November, 2025:

• I stumbled onto the site https://thegrokipedias.com/ and although everything it says seems to support Grokpedia, there’s no indication that it’s a property or project of X or Musk himself. Then again, Grokipedia’s UI is so sparse that maybe Musk had his people create a support site that will not be updated as often as the very much in-progress Grokipedia v0.1 will be.
• Or (scratches his head here) did Musk just tell Grok to “create a support site for Grokipedia?” We don’t know yet, and Musk being Musk, I wonder if we’ll ever know.
• While we’re still talking Halloween, here’s a picture someone sent me of what I consider the best Halloween costume of all time. No, it’s not AI. Look carefully:
  
• Ok, still Halloweenish: A food site explores the science behind…candy corn: https://www.seriouseats.com/candy-corn-science-11838045
• One more. Just one more, promise! Here’s a candy engineer (a WHAT??) explaining the science behind…Snickers bars.
• After coming to some sort of confidential settlement with various publisher groups, the lawsuits are over. Yet Internet Archive still offers Byte Magazine in PDF format from 1975 (when they first published) to 1998. Now, the PDFs are yuge: I downloaded May 1980, in which I had an article on the COSMAC CPU, and it was 221MB all by its lonesome.
• Here’s another upbeat, not manic but still admirably energetic piece of classical music: Janacek’s Lachian Dance #2: “Blessed.”
• Manic you want? They don’t come any manicker than Vaughan Williams’ The Running Set. I’ve linked to the piece before. It’s one of my all-time favorites. I characterize it “as an Irish jig on meth.”
• I just discovered AccuRadio, and it may be a forerunner of what might be the future of radio: A free streaming service with music divided into hundreds of channels. Their classical channels are a little sparse (search failed to find Ralph Vaughan Williams or Doreen Carwithen) but the pop channels—it’s all there.
• Daylight Savings Time has run its course for this fall/winter/spring and the nation is back on Standard Time—including Arizona, which never left Standard Time and hasn’t for…a long time. Recent research shows that most Americans would prefer to stay on Standard Time year-round. It’s 47% opposed, 12% in favor, and 40% “neutral,” which I suspect simply means they don’t care. Computers and phones get their time off servers. It’s just the battery operated ticktockers and appliance digitals that have to be set forward and back. (We have a fair number of those and are glad they don’t need fussing twice a year.)
• I’ve always wondered about this: Why are the floors of buildings called “stories?” Good quick explanation here. We live in a one-floor house, and the ground level is not called a “story.” (I have to get my stories elsewhere…)

No matter what else you might say about him, Elon Musk has the power to make *big* things happen: Tesla, Boring Company, SpaceX, Grok (more on which below) and now…Grokipedia. I didn’t list X because he didn’t create it; he just wrote checks.

If you recall, I started playing around with Grok earlier this year. My entry for March 28 shows a number of Grok replies when I asked, “Who is —-?” I asked about Carol, and my late godmother, Kathleen Duntemann 1920-1999. I asked about my sister, Gretchen Roper, but there is in fact another Gretchen Roper, who is a famous clarinetist. That exercise made me glad my last name isn’t Smith. Then I asked about…me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? You can read its reply here.

Fortunately for all of us, I’m not dead. I’m working hard on staying that way. The good news is that Grok is improving, and delivering fewer hallucinations than it was 7 or 8 months ago.

And now—ta daaa!—we have Grokipedia. It’s only a few days old and still at V0.1, so I won’t be too hard on it. As best I can tell, it’s a Grok-ish AI front end for a Wikipedia-ish encyclopedia. Musk claims he’s trying to remove political bias from Wikipedia’s articles that touch on politics. (Good luck with that, pilgrim.) On the other hand, he generally gets what he asks for and pays for.

Grokipedia’s home page displays a counter of its articles. As of a few minutes ago, it was 885,279. It also allows you to display Grokipedia screens in either light or dark mode. Some people like dark mode. I’ve seen too much typing paper in my life to abandon light mode, even  though I spent years with text monitors painting ASCII and PC-specific glyphs on a black background. For my first round of tests, I just entered random names and concepts to see what Grokipedia would do. As I pretty much expected, the majority of its articles have a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the article was adapted from one on Wikipedia. This is legal; Musk could have grabbed the whole damn thing if he wanted to, and unless I misrecall, Wikipedia has about seven million articles in its catalog.

I’ll be watching the Grok article counter going forward. I can almost hear some major crunching in the background.

Not all articles were cloned from Wikipedia. The article on the Polish National Catholic Church has no disclaimer. Wikipedia has an article, but it’s shorter and less detailed than Grokipedia’s. What Grokipedia lacks are photos. This was a pattern I saw looking things up on Grokipedia: There are no photos, even on articles cloned from Wikipedia that do have photos. (See both sites’ articles on the Russian dish ‘pelmeni.’ Several photos on Wiki; none on Groki.)

My guess is that this is a V0.1 problem and they’re still working on machinery for grabbing photos from Wikipedia or other sources. The Grokipedia articles are very plain, and don’t have a summary box on the right.

It’s unclear who actually writes the articles that are not from Wikipedia. Supposedly Grok does, but I have to wonder if there are editors in the loop. It’s possible to report errors in articles, but ordinary people can’t edit existing articles nor write new ones. I created an account there but it’s unclear what that account allows me to do.

Grokipedia is just getting started, so it’s missing some middling items. For example, there is no article on author Sarah A. Hoyt. During the search for her, Grokipedia brought up several hundred other people named Sarah, but their last names are in random order, making the list useless. Glenn Reynolds is missing, as are Jon Gabriel, Stephen Kruiser, Charlie Martin and others from that general group of authors. Charles Petzold’s Wikipedia bio has been slurped up by Grokipedia, as has that of Nancy Kress, but no other SFF authors of my acquaintance are there, even ones who have been reasonably successful, like Brad Torgerson. Weirdly, Groki has the Wiki article on the Bolo Universe, but none on Keith Laumer, who created it. (Nor on Retief, either.)

Golf clap. Good start, but there’s a LOT of work to be done still. I’ll be checking in on Grokipedia from time to time, and if something interesting turns up I’ll report it here.