it's not that without digital ID you didn't need verification. At least in Italy, digital identities means don't having to go attending lengthy queues in public offices, where paper identities where usually checked. Sometimes you still have to do it.
What I agree with, is that some system is needed to help those without an identity, or at the border of the system. Digital stuff can help there too.
what's most interesting to me about this research is that it is an online collaborative one. I wonder how many more project such as this there are, and if it could be more widespread, maybe as a platform.
This comment reminded me to check whether https://www.distributed.net/ was still in existence. I hadn't thought about the site for probably two decades, I ran the client for this back in the late 1990s back when they were cracking RC5-64, but they still appear to be going as a platform that could be used for this kind of thing.
I was also excited about those projects and ran DESchall as well as distributed.net clients. Later on I was running the EFF Cooperative Computing Award (https://www.eff.org/awards/coop), as in administering the contest, not as in running software to search for solutions!
The original cryptographic challenges like the DES challenge and the RSA challenges had a goal to demonstrate something about the strength of cryptosystems (roughly, that DES and, a fortiori, 40-bit "export" ciphers were pretty bad, and that RSA-1024 or RSA-2048 were pretty good). The EFF Cooperative Computing Award had a further goal -- from the 1990s -- to show that Internet collaboration is powerful and useful.
Today I would say that all of these things have outlived their original goals, because the strength of DES, 40-bit ciphers, or RSA moduli are now relatively apparent; we can get better data about the cost of brute-force cryptanalytic attacks from the Bitcoin network hashrate (which obviously didn't exist at all in the 1990s), and the power and effectiveness of Internet collaboration, including among people who don't know each other offline and don't have any prior affiliation, has, um, been demonstrated very strongly over and over and over again. (It might be hard to appreciate nowadays how at one time some people dismissed the Internet as potentially not that important.)
This Busy Beaver collaboration and Terence Tao's equational theories project (also cited in this paper) show that Internet collaboration among far-flung strangers for substantive mathematics research, not just brute force computation, is also a reality (specifically now including formalized, machine-checked proofs).
There's still a phenomenon of "grid computing" (often with volunteer resources), working on a whole bunch of computational tasks:
It's really just the specific "establish the empirical strength of cryptosystems" and "show that the Internet is useful and important" 1990s goals that are kind of done by this point. :-)
try waking up 3-4 hours before work and do something else you want to do but requires more energy. It's hard to keep the habit in today society, but it can be done.
Typically you can do your work good enough with less energy, if you've worked in the same place long enough.
Am I the only one thinking this urge to optimize our time is just anxiety? I'd argue not spending time worried about time usage would make one use better its time.
I'm not referring to the article per se, but to this kind of articles in general.
On this article: why school is considered not discretionary time? Also commute and meals are somewhat discarded. While cooking, or helping, read a poem or a short story; while commuting, read a book, listed to some good music. This way, discretionary time becomes 100%.
We're raised to be productive little machines. There comes a point in most people's careers where they ask themselves "is this it?" We're in a crowd of relatively wealthy people who actually gets to act on those questions.
It's also hard to live in the moment and enjoy those times if you're always working towards something else. Recently I have taken to visiting random neighbourhoods with no plans and nothing on my schedule. I was ashamed to discover places I'd passed a hundred times, beautiful streets just one block away from the main arteries.
> why school is considered not discretionary time?
Because most schools are so underfunded that, in practice, they are prisons with a food quality to match instead of providers of an environment conductive to good learning outcomes. State obviously varies by country a bit, but it's painfully obvious that schools (and their precursors daycare and kindergarten) primarily serve to enable women to join the workforce.
Monopolies naturally come from doing a thing the best possible way. YouTube does it. I personally use it very rarely and wouldn't care about its disappearance, but I don't know of other services serving its users needs better.
So: YouTube will cease to be a monopoly if 1) user needs change 2) it stops being the best at serving videos. Until then, it's not mysterious.
Copyright restrictions of digital contents is a vestige of the past. Given today technologies, it is rather obsolete.
For those thinking it goes against artists, keep in mind that a lot of art today is simply garbage made only for money. If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art.
The digital world, making it extremely easy to access and copy human knowledge, is an achievement of the human mind. Patreons, or an art world evolving alongside society and other jobs, may be one of the possible natural adaptations to this human achievement. Otherwise we're making the same arguments as Luddites.
For the unrestricted copyright inclined, there are ways to stay in legality, if such inclinations collide, and they are fruitful. You will find that consuming only public domain content will be a plus, not a privation.
> If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art.
How do artists eat?
It is true: art made only for money is usually not very good. But good art can, does, and should make money.
“Information wants to be free” is another way of saying “labor wants to be free” which means only rent extracting owners of scarce capital and assets get to make a living. Everyone else is a serf with 5G Internet.
If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.
Ridiculous. I have several friends who are self-published authors. They don't make most of their money from their art; they do it for the fun of it, and the joy of connection with their readers.
It literally costs nothing to write and publish short or long-form literature these days. If you want a physical book, the cost is small.
Writing an actually good novel can take a year or more, which translates to a significant amount of money. It also requires a lot of focus, which makes it hard to do with a "day job."
This kind of out of touch "why do they not eat cake?" mentality is a big reason there's such a deep tech backlash right now. Yeah, we can just land six figure jobs no problem, but other fields? Yeah, they should just do it for the passion. They don't need to get paid.
Of course authors have a passion for it. Nobody would get into that field without a passion, and people tend to not get good at anything unless they like it. That doesn't mean they don't deserve to earn anything.
> If you get rid of copyright, you’ll see literature vanish as an art that can be pursued seriously by anyone but people with trusts or other sources of independent wealth.
