Hacker News: tao_oat

New comment by tao_oat in "I think I hate the internet"

tao_oat — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 15:02:17 +0000

Sure, but I fail to see where the theft comes in.

New comment by tao_oat in "AI Doomlord Jacob Coxon's Media Tour Has Begun"

tao_oat — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 13:54:50 +0000

This is all consistent with the beliefs of many AI (and EA) types who are not associated with the company.

New comment by tao_oat in "I think I hate the internet"

tao_oat — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:31:39 +0000

> effectively stole

Could you say more about this? I'm not very familiar with the WhatsApp acquisition, or necessarily happy about it, but at first glance I don't see what part would come anywhere close to theft.

New comment by tao_oat in "Shopify acquires Tailwind"

tao_oat — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:24:07 +0000

Does anyone actually need IE11 support in 2026? It was released 13 years ago.

New comment by tao_oat in "Anthropic researcher believes more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans'"

tao_oat — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:23:07 +0000

Cool to see the BBC writing about this. If you're interested in this I suggest getting involved with PauseAI: pauseai.uk

New comment by tao_oat in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

tao_oat — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:53:43 +0000

I think the problem is primarily that a superintelligence would be fundamentally inscrutable to us, i.e. we don't know how it would think or what its goals would be. It might decide that humans are a minor inconvenience to achieving its goals and thus worth removing. Or that burning all carbon lifeforms could power its GPUs for a week.

Even if it wouldn't want to do this at first, the fact that it'd have the capability to seems bad.

New comment by tao_oat in "UAE-based Falcon AI NSFW classifier among top global open-source models (2025)"

tao_oat — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:46:12 +0000

I believe this is how many CSAM classifiers work. There isn't a simple legal avenue to host CSAM for classifier training, for good reason.

New comment by tao_oat in "Among European Companies That Use a CDN, Nearly 9 in 10 Use Cloudflare"

tao_oat — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:30:11 +0000

They're fine for a CDN but overall their offering surprisingly immature IME. The devx for their hosted scripts/database just isn't there, and e.g. they only allow one global API key with full permissions, etc.

New comment by tao_oat in "The turbulent AI era is here"

tao_oat — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:01:34 +0000

This is a surprising opinion to me! Subjectively, I very strongly feel that models improved significantly over the last two years, particularly around the time of Opus 4.6 and now Sol 5.6 and such. It's made a huge difference to how much autonomy I can give them.

If you trust benchmarks (which is debateable) then the rate of improvement is speeding up -- definitely not diminishing returns.

New comment by tao_oat in "Invisible Companies"

tao_oat — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:58:59 +0000

I think it's one of our better attempts to understand a very large complex system! I think it's inherently very hard to do. I do think you can critique a lot of things about the field and ideology, and so on, but I don't think that's an inherent problem of economics.

> non-obvious

I'd maybe question this a bit. I suspect that many things we consider obvious are only so because of the field of economics -- but that's admittedly only an initial hunch.

New comment by tao_oat in "Invisible Companies"

tao_oat — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:24:21 +0000

Do you think there's any value in trying to understand how human societies work at scale?

New comment by tao_oat in "The turbulent AI era is here"

tao_oat — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:21:03 +0000

This is my experience too. Many people in my offline, non-techy life seem to get almost upset when I argue that models are good at many things (and getting better fast).

And I kind of get it! If your primary exposure to AI is Google search summaries (from their cheapest models) and shitty AI graphic design, it makes sense to think it's vastly overhyped.

New comment by tao_oat in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

tao_oat — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:48:51 +0000

You're skipping his recent blog posts; I think that's where the bulk of people's complaints come from. See for example https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...

New comment by tao_oat in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

tao_oat — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:46:28 +0000

dhh is very strongly associated with identity politics, though? (as in, "western"/white identity)

New comment by tao_oat in "How to ship a database every day"

tao_oat — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:15:12 +0000

I've been following Turbopuffer for a while; IIRC the founder talked about scaling MySQL at Shopify. So might just be operational familiarity.

New comment by tao_oat in "Mistral got a US patent on tool calls in 118 days. Without prior public notice"

tao_oat — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:40:00 +0000

For some reason we seem to have more patience for bad writing when it's clearly from an LLM. This article starts

> US 12,670,045 B1 was filed on 4 March 2026 and granted on 30 June. The claims are now readable and they are narrow: a stateless sandbox that pauses a code block, ships one tool call to the client, and resumes by replaying from the top. The prior art that bears on that is durable execution, not CodeAct.

This is really hard to parse! What's CodeAct? This article doesn't seem worth anyone's time. (it clearly wasn't worth the author's time to write it).

New comment by tao_oat in "5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe"

tao_oat — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:23:04 +0000

Electricity (including heating) is actually the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions, but transport is indeed number 2: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector

Followed by agriculture & manufacturing.

New comment by tao_oat in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"

tao_oat — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:42:35 +0000

Seems incredibly unlikely, doesn't it? (I hope for the same thing but it feels almost like wishful thinking!)

New comment by tao_oat in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

tao_oat — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 10:17:39 +0000

Yeah, I think it's largely a UI issue! I really want a UI that lets me review distinct changes that are dependent on each other, and handle comments/changes neatly within that structure. I've found GitHub quite lacking there historically.

Also, if you're the mchristen I know, then I think we've had this discussion before haha! Hope you're well :)

New comment by tao_oat in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

tao_oat — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:56:48 +0000

I think we're saying the same thing, that's how I use stacked PRs.