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Foreign. Welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founding company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content@ 404 Media co. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are the 404 Media co founders, the first being Sam Cole.
B
Hey.
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Emmanuel Mayberg.
C
What up?
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And Jason Kebler.
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Hello. Hello. The merch is here. The merch is here. Merch alert. It's here.
A
And which merch is that? That's the new design, the new stuff, the old stuff.
D
Restock. It's a lot of stuff. I'm glad.
C
Flying off the shelves.
D
Yeah, I mean, get it while you can. Uh, but if you ordered, if you pre ordered, I'll be mailing it probably today. Hopefully today. Hopefully it'll be in the mail by the time you hear this.
A
What does that process involve? You go to the place we buy it from and then you throw it into a bunch of. You have a whole system.
D
I mean, like, honestly, it involves me printing out many labels and sticking them on these green envelopes and then digging through boxes and seeing what people ordered and send them. It's like extraordinary. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, I will say. But I do have it down. I have a cool label maker. I put stickers in them, which you can see here.
A
See, I'm here for audio listeners. He's flicking them around and now he's walked off.
D
I've got a box of stuff here. This is like stuff that I already had, but it's like I have these green envelopes, a label maker. I stick them on all with love. And then.
C
Did we choose green envelopes for the brand?
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Yeah.
C
Awesome.
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Yeah.
D
Yeah.
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We are going to become like a fashion brand that does journalism on the side. I think, like, the merch is going to take over, don't you think, Jason?
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I mean, that's the hope. It's a stable industry. I don't know if that's actually true, but.
A
And with tariffs and everything, it's just.
D
People need clothes, you know?
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That's true. All right. Yeah. Get your orders in. If you want some merch. I'm definitely going to get one of the new sweatshirts. Very other brief bit of housekeeping. Shameless plug. My book is coming out in paperback on November 11th. It's about how the FBI secretly ran an encrypted phone company to wiretap the world in the largest Sing operation ever. You've probably heard me talk about it a bunch. The paperback comes with loads more detail in the epilogue. You know, I spoke to more government officials, more people directly involved in selling the phones, all of that, so you can get an updated copy there. And of course, you know, being paperback, it's going to be probably easier to carry around with you and read. I'm just going to give this discount code to 404 Media listeners as well. If you use the code Wire20 at the link in the show notes, you get 20% off. I'll put in the show notes as well. Share Shameless plug. I will move on. Can we do another Shameless plug now? Emmanuel for a friend's book?
C
Another shameless plug for Becky Ferreira's book called first the Story of Our Obsession With Aliens. Becky Writes the Abstract, which is our science newsletter. Everybody loves the newsletter. To know Becky is to love her. She is such a beautiful, wonderful writer. I am reading this book right now and it's no different. I don't know what I was expecting. I never really talked to Becky about the book, but it's not what I expected. It's really more a work of anthropology about what our obsession with aliens is about and where it comes from and what it has meant throughout the ages. And it's just like really beautifully written and just includes a ton of really interesting, surprising research that I had no idea about. So highly recommend that it's on Amazon. It's on every bookstore, hardcover, Kindle audiobook, please get it.
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And we are launching a new interview podcast. I mean, it's going to be on the same feed that you'll listen to now. But then you've already got a tease of this from Jason did an interview about Windows 10. I did one ages ago, Window with the head of Signal. Sam did one about pornhub, I think, even before that. But we're going to be doing more of those every week. And I bring that up because one of the people on the show will be Becky. Right, Emmanuel?
C
Yeah, we'll do a deep dive into her book and I'm really looking forward to that.
A
All right, sounds good. Let's get to this week, this exhausting week. We record this on Tuesdays and it already feels like it's Friday because so much has been going on. But the headline of this one that Jason wrote is Grokopedia is the antithesis of Everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful and human. Jason, what do people see when they go to grokopedia.com I mean, I believe.
D
It'S dark mode only. It's a black window with a search box. And it's just like search for. It's like Wikipedia. It's a clone of Wikipedia is what they are attempting to do.
A
All right, but what is this then? So you go there and I'm gonna do some searches while you're talking. Cause I haven't poked around it yet. But what is Grokipedia? I'm sure people can guess from the word grok in it.
