Tim Bray on Grokipedia

I don’t really know who Tim Bray is and until now I had never been to Grokipedia. I don’t really like Grok - I tried Superheavy and it was slow, bloated and no better than Claude Opus.

But I have a bad habit of fact checking. It’s the engineer in me. You tell me something, I instinctively verify. In the linked article, sub-section, ‘References’, Mr. Bray opines about a reference not directly relating to the content cited. So I went to Grokipedia for the first time ever and checked.

Mr. Bray’s quote of a quote he quote couldn’t find is misleading. The sentence on Grokipedia includes 2 referencee of which he includes only the first. This first reference relates to his work with the FTC. The second part of the sentence relates to the second reference. Specifically on Grokipedia in the Tim Bray article linked reference number 50, paragraph 756 cleanly addresses the issue raised by Mr. Bray.

After that I stopped reading, still don’t know or care who Tim Bray is and don’t plan on using either Grokipedia or Grok in the near future.

Perhaps Mr. Bray’s did not fully explore the references or perhaps there was malice. I don’t know. Horseshoe theory applies. Pure pro- positions and pure anti- positions are idiotic and should be filtered accordingly. Filter thusly applied.

If you're going to go through the trouble of checking, you might as well link to the things you checked.

Sure.

Tim Bray’s Grokipedia: https://grokipedia.com/page/Tim_Bray

Relevant text: Serving as the FTC's infrastructure expert, he testified on technical aspects such as service speed and user perceptions of responsiveness, assessing potential competitive harms from reduced incentives for innovation post-acquisition; his declaration, referenced in court filings, emphasized empirical metrics over speculative harms.[49][50]

[49] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/FTCReplytoMetaR...

[50] https://dpo-india.com/Resources/USA_Court_Judgements_Against...

Paragraph 756: Tim Bray, the FTC’s proffered infrastructure expert, opined that “[u]sers’ perceptions of how quickly an online product responds to requests is an important component of the quality of their experience,” and that the delay between a user request and an online product’s response is commonly referred to as latency. Ex. 288 at ¶ 98 (Bray Rep.). Mr. Krieger testified that Instagram saw a “significant latency reduction post-Instagration,” a term referring to Instagram’s migration to Meta’s data servers. Ex. 153 at 76:24-77:5, 287:3-20 (Krieger Dep. Tr.). He prepared a presentation in 2014 stating that there was a “75% latency reduction in our core ‘hot path’ in rendering feeds” after the integration.