL CAREER STATUS in the tech universe, so you can imagine the type of customers and professionals that actually did buy into obscure UNIX-based hardware. This also created a lot of "friction" in the Industry that you can't easily learn about in this Future. It wasn't like today where people have "home labs" and can train themselves to go for whatever job they want using free software (even while sitting in a hellish ghetto of the poorest country on Earth). Back in the day, one was trained on what their school or employer had available (or they learned from carrying around books and imagination, or using X.25-based timeshare if they were lucky). Period. So maybe you landed a great job, but you had to use a shitty Unix computer with broken down terminals or maybe you had a shitty job but they gave you a coveted VAXstation. All your experience with Unix wouldn't buy you much in a DEC or IBM shop and vice versa. The implications this had on the layered applications of the day were profound, but mostly this created a lot of animosity between tech professionals of different backgrounds. There were constant attempts to address this, but the computer hardware manufacturers were complicit in it because it made it easier to lock their customers into one architecture or another.
Is it safe to now say that all general purpose operating systems except LINUX are nothing but husks to run LINUX (and whatever legacy ecosystem)? The most successful of all the 1980s demo dollies, The Scott McNealy, took a page out of DEC's playbook and instead of trying to go in with a massive super powerful Unix mini computer, he would pitch a few workstations running something called "SunOS" (BSD eunuchs) that "networked" over TCP/IP to effect "the system is the network" (a totally new concept then) before his company bet everything on a new chip (SPARC) that used RISC architecture to outperform the established industry players and make the guys in charge of those "heavy iron" budgets feel a bit inferior if they didn't buy-in a little. SunOS, SPARC and Solaris definitely caused a lot of disruption, but it really never had much of a chance to unseat IBM or DEC and was also slowly sinking into La Brea tar pit along with everything else (though it had a bit more life due to all the capX as the dot-com bubble was inflating around TCP/IP). IBM had already totally lost control of its maverick PC initiative (by under-estimating Billy The Kid who had also hired away DEC's top VMS engineer) and the ENTIRE market for mini computers (whether they ran OS/MVS, VMS or eunuchs like SunOS or NextStep) totally collapsed. Just the promise that a PC might be as powerful at VMS and could network as well as SunOS was sufficient to change perception and bet corporate budgets on a "computer, not a terminal, for every desk." More importantly, the resulting PC industry economies of scale meant that all of the tech workers could own a "home lab" and, in particular, allowed at least one kid growing up just outside the Soviet Union to go through the pages of Andy Tanenbaum's famous book on operating systems (that demonstrated key concepts for the reader through the creation of a eunuchs operating system Andy called MINIX). Combined with the political antics of a creepy academic communist at MIT and an irresponsible Defense backbone ISP in San Diego, the slow death of all operating systems has manifested (because LINUX ELF binaries and runtime support are now available on IBM mainframes, Windows and as of last June, macOS). Of course, there are still legacy shops, embedded systems and most of the new ELF-running operating systems still run LINUX in nested virtualization, but LINUX has pretty much taken over the game and eunuchs is el muerto.
Meanwhile, even the AIs incorrectly think that UNIX is "a playful reference on UNICS, the larger, more complex Multics 'project'" Sounds totally plausible like everything else coming out of an LLM, but we meat bags know better.
---
'Now there were these places called cities and they had the knowin' of a lot of things, they did. They had skyscrapers, videos and sonic.. Then this thing called the Pockey Clips happened and you have to understand, this is Home and there's no Tomorrow Land.' https://youtu.be/rn4aIinTJBQ
This was an incredibly interesting read and, combined with the other poster's response above, completely answered my question. Thank you so much for typing this out. What a completely different world this must have been. (I started my career in 2007.)
OpenTofu is a "best of a bad situation" kind of thing. The project was originally called OpenTF, which makes sense since Terraform config code almost always ends in `.tf`, but HashiCorp sent out the lawyers, so they had to change names. Plus, it goes well with OpenBao, their Vault fork.
It would be cool if The Linux Foundation had a fund to support open-source devs with stuff, like a stipend or hosting costs, kind of like what exists in the hospitality space. I know that this sort-of exists, but it feels distributed amongst a few big companies and is entirely at the whims of their quarterly performance.
1. The MinIO image on Docker Hub has more than a billion downloads [^0]. With those download counts, people have almost certainly written scripts that rely on this image existing (including their own Dockerfile! [^1]). Them leaving these images around is just asking for security breaches later down the line.
1b. While, yes, no-one's entitled to freely-available container images, it cost them almost nothing to maintain their existing toolchain for this. Them deciding to pull the plug is purely and entirely a money grab (and a dumb one, if you ask me; look at how the community responded with OpenTofu when Terraform when BUSL).
2. Fortunately, MinIO is a Golang app and can be built with a simple "go install" (though the build instructions in their docs don't align with the build recipe in their Makefile [^2]). However, they could pull a Tesla and make the source that they publish differ from the source that their binaries are built from.
3. They gave NO notice. That's the slimiest part of all of this. Tens of thousands of Kubernetes clusters, and handfuls of enterprise products, run or package MinIO that are now using images that will no longer be updated. All of these people will need to completely change their toolchains to account for that, and soon. That's just not a kind thing to do.
free software until mainstream acceptance. naive MBAs call it leaving money on the table, Microsoft calls it a monopoly-preserving strategy. no VC has the balls to go for the jugular anymore.
Not necessarily, but if there's a cost to providing free support to the community like official container images, then it will get cut. People comment that it's "free" to provide these things through Github, but it actually has a cost to the maintainers in time, and it's frankly an easy business decision to stop doing that at times in favor of roadmap work that produces business value.