This is already the case. The expected payout from one of the big five publishers for a novel is about $5,000 to $10,000 with the author never seeing any payments based on royalties. Millions of books are published each year and only thousands are commercially successful. Being successful as somebody writing literature is essentially a lottery. I don't think copyright works as well as everybody seems to think it does.
You're missing my point: copyright is not an effective solution to the problem. We all wish it were, because it has so many terrible side effects, but it's just not very good at getting artists paid, whether that be art, music, or literature.
What a great question! There is no complete answer, but I've been studying this for years. My position often comes off as anti-artist, because folks combine "I want artists to get paid" with "Copyright should be respected": this is a cognitive error: wanting to solve a problem is different than advocating for a particular solution. I'm particularly prone to criticizing solutions that have proven ineffective.
But to be more substantive: I think copyright laws are woefully out of date. First, the have eaten into the commons to an unhealthy degree. As copyright has been extended further and further, we've introduced a "copyright cliff" where works remain under copyright, but have been abandoned by their owner because the payoff just isn't there to make them available. So the public generally has access to very old works, and very modern works, but there' a big hole in the middle, especially for less popular works. Lewis Hyde discusses some aspects of this in his book "Common as Air".
In addition to the term of copyright, the way copyright is framed is antiquated - it assumes the presence of physical copies, and a lot of trouble stems from that.
William Patry was at one point of a lawyer for Google, but is more well known in legal circles for "Patry on Copyright", which Berkeley Law describes as:
> Patry on copyright provides an encyclopedic analysis of copyright, placing court opinions and statutes in their real-world context. In addition to enumerating a complete legislative and statutory history for relevant provisions, on pertinent litigation issues, a circuit-by-circuit breakdown is provided. The extensive discussion of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues is unparalleled in other legal work.
Patry wrote another book that I read called "How to Fix Copyright", and he dives into the sort of changes to copyright would help. They are summarized in the book description as:
> The task of policymakers is to remake our copyright laws to fit our times: our copyright laws, based on the eighteenth century concept of physical copies, gatekeepers, and artificial scarcity, must be replaced with laws based on access not ownership of physical goods, creation by the masses and not by the few, and global rather than regional markets. Patry's view is that of a traditionalist who believes in the goals of copyright but insists that laws must match the times rather than fight against the present and the future.
It was born when physical books took years to copy, and thus could be sold for a lot of money. It was also often done, like many arts in ancient times, under patronage.
> If something is made only for money, it is not art, and indeed I can understand why those making it advocate so strongly for copyright restrictions, money being the only thing attached to their art.
I struggle to think of a time when it was not so.
Da Vinci apprenticed as a painter; that is, he intended to make his living by selling his art for the dreaded "money". Other capitalist fraudsters posing as "artists" included Michaelangelo (who accepted the despised "money" for painting the Sistine Chapel!!!), Rembrandt, Degas, Picasso, and Pollack.
Then there are those charlatans of the art world whose names are forgotten to history, but they certainly accepted money for illustrating the walls of the pyramid passageways, the pages of bibles, and countless portraits of kings and courtesans.
that they worked for money doesn't mean money was the only thing attached to their art. You quoted a period very different from now, where there wasn't any stupid royalty or copyright: you had to work in order to earn money, if you were a painter, that meant making new paintings.
I'm not stating that today technologies don't bring up new questions. But making silly laws that go against the nature of such technologies won't solve them.
The rights of ownership do not change because of technology. Technology as we are coming to understand it in its maturity (but immaturity of its practitioners) has come to serve largely only some veiled or unveiled form of thievery. Paper was just as easy to copy as an MP3. And material could be stolen through other means very easily.
Wishing away intellectual property rights after you have stolen the entire Internet for profit, is simply your "get away car".
Regardless of how this ends, the tech industry will be seen for what it is. A den of thieves and will never be forgiven.
Smart people will stop using public repositories for source code. Open source will die. Programming languages will emerge that LLMs dont know anything about and work will continue in private. Bots will be banned.
Devils advocate: a lot of people I know in the big tech and adjacent VC world are supporters of things like universal basic income because they kind of agree.
Eventually we will have to admit that we have created so much wealth that classical work ethics are no longer humane or beneficial to society. It doesn’t mean people don’t work but it means it must at least partially be divorced from sustenance.
> a lot of people I know in the big tech and adjacent VC world are supporters of things like universal basic income
Does their support manifest in any tangible way? It's a popular thing for tech people to talk about, but it doesn't seem to be matched by any effort or associated behaviours.
I don’t know. Some may have donated to things or to politicians that support such views, but most wealthy people are like most people in general. They often don’t do very much about their personal political views beyond voting and occasionally expressing them. Those who are activists with their money are in the minority.
On the contrary, it is people who attempt to restrict the flow of information who cannot win this war. You have to win every single time. The pirates will only have to win once, and information shall be free.
copying paper is not as easy as copying a file. You should try, even making a simple paper notebook that doesn't fall apart isn't easy, let alone print a book.
The tech industry may very well cease to exist as we know it, but the concept of a digital copy is way more powerful. My comment didn't have anything to do with LLMs, and you mentioning that technology points out to a shallow understanding what digital means.
But the proof will lay in history. Any restriction can be easily overcome because of the nature of the digital world. Only a forceful dictatorial state can make effective restrictions (to some extent), and unless one advocates for that, thus effectively banning the technology itself if not only for some privileged users, one has to accept the nature of what humans have discovered: that counting on his finger (digital is from the latin digitus) can replace its analog counterparts in many situations. Has long has you have fingers you can count, unless someone cuts them off.
What I agree with, is that some system is needed to help those without an identity, or at the border of the system. Digital stuff can help there too.