Blog is getting too much spam, so they are restricting posts/comments from Gmail.com addresses.
That's ok, I understand the desire. I also recognize that it's a lazy "fix". I have my own domain and prefer that so I can track compromised sites.
In quasi-related conversation though, in the last year I have encountered 2 "necessary" websites (insurance, and medical form) that would only accept: Gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc addresses!
This information may have been supplanted but newer studies, but one study determined that African Wild Dogs were the most successful pack hunters on the planet with a ~92% success rate. (success being defined as 'eating' after a hunt.
Edit: Opening line from the article - Wild dogs are the most successful hunters in Africa, with a kill rate of 80 percent.
It's true that the space between sentences should be larger than the space between words, as it is in properly typeset text, though not twice as large. Using two spaces is a way to approximate that when you only have monospaced fonts. It's no longer encouraged in electronic text when using proportional fonts because the rendering software _should_ adjust the spacing itself.
It "should" adjust, but in practice most software do not render spaces after periods properly. There is no in band signal to distinguish periods for sentence ends vs e.g. Mr. Thus there is a clear argument for double spacing in all contexts
Buddy, there are rules and there are recommendations. The fact that it was common practice to use two spaces after a period up until the early 2000s in many situations shows that it is not in fact a rule, which is linguistic (as in the capitalization rules for proper nouns), but a recommendation, which is stylistic.
Stylistic recommendations can also be taken as rules, but in limited situations, such as a place of work saying we follow these guidelines (a manual of recommendations), which then become rules for that workplace.
Finally this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_spacing shows that their complaint has some merit, because the spacing used are not rules of the language, but conventions or recommendations imposed to improve the production of text based on the requirements and limitations of a particular technology.
on edit: probably shouldn't describe capitalization as being a linguistic rule, as it is an orthographic rule...heat of the moment, sorry. One might argue that the same applies to spacing, but I suppose that capitalization in orthography has been established for so long, and in so many different systems that it can be claimed a rule whereas spacing is still just a recommendation.
There is very little information that is illegal by itself. At least in the Western World, and especially in the US. The question is how far you get into the territory of aiding and abetting a crime
But the reasonable defense is that the intended use cases are legal. The home page list a couple, and the 'writing fiction'/'helping authors' case alone covers almost everything. An author asking you how to best conduct a terrorist attack or how Meth is made are perfectly normal. Maybe even tame, compared to what some authors tend to research
More seriously though, I think we should be fine: we don't host any content, and what people do with the models is their own responsibility (legally speaking, in our jurisdiction, at least according to Claude -- we're talking to a real lawyer next week). Like any other provider, we offer no guarantees of sane, safe, or accurate results.
Thanks for bringing up a service like this, it's quite important. A few serious questions if you don't mind.
Confidentiality? Do you use any sort of logging and if not do you have a way to guarantee that your hosting providers are not snooping?
Price vs Vast or Runpod? If i have a very large or a very small workload do you have a competitive rate vs a gpu provider that offers private gpu access?
Subscription vs Api costs? Do you only offer api rate or will you offer discounted tokens for subscription? Subscription friendly towards open source harnesses such as omp?
Heretic ablation vs other methods? KL divergence scores? Do you post train the weights yourselves or do you offer weights trained by other organizations and is this information available on the service?
Cache hit/miss pricing policy? 90/10 or a different cache pricing policy, and how long do conversions stay in kv cache?
Quantized cache and model? Do you offer a choice if i want a quantized model for speed or a quantized cache? If not do you publish the information?
SGlang vs vllm or other inference engine? Do you publish your engine stack details?
Thank you kindly I find the competition in this space very lacking.
These are great questions, thanks! I'll answer them in turn, in a list because I like lists.
* Confidentiality: no logging, third party analytics, or anything like that. More details in our Privacy Poilicy [1]. Our hosting providers will have their own policies, but we're not running a super private service like Proton or similar. Might do some kind of secure tenancy in the future if there's demand.
* Price: I think Runpod vs per-token are very different beasts and for different purposes. I really can't make a direct comparison, as it'll be based on use case, but we're going for convenience over price, so all else being equal I'd expect us to be more expensive for most users anyway (edit: i meant "than other API providers"! We'd definitely need to be cheaper or at least competitive with spinning up your own cloud infra. We'd have parallelism and economies of scale on our side for this). We have a lot of experience with running and optimising open models though, so that's part of the value proposition too.
* Subscriptions: Only API for now. Maybe subscription later but honestly we prefer simplicity. My own experience with subscription plans is that they're usually sold at a huge loss at first, then the price creeps up as the service is enshittified. That feels like a bit of a scam to get users, and that's not really what we're about. We want to provide something specific, and aren't really concerned about scaling as fast as possible. Maybe we'll provide subscriptions if there's a real demand for it, but no plans at the moment to do so.
* Methodology: we use abliterated models, but I've been advised to hold off talking about that for now. Might make a blog post about this though (when we have a blog).
* Cache: yeah about 90/10 for pricing. We're still trying to find the sweet spot for tuning eviction. Running LRU with no guarantee/storage at the moment, could probably be less aggressive with retention, but that also has privacy surface area implications. Ongoing conversation.
