tauon's recent activity
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Comment on What change would make you quit Tildes? in ~tildes
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Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech
tauon Link ParentTotally fair point, in the end much of it is going to come down to personal preference for sure. Two notes: Waiting on the request to go through DDG despite not actually needing their...Totally fair point, in the end much of it is going to come down to personal preference for sure.
Two notes:
- Waiting on the request to go through DDG despite not actually needing their servers/search engine for resolving the bang is a “known” issue, see https://unduck.link for an example that’s trying to alleviate that by caching the redirects logic.
- As a practical example for bangs where it’s less effort than trying to configure all browsers, potentially on a device not my own; I land on more than just the English Wikipedia depending on device/browser locale setting, and
!w.en <query>(or!w.de, etc.) guarantees I land where I intended to go.
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Comment on Tildes Survey #7: What is your gender identity? in ~talk
tauon Link ParentHm, that's a tough one. On the one hand I totally see your point, but I'd also personally love to see a result that's not skewed towards e.g. heteronormative respondents by default/by...Hm, that's a tough one. On the one hand I totally see your point, but I'd also personally love to see a result that's not skewed towards e.g. heteronormative respondents by default/by unintentional questionnaire design, lest we get a false impression of the average Tildes user :-)
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Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech
tauon Link ParentRegarding ethics: you win some, you lose some, and nobody's perfect. Their transition into a Public Benefit Corporation two years ago was one of the more outstanding "winning" moments, however....Regarding ethics: you win some, you lose some, and nobody's perfect.
Their transition into a Public Benefit Corporation two years ago was one of the more outstanding "winning" moments, however. Hearing that the almighty dollar (and by extension, company profits) isn't the be-all-end-all for a Palo Alto tech startup was so refreshing and reassuring, and them clearly demonstrating that such a style of company culture is very much possible, maybe even beneficial to growing likeminded customers, was a boon to the entire industry.
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Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech
tauon Link ParentThis just reminded me that most people have never even experienced the sheer power of bangs, since somehow they're only a feature in DuckDuckGo (who originated them), Kagi, and maybe some other...I get so angry when I have to search on Google on someone else's computer.
This just reminded me that most people have never even experienced the sheer power of bangs, since somehow they're only a feature in DuckDuckGo (who originated them), Kagi, and maybe some other search engines (Brave too, I believe?), but not available in Google search.
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Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech
tauon Link ParentAnd, just as an FYI to anyone reading this, as it was noted in one of the previous discussion threads on Kagi here: It’s not just default-off, you can actually fully disable even little things...And, just as an FYI to anyone reading this, as it was noted in one of the previous discussion threads on Kagi here: It’s not just default-off, you can actually fully disable even little things with the “AI” features, such as the question mark at the end bringing up Quick Answer, outright.
(Side note, but I love their settings being both clearly labeled and sensibly categorized:
kagi.com/settings/aiis both completely reasonable to expect as a settings category for any reasonable “tech” company, and nice to remember) -
Comment on My Accessibility Stack and the future on Wayland in ~comp
tauon (edited )LinkThanks for posting. This has unfortunately been on the horizon, clearly visible for all, and I truly mean all, to see coming (I’m not even using a Linux desktop, only via command line on servers,...Thanks for posting. This has unfortunately been on the horizon, clearly visible for all, and I truly mean all, to see coming (I’m not even using a Linux desktop, only via command line on servers, and yet was aware about the lack of accessibility in Wayland vs. X11, although I only knew about issues on the “output” side, as the article calls it).
Sadly, due to the way (F)OSS works, unless there are vocal maintainers pushing for something to be made (or huge sponsors donating money with a dedicated purpose), whether that be a new protocol/standard or implementation, I think it just won’t come into existence at all.
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Comment on Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs frontier labs in ~tech
tauon Link ParentYeah, now I wanna see return-per-million-tokens (since that is what’s already being billed). I know it’s gonna be a positive outcome/ROI for most people using LLMs, but exceedingly likely not for...Yeah, now I wanna see return-per-million-tokens (since that is what’s already being billed). I know it’s gonna be a positive outcome/ROI for most people using LLMs, but exceedingly likely not for all users.
The next question after that would be how to prevent your users from sliding into that second group, from a customer to the big labs company’s perspective, and how to reliably measure that in the first place.That’s probably a whole new business category: tracking and controlling (both in the accounting and the “setting a ceiling/limit” sense) LLM spending in an org.
