Minor off-topic quibble about streams: I’ve been learning about network programming for realtime multiplayer games, specifically about input and output streams. I just want to voice that the names are a bit confusing due to the perspective I adopt when I think about them.
Input stream = output from the perspective of the consumer. Things come out of this stream that I can programmatically react to.
Output stream = input from the perspective of the producer. This is a stream you put stuff into.
…so when this article starts “My input stream is full of it…” the author is saying they’re seeing output of fear and angst in their feeds.
I think an input stream is input from the perspective of the consumer? Like it's things you are consuming or taking as inputs. Output is things you emit.
Your input is ofc someone else's output, and vice versa, but you want to keep your description and thoughts to one perspective, and in a first person blog that's clearly the authors pov, right?
I recall that AI trained on AI output over many cycles eventually becomes something akin to noise texture as the output degrades rapidly.
Won’t most AI produced content put out into the public be human curated, thus heavily mitigating this degradation effect? If we’re going to see a full length AI generated movie it seems like humans will be heavily involved, hand holding the output and throwing out the AI’s nonsense.
Some will be heavily curated, by those who care about quality. This is a lot slower to produce, requires some expertise to do right, so there will be far less of it
The vast majority of content will be (is) the fastest and easiest to create - AI slop
I already use LLMs to quiz me on books that I'm reading. The current book I've been studying is "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (8th edition)." Obviously since it is a text book, there are homework problems and other discussion points. However; it's also fun to ask grok/chatGPT to quiz me on previous chapters and correct my answers.
There's plenty of conference talks posted on YouTube that I've watched over the years. Next talk I watch I will probably test out being quizzed by LLMs.
I genuinely wish there was an understandable endgame for the USA. The USA seems to be throwing its weight around but I’m not entirely sure to what end. This headline/article is just one area where the US is behaving perplexingly.
I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees. Fine there’s at least a through line. However; by demonstrating that the US is willing to revoke access to this war material during an active shooting war over some ego thing they’re showing allies who’ve invested in the US military equipment that they’re vulnerable to suffer this same fate. Now Europe is turning hard away from US tech.
To some degree this is a good thing, I think, from USA’s POV. Trump has said it’s unfair USA spends the most on NATO and that member states should pay more (how many don’t hit the 2% target). However; the point was to spend their 2% GDP on American armaments. Now Europe is taking their demand and money and investing in domestic military equipment. Which will inevitably beg the question in the coming years if NATO, a US establishment, is to be made redundant?
This US administration can’t seem to have their cake and eat it too. They want money, demand for their goods, but every time they act out they drive away their business partners.
The clown in the oval office claimed we wouldn't help them. More Danish men died per capita in middle east because of article 5 than men from the US...
If that’s the case that “NATO as has existed is already over” then maybe it is wise for the USA to pull out. Maybe that’s the endgame for Europe? Europe defends Europe (or gets taken over by Russia I guess), and USA isn’t on the hook for its defense anymore.
Americans all have this attitude that theyre "on the hook" for everyone elses defence as if theyre the white knight defending the world against evil. Its more like the local mob tough guys who have been taking protection money for the last 40 years backed down when a rival gang finally decided to make a move
I'm American, and I don't have that view. So it's clearly not literally true.
So perhaps you mean that it's "mostly" true. Then I'd ask, what evidence do you have to support that? Is there some poll of public opinion you can refer to? That's something we could meaningfully discuss.
Actually, your view is true even if there exists even just one person with your view. In reality what matters is the distribution of views. Furthermore, what matters is the distribution of views by the decision makers because those will be divorced from public distribution and informed by other secret plans or information unknown to public. So in a sense, it doesn't matter whether he is right or you are.
NATO is there to make sure that the dollar is the dominant trading currency.
NATO is the reason why saudis are trading in dollars.
NATO is the reason that the US has credible nuclear deterrents
NATO is why america doesn't need to have a physical colonial empire in europe (otherwise it'd need to subjugate cyprus, and somewhere like saaremaa, and that costs a shit tonne of money)
NATO isn't about playing for defence of europe, its about keeping the USSR and russia far enough away to keep trading routes open.
If Russia wants the international version of suicide by cop. Invading US soil is the next tier up from invading Russia in winter in military blunders. No one has been stupid enough to try since 1812 when the British navy ruled. And they couldn't achieve any meaningful goals.
In 4 years another administration could come in but there's still damaged trust. If something happens in 5, 6 years from now and article 5 kicks in then even if the US comes to help what is there to say they won't suddenly pull out again 2 years into a war when Vance takes charge? The reliability is gone.
