How popular is Grok compared to other companies models for SWE tasks? I almost never hear it talked about against OpenAI's or Anthropic's products

Because of the of the political stuff, they have a bad reputation I think and are taken less seriously (I feel this way). They have an opportunity imo to break free from that and just not do the gatekeeping / condescension that the other providers are starting, and become more mainstream.

Even without the politics, Elon has shown that he will weaponize his platforms against people/companies he personally doesn't like (e.g. specific bans/demotions to external sites like Substack and Bluesky).

Using Grok is therefore a supply chain risk and it's not nearly good enough to offset that risk.

As opposed to what was happening before, on Twitter?

Nobody said that Twitter wasn't poorly-managed. All types of petty squabbling are a liability nightmare for consumers of software services.

Seems irrelevant since Jack Dorsey is not the one buying half the worlds compute and telling us to plug his AI into our brains.

I do just want to focus on the 'even without the politics' asterisk though because sometimes there is a risk people think everyone on x side (x meaning 'a given side', not x.com) is wrong

You can claim Elon bought x as some sort of power trip. Fine. Willing to entertain it, I have no dog in the fight. I'm not a member of the Elon fan club. And yet Twitter (under Dorsey though I don't think he was involved) was banning tons of people under guises of 'misinfo' that wasn't misinfo

Pre-Musk twitter isn't the comparison point here. Anthropic/Google are.

Americans are 4% of the world's population, and even among those 4% at least half don't give a shit. the rest of us give even less of a shit, we don't have the luxury to be principled.

The rest of the world either has no money to pay for this stuff or cares even more. You think the average European or Australian loves Elon's racist tweets?

The people who "don't have the luxury" are using cheaper Chinese models.

do you contemplate Xi Jinping's public statements before you buy something made in China?

They were missing a harness like Claude Code or Codex (terminal). However they recently released Grok Build, which is probably the fasted I've used, in terms of responsiveness, but didn't have a model at Opus 4.7/8 level. The thing is if they add 4.5 to Grok Build and keep improving the harness I think it can compete (cheaper and faster).

I've been using Grok Build over the last couple weeks. It's actually a very good CLI. The Grok Build 0.1 model isn't great but can also use Composer 2.5 which is excellent. Well worth trying.

You can very roughly proxy popularity of close-sourced models through OpenRouter token throughput. Grok has an order of magnitude less OpenRouter usage than Claude, GPT, even Gemini.

They had two big substantive flaws on top of the political stuff. Aside from a brief window last summer Grok has been behind the curve for coding, and before the Cursor acquisition they didn’t have a harness. Now they have an Opus tier model and a real harness they have at a minimum the opportunity to undercut the competition on price. And with the 5T and 10T models being trained on Colossus 2 they have the possibility to leap ahead.

Completely irrelevant, which was expected considering their previous models were vastly outclassed by other models at SWE.

This is the first grok model that seems actually pretty competitive at SWE.

Wasn't, which is why they purchased Cursor.

If they were a frontier lab, you'd know.

No one's made a MechaHitler joke yet?

For me, I've found that some curved displays are better than others. My home monitor is curved, on a seemingly very large radius, and I love it!

However some that I've used that are more curved make everything look distorted.

you beat me to it :)

I have this conversation with my wife (who is an avid book reader) at least once per month. I read so many technical documents for work, via my computer, that I often don't want to read a book for pleasure.

I’m “reading” all day long. Code, chats, news, documentation.

There’s really all the difference in the world if you can sit still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade level

I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It’s hard to avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted

I agree that the big difference is between short and long form reading.

i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so much it takes discipline to but the down.

What this seems to show is that long form reading has significant effects on your brain, developing the ability to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to do it. It could even run both ways?

Reading technical docs is closer to reading shop names and street signs than it is to the intention to sit down and consume a work of art.

maybe listen to audio books instead. i don't read books because i would forget everything else around me, but with audiobooks i can do other mundane activities (like housework, going for a walk) alongside it, and it feels very different from reading.

Your wife's right.

> Companies forget this.

they don't care about your commute at all. "if [c-level exec] can make it to the office every day, so can you" not to mention that, said exec does not in fact make it to the office every day

I agree, I don't need an existential crisis every time I open a terminal session

I just don't need a terminal to help me get there; I'm quite good at existential dread without any assistance

Seriously, the point of occupying one's time with most any activity is to avoid ruminating on this stuff.

As expressed in the Internet-famous comic:

https://imgur.com/gallery/d9KdAvH

(It's the "Don't let the existential dread set in" one, to save those familiar a click)

(YMMV, I suppose)

similar, only I use dadjoke and the thinking cow to keep things a lighthearted :)

  dadjoke | cowthink -s

I love FF and have gone back you it for the last few months, after using chrome for years, CPU and battery usage is great now, but coincidentally I've been getting these weird hangups on my laptop. So yesterday I opened up my activity monitor with 6-7 tabs (including 1 youtube tab in a separate window) open I found FF using ~12gb of memory on my MBP. Then to get a comparison, I opened the exact same tabs in a chrome browser (separate window for youtube and all) and found it using under 1gb of memory. This may be is an exceptional case, but for now I just don't have the memory to run FF with docker and dev environments up too.

It's same with a lot of the rural south too. Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas. I grew up driving past these types of towns all the time.

One of my go-to closing questions in interviews is to ask them if they have any concerns/doubts about hiring me for the role.

So far I've gotten pretty good and honest feedback from it. It also gives me an opportunity to explain myself and/or try to turn around any doubts.