Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.

On Bray

My Grokipedia entry has over seven thousand words, compared to a mere 1,300 in my Wikipedia article. It’s pretty clear how it was generated; an LLM, trained on who-knows-what but definitely including that Wikipedia article and this blog, was told to go nuts.

Speaking as a leading but highly biased expert on the subject of T. Bray, here are the key take-aways:

(Overly) complete

It covers all the territory; there is no phase of my life’s activity that could possibly be encountered in combing the Web that is not exhaustively covered. In theory this should be good but in fact, who cares about the details of what I worked on at Sun Microsystems between 2004 and 2010? I suppose I should but, like I said, I couldn’t force myself to plod all the way through it.

Wrong

Every paragraph contains significant errors. Sometimes the text is explicitly self-contradictory on the face of it, sometimes the mistakes are subtle enough that only I would spot them.

Style

The writing has that LLM view-from-nowhere flat-affect semi-academic flavor. I don’t like it but the evidence suggests that some people do?

References

All the references are just URLs and at least some of them entirely fail to support the text. Here’s an example. In discussion of my expert-witness work for the FTC in their litigation against Meta concerning its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Grokipedia says:

[Bray] opined that users' perceptions of response times in online services critically influence market dynamics.

It cites Federal Trade Commission’s Reply to Meta Platforms, Inc.’s Response to Federal Trade Commission’s Counterstatement of Material Facts (warning: 2,857-page PDF). Okay, that was one of the things I argued, but the 425 pages of court documents that I filed, and the references to my reporting in the monster document, make it clear that it was one tiny subset of the main argument.

Anyhow, I (so that you won’t have to) spent a solid fifteen minutes spelunking back and forth through that FTC doc, looking for strings like “response time” and “latency” and so on. Maybe somewhere in those pages there’s support for the claim quoted above, but I couldn’t find it.

Useful?

Wikipedia, in my mind, has two main purposes: A quick visit to find out the basics about some city or person or plant or whatever, or a deep-dive to find out what we really know about genetic linkages to autism or Bach’s relationship with Frederick the Great or whatever.

At the moment, Grokipedia doesn’t really serve either purpose very well. But, after all, this is release 0.1, maybe we should give it a chance.

Or, maybe not.

Woke/Anti-Woke

The whole point, one gathers, is to provide an antidote to Wikipedia’s alleged woke bias. So I dug into that. Let’s consider three examples of what I found. First, from that same paragraph about the FTC opinion quoted above:

While Bray and aligned progressives contend that such dominance stifles innovation by enabling predatory acquisitions and reduced rivalry—evidenced by fewer startup exits in concentrated sectors—counterarguments highlight that Big Tech's scale has fueled empirical gains, with these firms investing over $240 billion in U.S. R&D in 2024 (more than a quarter of national totals) and driving AI, cloud, and patent surges.[128] [131] Six tech industries alone accounted for over one-third of U.S. GDP growth from 2012–2021, comprising about 9% of the economy and sustaining 9.3 million jobs amid falling consumer prices and rapid technological diffusion. [132] [133] Right-leaning economists often defend consumer welfare metrics and market self-correction, warning that forced divestitures risk eroding the efficiencies and investment incentives that have propelled sector productivity above 6% annual growth in key areas like durable manufacturing tech. [134] [135]

I’ve linked the numbered citations to the indicated URLs. Maybe visit one or two of them and see what you think? Four are to articles arguing, basically, that monopolies must be OK because the companies accused of it are growing really fast and driving the economy. They seem mostly to be from right-wing think-tanks but I guess that’s what those think-tanks are for. One of them, #131, Big Tech and the US Digital-Military-Industrial Complex, I think isn’t helpful to the argument at all. But still, it’s broadly doing what they advertise: Pushing back against “woke” positions, in this case the position that monopolization is bad.

I looked at a couple of other examples. For example, this is from the header of the Greta Thunberg article:

While credited with elevating youth engagement on environmental issues, Thunberg's promotion of urgent, existential climate threats has drawn scrutiny for diverging from nuanced empirical assessments of climate risks and adaptation capacities, as well as for extending her activism into broader political arenas such as anti-capitalist and geopolitical protests.[5][6]

Somehow I feel no urge to click on those citation links.

If Ms Thunberg is out there on the “woke” end of the spectrum, let’s flit over to the other end, namely the entry for J.D. Vance, on the subject of his book Hillbilly Elegy.