D
I mean, it's Elon Musk's butt hurt competitor. He calls it a competitor to Wikipedia, which he calls Wokipedia. And basically it is an LLM that calls itself an encyclopedia. It looks like Wikipedia in many ways. And it is like explicitly an ideological project of Elon Musk to like de woke ify Wikipedia, which he does not like for many reasons. But the main reason being he doesn't like what his article, what the Wikipedia article for Elon Musk says about him. So this has been like one of his little pet projects for like quite some time is one, like railing against Wikipedia and then two, like funding or creating some sort of alternative to Wikipedia. But of course, you know, as denoted by the name, Grokopedia is entirely AI generated. It is not like Wikipedia at all in terms of former function. It's as though you just like told an AI to make something that looks like an encyclopedia and it turned out exactly how you might think it would turn out.
A
And to belabor the question, how did it turn out then it's just like a bunch of inaccurate crap like what are we talking about?
D
So what it reminds me most of is Google's AI summaries. Honestly, it's like you type something into a box and then there's, you know, an article or it's trying to like answer a question at the top. The difference is that Grokopedia is like a website in that it has articles on bespoke topics. So right now it says that there's 885,000 articles available. So if you type in Twitter, like there's a page for that. If you type in, you know, presidents of the United States, there's a page for that. And the page is not changing, like based on an inquiry. So it's not like a chatbot. It is, it's like a static website that has been created with AI generated content. It is pretty minimalist. So Again, it's like, you know, black screen, white text, there's no images. There are not really links. Yeah, there's not links in line or they have the little citations like they do on Wikipedia. So like, it does say where it's taking the information from. Notably, like links to Wikipedia itself seem to be banned. There's been a few places in articles where it has leaked some of the like internal instructions for Grokopedia. And it, it says like, oh, I'm not allowed to cite Wikipedia. And they also have like little headlines, um, like Wikipedia does. So I'm, I have the Twitter one pulled up. Uh, you know, it has like a summary at the top and then it has a section called History. And it says like founding and early development of Twitter. And it, it kind of goes on and on and on as to like whether it's all made up, dribble. I mean, I feel like LLMs are getting to the point where yes, there are hallucinations and surely there are hallucinations in this as well, but it's like people who have dug deep into this have found inaccuracies, but for the most part it's like, it's more that it's surface level, like extraordinarily surface level, like recitation of facts versus it just being like totally all bullshit. There is like a, there is a right wing slant specifically, and it has been programmed to have a right wing slant. Wire did a good piece about some examples of that. But like, if you fell onto Grokopedia today and you started typing things in, you'd be like, wow, there are some facts here. Interestingly, every single article is extraordinarily long, which I think is probably a function of the fact that it's AI generated. It doesn't really know when to stop, I think. And it's in my opinion, organized, really weird. You know, it just has things like, kind of out of order. It puts like import, like quote unquote, like important things like at the bottom of the article. This, Twitter, this article on Twitter is like many thousands of words long, for example. And it's just like, I don't know, it's, it's just super surface level in my opinion. I don't know. Have any of you like played around with it at all?
A
I was just looking through what Wired found and the headline of that one was Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far Right Talking Points. And yeah, they went through it and they found the entry on transgender referring to trans women as biological males. All of that Sort of thing. Kind of exactly what you would expect from a Grokopedia or one leaning in that direction or anything. I guess it's so surface level because if you start to dig into actual more of the facts and more of the nuance, it turns out that reality has a left leaning bias because I don't know, it's just based on fucking reality and real things and science, but I don't know. So who.
D
I guess what I mean by that is like there's an entry for the word printer, like a computer printer, and it says a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a durable representation of graphics or text, usually on paper. It's like, okay, true, that's good. I mean it's. Which is just to say like you don't go there and it's not like complete drivel, it's just there's lots of things in here that are not political, just as there are many, many Wikipedia entries about anything you could possibly imagine. And so like if you just type in a random word, there'll be an entry for it and you're not going to read it and be like, this is completely like bullshit, AI. You'll be like, this is just like a series of facts, like laid out in a, in a way that is not terribly useful.
A
Right. Or interesting or anything like that. To zoom out. You said, you know, Musk makes it because he doesn't like his own Wikipedia page and that sort of thing. But there's like a more. There's a broader context here, right? In that even some lawmakers have issues with Wikipedia, like Ted Cruz, like what's been the recent context in people on the right or kind of all over the place, especially on the right, having issues with Wikipedia. What's the context there?