* Quantisation: my brother in christ, everyone runs quantised. :) We're initially targetting FP8 on most models, but have had great results with MXFP4 though. If we can pack more concurrency onto nodes without losing quality, we'll reflect that in pricing. Or we'll offer as a separate model for cheaper and give users the choice. Edit: I see you were asking specifically about speed, which MXFP4 doesn't improve, but maybe if there's demand we'll run other qaunts for speed increase, especially on the larger models.
* Engine: vLLM gang all the way! For now at least, as it's what we have most experience with, and we find it the most flexible. We've been experimenting with SGLang though, and there's definitely some interesting optimisations we could do with it.
Hope this answers your questions, at least the ones I could! The irony of that hasn't escaped me!
Improper use is that of the user, not inherent to the tool.
Scolio: guns. Respondeo: guns are much more specialized (one-use) than knives. Proper use of sharp knives when what was shipped was a butter knife is understandable.
(The simile is not fully overlapping but should give the idea. The instrument must be flexible; if it is misused it is then a responsibility of the abuser.)
Generating blackmail is not illegal, using it to blackmail someone is. Generating libel is not illegal, publishing it publicly is not illegal either although you can be sued over it.
Generating worms and computer viruses is not illegal last I checked, but disseminating them is.
My point is that generating is not illegal but sending is. Your whole point hinges on legality, so the distinction between legal and illegal seems pretty key.
Its amazing how biased that source is and how much it buried the lede. They were arrested for participating in a riot where someone attempted to murder a police officer. That's not just someone criticizing ICE on social media. If it was, half the posters in any political thread on HN would already be arrested.
True, and the time to completion thing is something i haven't seen much discussion of, because everything is sloooooow these days.
I've even considered the claude "fast mode" setting, but thats only 2x and at least 20x as expensive as the 5x plan so can't afford that atm for my company.
Peak for me was 4.6 and it just did stuff blazing fast, both Opus5 and Fable is way, way slower for me, breaks stuff, uses bizarre cryptic language. As i've said elsewhere in this thread to me it's pretty obvious there's huge downgrades because of economy with various "clever" fixes that makes them work, albeit slower and weirder, ie. you get less for what you pay increasingly over the last 6 months.
For me absolutely not. Fable 5 has been a step function change in the ability to hand off stuff to Claude. Opus 4.5 was itself a step function but I was still steering that significantly. Fable is one-shotting stuff that took multiple redirections in 4.5.
From my view Fable has been pure marketing bullshit, my workflows peaked at 4.6, Fable is neither smarter, its language is more annoying and it breaks stuff more easily.
I'm with you 4.6 is still King for me although all models require careful attention to ensure they maintain taste. If you don't know enough about what you're doing to keep the code clean yourself they will all add complexity and drift with time until you get to a point that you must rely on the model to fix it because you no longer understand it. That's a situation I hope to never find myself in.
Exactly, the most important part is to still engineer the schematics 100%, diagram whats going on and steer it towards these set-in-stone standards and patterns, otherwise you'll have no idea whats going on fast.
I good exercise for me is to constantly look at the folder structure and skim the code, i don't have to approve every line, but the primitives, the datastructures and other skeleton should be human readable, hand writable in an easy maintainable way following existing standards / libs. etc - so you can continue if suddenly all AI disappeared.
I was thinking the other day that the AI bot infested internet we have now is some sort of Eternal December that is even worse than Eternal September. But we never get Christmas.
Eternal september is more of a concept than a real thing; you had to have seen that by now; almost everything gets ruined when there's no discriminating force.
Thanks for the recommendations and for being taken seriously :) Chemistry is actually something I have considered before, so not so far out there. Thanks!
All the results for "e os" are about /e/OS, and that's its full name, so you wouldn't just search for "e". D language is a better example — its just called "D", but searching for that doesn't give results about the language. On the other hand, for "C" and "R" the top results are all about the languages. "Go" is also a pretty bad one, they insist it's not called "golang" but you basically have to search for that to get any useful information.
Yeah but when e/os first changed their name it was much harder. I have a feeling these results have had some human help.
It used to be called eelo but some prick thought it sounded too similar to his one man consulting company and threatened to sue. In the beginning it worked much better to search for the old name.
It shows paintings based on your location and the 'time of day', or something.
From the `About`:
>Plein Air — A painting for right now, wherever you are
>Plein air — French for in the open air — was the discipline of painting outdoors, in front of the weather, the way Constable studied clouds in Suffolk meadows and Monet painted the same haystacks at every hour of every season. The painters took the canvas outside because the light couldn't be remembered later, only stood inside as you painted.
>Plein Air stands you next to one of those paintings. The sky over your head and the sky in the painting share the same kind of hour — the same long afternoon, the same threatening storm, the same fog clinging to the river. One painting, chosen for right now. Tap the title to see why it was picked.
That's ok, I understand the desire. I also recognize that it's a lazy "fix". I have my own domain and prefer that so I can track compromised sites.
In quasi-related conversation though, in the last year I have encountered 2 "necessary" websites (insurance, and medical form) that would only accept: Gmail, yahoo, outlook, etc addresses!
It's frustrating.
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