Critics from progressive outlets, including Sarah Smarsh in her 2018 book Heartland, faulted the memoir for overemphasizing personal and cultural failings at the expense of structural economic policies, arguing it perpetuated stereotypes of rural whites as self-sabotaging.[71] These objections, often rooted in institutional analyses from academia and media, overlooked data on behavioral patterns like opioid dependency rates—peaking at 21.5 deaths per 100,000 in Appalachia around 2016—that aligned with Vance's observations of "deaths of despair" precursors.[72]

I read and enjoyed Heartland but the citation is to a New Yorker article that doesn’t mention Smarsh. As for the second sentence… my first reaction as I trudged through its many clauses, was “life’s too short”. But seriously, opioid-death statistics weaken the hypothesis about structural economic issues? Don’t get it.

Take-away

Wikipedia is, to quote myself, the encyclopedia that “anyone who’s willing to provide citations can edit”. Grokipedia is “the encyclopedia that Elon Musk’s LLM can edit, with sketchy citations and no progressive argument left un-attacked.”

So I guess it’s Working As Intended?

The post Bark Loop appeared first on Sheldon® Comic Strip.

By philosopher Steven M. Cahn:

(1) Assume that there exists an omnipotent, omniscient, omnimalevolent Demon who created the world.
(2) If the Demon exists, then there would be no goodness in the world.
(3) But there is goodness in the world.
(4) Therefore, the Demon does not exist.

A demonist who wants to deny (4) would need to deny (1), (2), or (3). No demonist would question (1), and it’s difficult to deny (3), but we can escape (2) only by claiming that the world’s good is somehow necessary, that every good in the world is logically needed in order for this to be the worst world that the Demon could have created.

This is the familiar “problem of evil” turned on its head. The notion that all the world’s good (sunsets, Socrates’ free will) is necessary to create maximum evil is just as improbable as that all the world’s evil (bubonic plague, Hitler’s free will) is needed to create maximum good. Unless demonists or theists can produce further evidence in favor of their positions, “the reasonable conclusion is that neither the Demon nor God exists.”

(Steven M. Cahn, “Cacodaemony,” Analysis 37:2 [January 1977], 69-73.)

Source - Patreon

If you’re using TRY/CATCH to do exception handling in T-SQL, you need to be aware that there are a lot of things it doesn’t catch. Here’s a quick example.

Let’s set up two tables – bookmarks, and a process log to track whether our stored proc is working or not:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Bookmarks;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.ProcessLog;

CREATE TABLE dbo.Bookmarks(
    URL VARCHAR(50));
GO

CREATE TABLE dbo.ProcessLog(
    ProcessDate DATETIME,
    StatusMessage VARCHAR(50));
GO

And create a simple stored procedure that adds a bookmark, and tracks whether it was successful:

CREATE OR ALTER PROC dbo.AddBookmark @URL VARCHAR(50) AS
BEGIN
    BEGIN TRY
        INSERT INTO dbo.Bookmarks
            VALUES (@URL);

        INSERT INTO dbo.ProcessLog
            VALUES (GETDATE(), 'It Worked');
    END TRY

    BEGIN CATCH
        INSERT INTO dbo.ProcessLog
            VALUES (GETDATE(), 'It Failed');
    END CATCH

END
GO

When you execute the proc, it succeeds, and a row is written to ProcessLog:

But if someone adds a new column to our Bookmarks table:

ALTER TABLE dbo.Bookmarks ADD BookmarkedOn DATETIME;

And we try to run our stored proc again, it fails:

Because the stored proc’s insert statement didn’t explicitly list the columns in the Bookmark table:

INSERT INTO dbo.Bookmarks
            VALUES (@URL);

Okay, that’s bad code – but did the CATCH come into play? Check the table contents:

There’s no row in ProcessLog saying that the process failed! What happened? Wasn’t our CATCH supposed to insert a row there?

Catch only catches SOME errors.

Early errors aren’t caught, like errors when the query is being compiled. In this case, when SQL Server was building an execution plan for the stored procedure, SQL Server couldn’t build a valid execution plan because there’s no way for it to execute the insert. The compilation failed, which technically means the query wasn’t executed – even though to you and me and our app users, it was executed.

Low-priority errors aren’t caught, like under severity 10. Those are just considered informational messages.

High-priority errors aren’t caught, like severity 20 or higher. Those terminate the connection altogether.

Right about here is where you’re expecting me to give you a magic bullet that fixes these problems, but instead, I have to give you a monster amount of documentation. Check out the epic posts Error and Transaction Handling in SQL Server Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 by Erland Sommarskog. They’re monster posts, and I have to be honest with you, dear reader, I haven’t ever read them cover to cover. This is one of those times where I’m glad I have a fake job, aka consultant, where I can just say, “If our stored procedure’s business logic is really that critical and complex, it’s time we move that processing over into an application language like C# that has better error handling and testability.”

Source - Patreon