What I'm learning from this is to provide basically zero support from the outset and let it grow organically if I ever build a business on an open source product. As soon as you stop supporting anything for free someone feels entitled to it.
"but if there's a cost to providing free support to the community like official container images, then it will get cut.", but here's the kicker, supporting creating docker images when you're on github is close to negligible as to be paper thin.
As a sales engineer, when I'm not pushing random PRs for random demos or infra I'm building, I'm searching for people on LinkedIn in hopes of getting introductions. I tested a really basic LinkedIn search on myself.
Atlas confidently failed successfully [0]; Kagi [1] and Google [2] nailed it.
This is a perfect example as to why I don't think LLMs should replace search engines any time soon. Search engines help you find the truth. LLMs tell you the truth, even when it's not.
With chatgpt I don't search, I ask. Chatgpt explains, I ask again, and refine and refine.
Ask back for sources, etc.
When in doubt, I copy/paste a statement and I search for it with Google. And then Google LLM kicks in.
If it's consistent with chatgpt, I am still wanting to see the links/sources. If not, I notify chatgpt of the "wrong" information, and move on.
70-80% of search is dead. But of course searching for people or things like that, Google is still needed.
But search (the way we know it) was a paradigm that the old Internet created, because it was obviously easier to search for one or two keywords. Semantic search was always something they tried to implement but failed miserably.
Chatgpt is the new way to get information on the internet, like it or not. Even when you think that "it's only trained on recent data, etc", it's only partially an issue, because in many cases it's trained on good information coming from books. And that can be quite useful, much better than a crappy blog that is in the first Google page.
The new paradigm is to use chatgpt as an assistant / someone you can ask information to, in order to answer a question you have. The old paradigm, on the other hand, requires that you start from zero. You need to know already what to search for, in order to get to the fact you wanted to know in the first place. Now it's there, as long as you know a few words.
Perhaps the great filter is if a species is capable of creating an AI intelligent enough to make them multi-planetary. Maybe the great filter is the AI gaining sentience and having the AI explorers stars while the stupid monkeys get stuck on their precious rock that they won’t take care of.
You might be right about search being "dead." Nonetheless, I think this is a hugely detrimental development.
Hallucinations and misrepresentations aside, my problem with LLMs as search engines is that they purport to give you "the truth" based on the "truth" it thinks you want to see from your query.
While I think LLMs do a much better job of natural language search than search engines do, they also remove the critical thinking that's employed in going through a list of results, processing the information therein and rendering a result.
LLMs might short-circuit the need to trawl through that "crappy blog," but they can, just as well, exclude key information in that blog that adds important context to what you're looking for.
You're doing the right thing by continuously refining your answer and cross-checking it with other LLMs, but I'm sure you've also met many people who use the Gemini AI overview answer and call it a day (which has been hilariously wrong in some searches I've done with it). Regardless, I still strongly believe that well-formed search queries beat rounds of refining LLMs every time.
But chatgpt isn't a search engine. It's obviously not as good for searching for things.
It can tell you things, but those things are abstract in nature - aggregated across it's training data.
Thats the opposite of what we want search to do. Search is about finding a needle in a haystack. Not about telling me what the needle probably looks like based off the characteristics of needles.
I mistakenly thought that Atlas was their official search engine offering separate from Chat, so I hit it with an old school search query instead of a natural language query I'd typically use with ChatGPT. Nonetheless, this is a good example of how much a well-constructed prompt can affect the final result!
(Update: I understand that Atlas is their browser offering. I mistakenly thought that it was their official search engine offering. Proof that humans can hallucinate as well as the best frontier models :D )
> On July 2, 2025, the band released their first live album, American Football (Live in Los Angeles), recorded during the anniversary shows at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles with guest appearances by Ethel Cain and M.A.G.S., accompanied by a concert film documenting the performance.
If you go to the source [^4] for this claim, you'll see that:
- They dropped a film of the same name alongside the album release.
- The "guest appearances" are actually interviews in the film.
- The entry excluded the female artist that was cited in the source.
I, then, compared Grok's entry on United Airlines [^2] against Wikipedia's [^3]. Grok's seemed to be autogenerated this time.
I skipped to the section on MileagePlus since I know a bit about how that program works. It has a few inaccuracies:
- It only lists the four published MileagePlus tiers: Silver, Gold, Platinum and 1K and omits the two unpublished, but well-known, tiers above 1K: Global Services and Chairman's Circle.
- The 2025 premier qualifying point (PQP) redemptions are actually from 2024.
- Some of the language it uses wouldn't meet Wikipedia's editorial standards, like the nebulous "priority everything" benefit from obtaining 1K status (whose source is unclear, as neither of the two sources cited use this phrase).
- "The current logo features a stylized "U" incorporating a world map outline, symbolizing global connectivity" That's United's old logo. They absorbed Continental's logo when they merged.
- The article opens with the claim that United has 1018 aircraft in its fleet as of APR 2025, then, later, states that it has 1,001 active aircraft as of OCT 2025. The source for the 1,001 figure states 1,055 on the page with 1,003 in revenue service.
So I wouldn't use Grokipedia as a source for anything, just like Wikipedia, though I'm sure some will try.
[^0]: https://archive.is/twkBP (might not be available yet; it's still getting archived)
[^1]: https://archive.ph/lOkdT
[^2]: https://archive.ph/EnN2T
[^3]: https://archive.ph/uooNW
[^4]: https://pitchfork.com/news/american-football-to-share-new-li...
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