D
Yeah, so I mean, Wikipedia is this very international project and as such it operates in a lot of countries that have authoritarian governments and it has a lot of like anti censorship aspects to it. You know, there are millions of editors worldwide and they're in countries all over the place. So it's not like that American centric of an organization. And so they had to try to like resist censorship in Russia, in Turkey, in like a lot of countries all over the world. And interestingly, like one of the biggest threats to the Wikimedia foundation right now is coming from the United States. And there's been a lot of discussions like at the Wikimedia foundation, which is the foundation that runs Wikipedia and its related projects, as to like where they should be holding conventions and things like that. Now, you know, they do them internationally, but there's been discussion about like moving some of them outside of the United States because one, a lot of people who want to come to them can't get visas. There's talk about like, should it be backed up elsewhere, like that sort of thing, just because Republicans in particular have turned their sights on it. So the, the background to it is for many years like rich and powerful people have not liked how they are portrayed on Wikipedia. There's an entire industry of something called paid editing where it's like reputation management. Companies try to edit Wikipedia pages to, you know, like, make them more palatable to rich and powerful people. This is like extremely against the rules of Wikipedia. So for years there's been like this idea of reputation management on Wikipedia. It's extremely against the rules to pay someone to edit or to just like edit your own page there. There was like this account on Twitter before Musk ran it that was like, called Congress Edits. So whenever an IP address from within Congress was caught like editing Wikipedia, it would show what it was. And it was very often like Congress people changing their own pages and things like that. And one of the big like bulwarks against this is the fact that it is a group project and like human beings are maintaining this. And there's like, there's a bit of a hierarchy to Wikipedia where like, if you're a really well respected editor, like, you can quite often like get your own way and that sort of thing. And so a lot of the people who edit Wikipedia and they're, they're from all over the world, but a lot of them are like, based in Europe or they're based in Africa or they're based in Asia and they're like editing pages about like the January 6th riots or the 2020 election and things like this. And it's like they're not, they're not willing to bow down to, you know, the false narrative that the election was stolen or whatever. And so Wikipedia has become a target of Trump, of the administration, of people who are saying like, it has a liberal bias. It, you know, reflects reality. The reality that, you know, the election was not stolen and things like that.
A
It is obviously reminiscent Grokipedia of something I only just learned actually existed. When I listened to, you know, our friends at REMAP and they mentioned something called Conservopedia, which I again never heard of, launched in November 2006. Well, I'm actually reading the Wikipedia page about Conservipedia and it just says it's an English language wiki based online encyclopedia written from a self described American conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view. I mean, it sounds like Grokopedia is basically the same thing and that is ideologically driven. Not that it's necessarily exactly the same ideology, but I mean it's not far off and it's going to be interesting how it develops and grows over time. I guess I was going to bring.
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It up as well and I wanted to pull an article, but for me conservepedia is not loading. Is that true for you?
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Also, I couldn't get it to load, so then I went to the Wikipedia of Conservat. Of Conservaedia. I mean, do you remember that coming out? I don't. I think I was too.
C
I haven't heard of it until Rob Zachney mentioned it on the Remap podcast as well. Yeah, yeah.
A
I don't know.
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Did they hug it to death or did it go down?
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Yeah, I'm not sure.
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All of remap's listeners crushing conservepedia.
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It's just funny that there's.
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For me it's just slow.
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Oh, okay.
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I mean, it's funny. There's been like many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many attempts to make an alternative and often it is under these grounds of like, we need a conservative version of Wikipedia. We need. It's often like people who were Wikipedia editors for a long time who were getting a lot of their edits rejected because they were trying to insert like insane shit into specific articles and they're like, I'm just going to start my own one. And then they do it and no one does it and no one goes there. Because in part there's this just incredible collaboration of Wikipedia. Like why would you. You're not going to be able to take millions of people from this objectively very good and powerful thing and get them to do the exact same work somewhere else for your ideological project.
A
Yeah. Sam, do you still have Conserva Pedia in front of you? I can't get alert.
B
Yeah. Do you want to know what it means?
A
Yeah. What are we looking at?
B
It's a pretty bare bones frame website, but it says, I mean, there's a list of popular articles at Conserva Pedia. The top articles, there's a bunch. But there's evidence for Christianity, Great Flood, the World, Denial, American Civil War, Free Market, Tchaikovsky, Unplug the NFL Anxiety is one of the top articles. Most anxiety can be the result of a misunderstanding or rejection of fundamental truth. I sought the Lord and he Heard me and delivered me from all my fears. Psalm 34. 4.
C
Amen. Amen.
A
Yeah, I was with him in the.