I guess you've got to be flexible depending on circumstances. I mean NATO only really got going after Europe elected Hitler and now we have another iffy electoral result to work with.
I think they might have been helped along a little by things like being occupied, becoming economically and militarily reliant on their occupiers and watching all of their leaders face judgement at the Nuremberg Trials.
Things haven't gotten quite so extreme in the US yet but it feels reductive to suggest that they can just have a flip flop election and that will show they "realised the error of their ways" like Germany did post WW2.
I think culturally most of the US is still pro NATO, it's just Trump and friends who are anti. I guess if Vance succeeds him things will be similar but if the dems win they won't.
I'm kind of interested if Russia could become normal if the current regime collapses.
The US has burned trust well past 4 years. This has shown how the US political system enables this. Every 4 years they elect someone who has the power to just toss out everything the previous administration did or committed to. Every 4 years... and the US is so politically divided that it only takes a few percent of opinion change at each election to swing to the other party with polar opposite views. As a result, why would any other country now trust the US in any agreement? (not to mention the large number of agreements they have signed then just abandoned later) Four years is nothing time wise.. barely enough time to get an agreement fully implimented before the US can just say "Nah..." There will be significantly less trust for the US even beyond the Trump era.
It would be delusional to think that this can be patched up with a new president, or that any of America's former allies will be willing to wait around twirling their thumbs, hoping that the next time America flips a coin, it turns out better.
The relationship is over. Maybe in 4 years America can start making some initial steps towards patching things up, but even that seems increasingly unlikely at this point.
Why would another Republican President act any differently than Trump after they see how well that works? A majority of the US either doesn’t care about international affairs or they are actively isolationist.
Does anyone think a country not already involved in a nuclear war would willingly expose itself to being annihilated? NATO works best when all member states are stable, ideologically aligned, and its Article 5 resolve is untested. Here the uncertainty works in its favor. But when NATO expands past deep ideological alignment towards a maximal expansionist strategy, and openly courts states its rival signals as core security interests, NATO becomes something else entirely. When it became a tool for maximally isolating Russia, it undermined its own credibility as a unified security entity. There is a genuine question whether the US would go "all in" to defend eastern european states. The fact that we can credibly ask this question about a NATO member just shows how far it's gone from its initial ideals.
We need to remember the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurance and not forget that Ukraine was coaxed to give up its nuclear weapons in 1993 by a guarantee of territorial integrity.
Why do we need to remember this agreement that provided zero security guarantees? At most it ensures denuclearization is dead, but frankly speaking, it already was.
Maybe instead we should remember the 2014 Wales Summit that was intended to deter Russian invasion?
Or maybe instead we should consider that right before Russia's invasion in February 2022, Europe collectively dropped their military spending as % of GDP? Possibly since Trump had left office in 2021? Its unfortunate deterrents don't function when you do this...
Actually, maybe what we need to remember is that most of Europes money has been going to Russia even after the invasion? What a strange thing for allies to do right?
It's weird how the United States justified its support in Ukraine as securing the region for its allies while its allies undermined this at every step of the way, do allies usually do that? When I listen to them on TV they seem to care a lot about Ukraine so it's strange...
> I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees.
I don't think there are any "security guarantees". What could they be?
The "endgame" as far as I understand it: The US wants access to the minerals as a compensation for the money already spent and, perhaps, to restore some of the support currently put on hold (satellite data access). Once the Ukranian resistance is broken, the US and Russia will jointly dictate a peace, gradually install a Russia-friendly regime and split the profit between them. They will happily invite the EU to finance some of the rebuilding of Ukraine that is then mainly performed by US and Russian companies. The US furthermore hopes that by spearheading the lifting of sanctions it will get priority access to some beneficial deals with and within Russia itself.
I think the implicit guarantee is if American business and workers are harvesting minerals then if Russia attacked the USA would have even more incentive to intervene militarily.
That said, I don’t know what more Ukraine would want given the Budapest Memorandum already ties the USA, UK, and Russia to Ukraine’s defense. That’s proven to be a mixed success, as both USA, UK, and other countries have indeed stepped up for Ukraine’s defense.
There is no such thing as implicit guarantees. The US has shown it is not a trusted country, and as such, we expect that it will also renege any written guarantees.
