My initial impression misjudged the ambition of Grokipedia 0.1.
It's apparently true that many (all?) articles began with Wikipedia content, and some articles are presented with few or no changes to the Wikipedia text.
But many topics have already been largely rewritten.
Notably, when Grok rewrites a page, it will heavily change the sourcing.
For example, on the Grokipedia page for Boris Johnson there are currently 361 citations with URLs. Only 12 of these URLs also appear on the Wikipedia page.
Such extensive changes are common.
After noticing this, I taught a computer to compare Grokipedia and Wikipedia reference lists, which makes it easy to estimate how heavily a page has been edited.
Heavily rewritten pages appear to be far more common than I had initially expected.
In addition, when Grok is rewriting a page, it appears to only add citations as bare links (example at left).
By contrast, citations copied and retained from Wikipedia pages often still show Wikipedia's more detailed citation format (example at right).
While Grokipedia 0.1 does retain considerable elements of its Wikipedia origins, I don't think it is really fair to think of it as a Wikipedia clone.
For better or worse, it is already its own thing, beholden to the whims of Grok.
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A powerful El Niño Event is expected to develop during 2026.
How powerful? Well the seasonal forecasting models are currently all over the place.
So, somewhere between a Top 10 event in modern history and super-bonkers extreme crazy land. 🤔
The simple reality is that seasonal forecasting is hard (and relatively new), and many of these models are just going to be wrong.
I'm expecting a strong El Niño event, and plan to follow the forecast updates closely, but remain very skeptical of the extreme upper end models.
I'm sure it's an exciting time for the seasonal forecast modelers. They get to test their work against highly unusual conditions, and hopefully improve in the process.
But for those of us who just want to know what to expect, confidence is still low.
I thoroughly believe in celebrating the small victories, so here is a tiny one.
The percentage of humanity's energy system that is derived from fossil fuels, ticked down again in 2024 and is now technically at the lowest level since the 1960s, though fossil fuels still dominate.
This change is more noticeable if one focuses on just electricity (rather than all forms of energy), as the rise of solar and wind electricity have been grabbing market share at a rapid pace.
Unfortunately though, "percentage of energy" is fairly optimistic framing.
In absolute terms, natural gas and oil use have continued to grow.
Renewables are expanding faster, and thus grabbing a bigger share, but we are still very far from a clean energy transition.
The Northern Pacific Ocean is currently smashing temperature records.
And it is reaching these levels far earlier than the current generation of climate models had expected.
A short thread 🧵
Nearly the entire Northern Pacific is experiencing a strong marine heat wave, with record warmth in Japan and abnormally warm waters stretching all the way to the North American coastline.
This much extra warmth in a large ocean basin is very rare.