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First half and then Black hole feminism. It's just like a bunch of stuff. And then there's a list of in the news what MSM isn't fully covering. Ireland elects anti EU warmongering, anti NATO expansion president setback for worst college majors, Stephen Smith, Trump is coming for black sports organizations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
A
I find it funny that there's often the idea that Silicon Valley, they think they're making something new, but it's like, oh yeah, we did the boring tunnel and everybody can get in there. And it's like, dude, you just made a bus or whatever. And they can't even make a new right leaning Wikipedia because Conservopedia already did that 20 years ago.
B
You can work for Crim Turbopedia. There is a job listing. Fill out an application.
A
What's the job?
B
You think it's not paid?
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Oh, okay, well.
B
Well, why would you like to join? And then there's an empty field. Additional comments optional.
A
Well, neither.
B
That's it.
A
Neither is Wikipedia, of course. But that brings me to the final thing I just want to ask Jason, which is that, look, the actual point of your piece is explaining the Grokipedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good and reliable and important. I mean, just. I'm sure everybody knows, but what do you mean by that? It's the collaborative nature you were talking about. Like, what is it?
D
Yeah, I mean, I've said this before on the podcast, but I think that this is the biggest group project in the history of humankind, like, global project. It's, you know, a nonprofit organization. It's incredibly international. It's for the most part very positive vibes. And it's proven itself to be like, incredibly resistant to these efforts to attack Wikipedia because it has all these like, rules and norms and guidelines that are like, they have been set up over the course of literally just many, many years. And like probably the most annoying meetings of all time, like, if you go to the talk page for any article, you'll see people just talking about how to word something or like, does this article actually belong here? Or they'll discuss, like, should a comma actually go here? And that sort of thing. And that is like pedantic and annoying probably for a lot of people. But it also makes Wikipedia Wikipedia like, it makes it this incredibly human thing. And Emmanuel has done a lot of reporting about how, like Wikipedia has been pretty good at resisting AI, for example, and that's partially because you have the collective labor efforts of like all of these people who care very deeply about this thing, who's who are volunteering to do it, and they don't want to see it taken over by AI. And so what Grokopedia is, is this like extremely low effort. Like not even, it's not even a competitor to it. Like I said that in the article because it's just like so half assed. It's like you told an AI to go scrape a bunch of shit and this is what we turned up with.
A
Yeah, it doesn't seem that Grokipedia is, as you say, particularly high effort at all. It's sort of just churning out and pulling out on the Internet. Well, we'll see how it develops. We'll leave that there. And after the break we're going to talk about the end of Windows 10 and the Environmental impact that's going to have, but then a bunch of other stuff as well. We'll be right back after this.
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A
All right, and we are back. Jason wrote this one, but I want to ask Emmanuel and Sam something first. The headline is the end of Windows 10 support is an E waste disaster in the making. Emmanuel, can you explain how you're updating your PC at the moment? Like, what does that involve for you?
C
Yeah, I'm a lifelong loyalist to Windows and as anyone who uses Windows knows over the past it's probably like three years, two years now. Microsoft has been pushing people increasingly more aggressively to Windows 11 from Windows 10 and I think last week was the last security update, which again, as a lifelong Windows user, this is the most aggressive transition that I think I've seen the company make. Like, I think it's still the most used operating system in the world. I think there are still machines out there running 95 and 98 and 2000.
A
Yeah, my gaming PC.
C
Yeah, but it's like ATMs and like, I don't know, probably whatever manages our nuclear defense and stuff like that. But because it's so widely used, there is, you know, probably decades of support after they move on to the next operating system. As a user I never felt so aggressively pushed to like you need to get the new one and I honestly wouldn't. But my computer started crashing so, so I went to update Windows and the first thing I see is that my computer is not like, I forget what the term it didn't say, like I didn't meet system requirements is what it says. Which as a gamer, like what you hear is like, your computer is not good enough for Windows 11. Which is ridiculous because that's obviously an error, right? Well, it's not an error. The thing is, is that you have to. Windows 11 only works with TPM 2.0. TPM stands for trusted Platform Module. It's basically, I think the way it works is like it's a chip on the motherboard that handles some like cryptographic.
D
Keys.
C
So it could do things more secure on like a kernel level. And I had to like update my motherboard so I could run that and then that means updating the bios and then I could update Windows so I can update my, my GPU driver so I can like play Battlefield 6 confidently without crashing. But I'm still crashing. So it was all for not I shouldn't have updated. But I guess it's good because now I get the security updates.
A
Sam, are you going through this as well as like a fellow PC user?