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Comment on Donating 80% while it still counts in ~society
tauon (edited )LinkGreat read! This is highly in- and aspirational behavior, although I am quite glad to read footnote 1, that despite the two even drawing on savings in order to be able to give more, due to their...Great read!
This is highly in- and aspirational behavior, although I am quite glad to read footnote 1, that despite the two even drawing on savings in order to be able to give more, due to their high-performing stocks it’s still not bordering on what could be otherwise seen as almost self-destructive action.
I was especially surprised to read childcare as an item in their expenses, I guess donating a share and absolute amount of income – and by extension, future wealth – this large is something I didn’t expect from “ordinary” (non-billionaire/uber rich) people who have children.Apart from that, the amazingly straightforward “three futures” consideration will be occupying my thoughts for the next while, too.
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Comment on I'm going on vacation in ~tildes
tauon Link ParentIn addition to the hierarchical tags as described in the Tildes docs, for my own posts, I try to ask myself: "If filtering for a topic, what would be good categories for this post to appear in so...In addition to the hierarchical tags as described in the Tildes docs, for my own posts, I try to ask myself: "If filtering for a topic, what would be good categories for this post to appear in so that I’d find it even if I didn’t know the title?"
And that seems to work quite well, and most of the time my own existing tags needn’t be changed, only amended with new ones I didn’t think of adding :-)
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Comment on Excerpts from actual one-star Amazon.com reviews of books from Time’s list of the 100 best novels from 1923 to the present in ~books
tauon LinkThese are absolutely hilarious, thanks for sharing. Not even three in and I’ve found a new quotable motto.These are absolutely hilarious, thanks for sharing.
If I was the author of this book I’d tell myself to get a grip on the real world.
Not even three in and I’ve found a new quotable motto.
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Comment on OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO in the coming weeks in ~finance
tauon (edited )Link ParentYup. Ed Zitron is undoubtedly going to have a field day with this (and I’ll be looking forward to his analyses).Yup. Ed Zitron is undoubtedly going to have a field day with this (and I’ll be looking forward to his analyses).
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Comment on OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO in the coming weeks in ~finance
tauon (edited )Link[…] Some of my thoughts: This move was on the horizon, especially after their latest massive “$122B” funding round. Private markets can only afford to give so much money. Kudos also to the GS and...OpenAI is preparing to file for an initial public offering in the coming weeks and is targeting a public debut sometime in the fall, according to a person familiar with the plan.
The ChatGPT creator is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to make a confidential IPO filing as soon as Friday, but the exact timing remains uncertain, the person said, asking not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
[…]
OpenAI has been laying the groundwork to go public as soon as this year as part of a broader effort to raise more capital and pay for its costly push for more chips, data centers and talent, Bloomberg News has previously reported. Rivals Anthropic PBC and SpaceX are also preparing for listings. SpaceX’s IPO paperwork may be made public as soon as Wednesday.
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley declined to comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on OpenAI’s IPO filing plans earlier on Wednesday. Reuters had reported in October that the IPO could value the company at as much as $1 trillion.
OpenAI eliminated an overhang to its IPO plans earlier this week when a jury shot down Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the company and co-founder Sam Altman. Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, had claimed that the company under Altman’s leadership betrayed its mission to benefit the public by morphing into a for-profit business. A jury ultimately rejected his case, finding that he waited too long to sue the company.
Since the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI has evolved into one of the world’s most valuable and powerful AI companies. In April, the AI model developer completed a deal to raise $122 billion from investors at an $852 billion valuation, marking the company’s largest funding round to date by far.
The AI developer has committed to spending more than $1.4 trillion on physical infrastructure in the coming years to support its AI efforts. To finance those bets, OpenAI and rival Anthropic have tapped an overlapping group of venture funds and tech companies, including their cloud and chip suppliers like Amazon.com Inc. and Nvidia Corp. The complex web of tie-ups has sparked concerns about the fallout if the technology doesn’t match today’s lofty expectations.
Some of my thoughts:
This move was on the horizon, especially after their latest massive “$122B” funding round. Private markets can only afford to give so much money.
Kudos also to the GS and Morgan Stanley advisors who will undoubtedly make a fortune off the presumably biggest tech IPO ever, but… I’m not sure I would personally bet on investing into this AI bubble.
It will be very interesting to, I believe for the first time, hear auditable – and probably audited – growth and revenue numbers from the financial statements they’ll have to submit as part of the process.
Also, I did not know about the Anthropic and SpaceX plans to do the same!