B
I mean going through it is not really the word for it. It's more that I, that I've been getting pop ups from Windows for about a year saying you need to upgrade to 11. And then I hit ignore and it keeps getting more and more aggressive and I keep hitting ignore and telling it to off forever and it finally got me like I just, I didn't want to have like a, an unupdated PC because.
A
So you've done.
B
Yeah, it's, yeah, it's done. The deed is done. Very sadly. It's fine. It's totally the same. It's, you know, it's like not a.
C
Big deal, dude, our start menu is in the middle.
B
Well, you can move that. I moved mine. But yeah, when I saw her I was like, fuck this. I was like, flip the table. But that's the only difference that I can notice. So whatever, that's fine.
A
So I Legit. Have not used Windows since Windows 98. I'm not even joking and I used to use it a lot, so I'm rarely out of the loop. But what I do understand is that some, I mean a lot of people are, are very protective of Windows 10, right? Like people love Windows 10 for some reason and they like, why, why is that? Why are people so attached to works?
B
It's a good os, man. What do you want?
C
It's a good os. It works, it does what you want it to do. It doesn't crash. Yeah, it's a super stable. It's a super stable os. Probably the most stable that I've ever used. I would say that like every iteration gets more stable, but that's not true. There are like notoriously bad ones like Visco or whatever, right?
D
I think that you're baiting Linux users right now.
A
Well by saying this is the most secure.
D
If you use Linux or Unix, please don't email. Talk to Emmanuel, he'd love to hear from you. He would love to hear from you.
A
I mean, since you bring it up and I feel I've made this joke a couple of times like in Slack and stuff, but I feel like Jason is so close to becoming a Linux user. Like so close because based on this article and you know, the environmental impact of Windows 10, et cetera, I feel like you're getting so. Have you done it before, Jason?
D
I downloaded Ubuntu on an old laptop one time and I used it for a few minutes and then I couldn't find a driver for something that I needed that I'm sure I could have figured out, but I aborted Mission immediately. I do think that Linux is probably incredibly usable. That's not the type of thing that I'm into. That's not the type of frustration that I want to deal with. I want to deal primarily with hardware based frustrations versus software based ones.
A
Yeah, you want new tech or new interesting gear or repairing old interesting gear. You don't want to be in the command line going why the fuck is it not updating my packages? Or something like that.
D
Yeah, yeah, which, I mean, maybe that's an outdated view of the usability of.
A
Linux, but no, it's pretty on point, I would say. I mean, I used Linux well because I couldn't afford like a Mac. A Mac was like too expensive. When I was like freelancing, I used like a used thinkpad for like 200 or 300 pounds or something. I remember I actually brought it to the office once when I was Using cubes on it like a secure operating system. And I think I showed it to Emmanuel or Jason the other way around. But one of you then called the other one over, like, come check this out. Come look at Joseph's stupid laptop. Because it was like a big brick with those red little mouse pads in the middle, like in the keyboard. I love that thing. But no, it became too much pain in the ass and I moved to Mac.
B
But I think we were all sitting here trying to think of the word for the little red thing. What is it called?
D
Clitoris. That is what I mean.
B
That's the only thing that I can.
A
Yeah, no, there's a word.
D
It'S called the red dot. The thing is that what it's called the track point.
B
Trackpoint.
A
Oh yes, there might be something like that. So the reason I went down that little Linux.
D
Wikipedia calls it a pointing stick.
A
What does Grokopedia call it?
D
I know, I gotta look it up.
A
Conservopedia is not fucking touching that. They don't want anything to do with it. The reason I went on that little tangent with Linux is because I'm sure a lot of people, because of this Windows 10 end of life, end of security updates, are probably going to move some of those devices over to Linux. Right? And have you heard people doing that, Jason, since you published this piece a couple of weeks ago? Like, are people telling you that, oh yeah, we're actually going to do that, we're actually are going to move to Linux or.
D
Yeah, I mean, a lot of people commented on that story. That was like an incredibly commented upon story, I think, because a lot of people said, well, can't you simply move to Linux?
A
There's so many different ways people will find to say that.
D
But I mean, it's true. They're like, I, you know, my computer or my wife's computer or whatever can't Upgrade to Windows 11. So I have installed, you know, a stable version of Linux and it will provide me many years of functionality after this. I was speaking in the third person, Emmanuel. There's also been a lot of people who say that, well, you could do this for a computer or, sorry, if you, if you run like a fleet of them, for example, like it's not as easy as saying like, well, why doesn't the IT guy just install Ubuntu on like a bunch of a thousand computers for fourth graders or whatever. It's like a lot of them are operating under specific contracts as we talked about on an interview podcast with Nathan Proctor, which maybe you have listened to, but you should go listen to if you're interested in this. A lot of them have like security guidelines that are binding. And so it's like if you work for a local government or something, like if you're not able to get the latest security updates, you have to get rid of those computers. And so that's what's happening to a lot of these. I've also heard of people who have figured out how to update Windows 10 computers to Windows 11 when technically they don't meet like the minimum specs and they're not able. It's like go to the command line, delete X, Y, Z thing and you can just like do it anyway. Which I also don't think is a solution at scale. I think that by and large, like we're talking about a lot of computers that are either owned by people who don't update their hardware very often or enterprise buyers of hardware that are kind of bound not just by the hardware that they have, but by different contracts and different laws and regulations and things like that.
A
So again, people can go listen to that interview if they want a bit more detail. I'll just very briefly give people some context now, but the numbers are something like 400 million computers can't be upgraded to Windows 11. So I mean, what are they gonna. What's gonna happen to them? Are they gonna become scrap landfill Linux machines without wi fi or audio? Who really knows? I guess we'll see. But yeah, definitely go check out the interview if you want more from that. I just wanted an excuse to hear about Emmanuel and Sam's upgrading disaster, but it actually sounded like Sam's went, okay, I just kind of wanted, that's fine.
B
Get a PC, dude. Get good. Build it.
A
Absolutely not.
B
Coward.
A
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Date: October 29, 2025
Hosts: Joseph, Sam Cole, Emanuel Maiberg, Jason Koebler
In this episode, the 404 Media team dives deep into the launch and politics of Grokipedia—Elon Musk’s purported Wikipedia competitor built with AI, reflecting a particular ideological slant. They compare and contrast it to Wikipedia and Conservapedia, considering the broader cultural and political context of attempts to reframe the way knowledge is collected and presented online. The team also covers the looming e-waste crisis stemming from Microsoft's aggressive push away from Windows 10, sharing personal anecdotes and insights about the evolution of operating systems.
"Honestly, it involves me printing out many labels and sticking them on these green envelopes...digging through boxes and seeing what people ordered. It’s a lot of work. But I do have it down." – Jason (01:11)
"It’s Elon Musk’s butt hurt competitor...He calls it a competitor to Wikipedia, which he calls Wokipedia. Basically it is an LLM that calls itself an encyclopedia...explicitly an ideological project of Elon Musk to de-wokeify Wikipedia." – Jason (05:52)
"There is a right-wing slant specifically, and it has been programmed to have a right-wing slant." – Jason (09:10)
"Every single article is extraordinarily long...It’s just super surface level in my opinion." – Jason (09:57)
"...exactly what you would expect from a Grokipedia or one leaning in that direction..." – Joseph (10:41)
"Grokipedia is entirely AI generated...not like Wikipedia at all in terms of form or function." – Jason (06:38)
"It's funny, there have been...many, many attempts to make an alternative [to Wikipedia]...often like people who were Wikipedia editors for a long time...trying to insert insane shit into specific articles...then they do it and no one does it and no one goes there." – Jason (17:30)
"Republicans in particular have turned their sights on it...for years, like rich and powerful people have not liked how they are portrayed on Wikipedia..." – Jason (12:42)
"...the biggest group project in the history of humankind...The fact that human beings are maintaining this makes it this incredibly human thing." – Jason (20:33)
"My computer started crashing...Windows 11 only works with TPM 2.0...I had to update my motherboard [and] BIOS..." – Emanuel (27:42)
"It finally got me...I didn’t want to have an unupdated PC..." – Sam (29:25)
"It works, it does what you want it to do, it doesn’t crash...super stable." – Emanuel (30:42)
"A lot of people commented on that story...‘well, can’t you simply move to Linux?’...but it’s not as easy at scale—schools and agencies are bound by regulations and contracts." – Jason (34:22)
"A lot of computers...are either owned by people who don’t update their hardware very often or enterprise buyers bound...by different contracts..." – Jason (36:44)
This episode offers a thorough, irreverent, but deeply informed discussion on the politics of digital knowledge bases, the drain of AI-driven vanity projects, and the unintended fallout from tech giants pushing users off stable platforms. The team blends personal anecdotes, historical context, and sharp humor to frame the growing rifts in digital information and the very real environmental impacts of planned software obsolescence.
404 Media subscribers get access to a bonus segment discussing A16Z and the drive toward a fully AI-generated Internet.
Subscribe at 404media.co for more.