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OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO in the coming weeks
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Comment on How I feel about LLM (AI) writing in ~tech
tauon (edited )Link ParentLate addition, there’s even more proof that it's not possible for, well, anyone to distinguish LLM from human writing anymore: I found this blog post about Fixing LLM writing with Distribution...Late addition, there’s even more proof that it's not possible for, well, anyone to distinguish LLM from human writing anymore: I found this blog post about Fixing LLM writing with Distribution Fine Tuning, and, well… the technique seems to work alright. Here's a demo page, just click on one of the pre-made suggested prompts to the side and wait for the output to appear.
The author also posted a screenshot about this technique fooling Pangram, which is why I thought about commenting this here in the first place as that was the tool @indirection had brought up in the first place.
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Comment on Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us in ~comp
tauon Link ParentThis assumes that there is sufficient time, money, and willpower on the development side during and after a program has been written. And we all know especially in a business context, developers...This assumes that there is sufficient time, money, and willpower on the development side during and after a program has been written.
And we all know especially in a business context, developers are never cut off from any of those /s -
Comment on Aurora: A leverage-aware optimizer for rectangular matrices in ~comp
tauon Link ParentAddendum: turbovec is "a vector index built on TurboQuant" which promises to enable First real-world application that I'm aware of! From there, I also found Qdrant 1.18.0 is out, which also adds...Addendum: turbovec is "a vector index built on TurboQuant" which promises to enable
A 10 million document corpus takes 31 GB of RAM as float32. turbovec fits it in 4 GB - and searches it faster than FAISS.
First real-world application that I'm aware of!
From there, I also found Qdrant 1.18.0 is out, which also adds TurboQuant to their product.
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Comment on How I feel about LLM (AI) writing in ~tech
tauon (edited )Link ParentJust as a heads-up, unfortunately (like @post_below demonstrated) it is fundamentally not possible for these tools to be accurate on a technical level, at least in the general case. Either you’ll...Just as a heads-up, unfortunately (like @post_below demonstrated) it is fundamentally not possible for these tools to be accurate on a technical level, at least in the general case.
Either you’ll let through a lot of LLM writing, or deny a lot of human writing, but when even the industry “frontier” OpenAI admits the authorship of a piece of text cannot be attributed to an LLM or a human in an automated manner, it’s not looking good.
There have been “watermarking”, uh, attempts, where models were designed to favor certain phrasings on the individual word level, which is a pretty cool tech showcase…, but especially ever since the existence of somewhat capable open-weight models, the cat has been out of the bag – Google would have had to invent this method much earlier (and be confident enough to enable it by default with everything) for it to be relied upon by a majority of models, unfortunately.
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Comment on How I feel about LLM (AI) writing in ~tech
tauon Link ParentYes, it’s very much an intuition thing, IMO. (Dick Guindon) I think this quote succinctly captures why we value written thought; it’s been refined at least once from after the thought’s initial...Yes, it’s very much an intuition thing, IMO.
“Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.”
(Dick Guindon)
I think this quote succinctly captures why we value written thought; it’s been refined at least once from after the thought’s initial inception.
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Comment on Curl will end its bug bounty program by the end of January due to excessive AI generated reports in ~comp
tauon Link ParentAnd the accompanying blog article to that Mastodon post: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/04/22/high-quality-chaos/ The graphs are… quite something.And the accompanying blog article to that Mastodon post: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/04/22/high-quality-chaos/
The graphs are… quite something.
Aside from “just” preventing spammy/bot signups (which as an aside is something we here IMO take for far too granted), probably the better part of Tildes being pleasant to use, unreasonably effective, etc. lies in being invite-only, and users generally being restricted to one account (throwaways/alts notwithstanding).
On average, most people here seem to self-select towards being nice and generally chill anyways, but if you were to misbehave, you’re probably out for good pretty quickly, whereas elsewhere, you could just head straight back to the signup page after receiving a community/user/site-wide ban or block. Thus people might think twice about how strongly their posts are worded, or if yet another rebuttal-and-disagreement is actually needed in an argument that’d get heated if it were to take place on another platform. Here, we see something unfortunately rare: People can and will just “agree to disagree” in a civil discussion.
The (relatively) smaller scale helps with this too, of course. You’d probably be more inclined to start a shouting match with a stranger, potential bot/paid actor, than someone who is clearly a recurring character, perhaps even recognizable by name, with their own interests and opinions.
Same for inviting: Nobody is inviting assholes in large numbers, since the invitation tree makes it both clearly (admin-)visible where it all started, and trivial to prune.
TL;DR: Keep invite-only accounts to ensure Tildes’ quality. Anyone can read along anyway, and there’s a multitude of ways to get invited.