> if American business and workers are harvesting minerals then if Russia attacked the USA would have even more incentive to intervene militarily
Or Russia just invades while being careful not to damage their buddy's mines. Maybe the US even helps the Russians out once the Ukranian "dictator" is forced to begin fighting in too close proximity to the minerals.
The point is that Russia won't have to attack any more, because Ukraine will already be nothing more than a puppet state after having been forced to sign the kind of peace deal that Putin wants.
American businesses and workers operate all over the world. No-one thinks that this means that all these countries will receive military support from the US if they are invaded.
Another relevant detail here is that a lot of the resources included in the deal are in territory that's currently occupied by Russia – which Trump clearly envisions Russia keeping in any peace settlement.
> point was to spend their 2% GDP on American armaments
Do the NATO agreements specify American armaments? Europe could have spent on European armaments and armies too, just chose not too because they didn't see a reason to.
Europe not buying F35 or whatever hurts US arms industry, but probably not the general strategic position of the US. There's even a credible argument (dont know how credible?) that these arms programs actually undermine security by investing crazy money in outdated / ineffective technology. The dumb part would be not learning from the Ukrainians how to fight a modern war.
US participation in NATO may be made redundant, but Europe's need for a credible collective defense agreement is not going away.
I think it boils down to the fact that Trump does not understand soft power. Slashing the most powerful and influential aid programme in the world shows that very clearly. The US is as rich as it is because they created an environment of stability (at least on their own territory) and ensuring that there are markets American companies can sell into.
Maybe not so much that as he sees everything as a bargaining chip and any unused chips as a waste. After all, bribery and favors are more or less what soft power is.
The endgame isn't for the USA, it's for Trump. I don't really know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that to understand his actions, you have to rid yourself of the idea that he's doing it for anybody or anything else than for himself.
> I understand that Trump wants Zelenskyy to sign the minerals deal and that implicitly there’s security guarantees.
I don't think this is true at all, I think Trump wants Ukraine to be conquered and for Russia to win and for people to stop bothering him about any of it.
Trump blew up whatever nonsense minerals deal there was, and is actively sabotaging the Ukrainian defence efforts via this, and ending intelligence sharing, and apparently leaning on random American companies to stop them selling services to Ukraine, and by providing diplomatic cover and support to Russia.
people haven't seem to have caught on yet - the US has switched sides, it is now part of the Russia bloc.
What would you do if you were a team of US oligarchs with connections to the administration and wanted to increase your share of, and power over, the domestic cake?
Tell me it doesn't fit.
Edit: this story just dropped off the main page. Currently sitting at 85 points and 77 comments. It had position 2 or so, now it has position 79.
Laat I think I knew anything it took surprisingly few flags and I think people abuse it all the time to get rid of things they personally don't like. And don't like is a broad category.
But Zelensky came to the white house to sign the deal. If Trump wanted the deal to be signed, it would have been signed. But he chose to gang up on Zelensky.
Fully loaded, government wages aren't as bad as they seem on on paper. Price out an annuity from an insurance company with payouts equal to a government pension. The quote might be above $2M.
If you contribute the max to a 401k for 30 years you should have around 2 million (and don't put everything into stupid investments, which many 401ks make hard). But that is $20k/year that doesn't go into your wallet. Of course inflation needs to factor in - 30 years ago your max contribute was about half of today ($9,240.00 vs $23,500.00) and so your expected result would have been more like 1 million. But if you contributed the max for all those 30 years you are probably close to 2 million. If you start today for 30 years you should be quite a bit more than 2 million - but how much I cannot predict. I'm assuming above that you get an employer match which most do.
The above assumes you have a 401k. Those plans are more available than any previous retirement option (other than social security which nearly everyone has and is mandatory). However even though 401k is available to more people than previous workplace retirement plans, there are still large numbers who don't get a 401k (someone who can have one but chooses not to is also an issue).
The above is US centric. Many people reading this don't live in the US and so have completely different options that I have no idea about.
But wasn't DOGE created to eliminate some of those jobs? In which case, the question becomes: Will supply be willing to show up for the market price, which may soon become zero or even negative?
Gotta give it to DOGE, which already eliminated Co-founder/CO-CEO and its top lawyer. They seem to be walking the talk. But I'd consider it totally serious if Musk's position is eliminated in before his kids move to next grade mainly due to not meeting targets or missing 5 days a week at work mandate.
Pensions compete with self-directed retirement in the same way that a salary competes with founding your own business: they take all the risk and all the mental effort and give you something you can (mostly) rely on without any added effort, in exchange for a smaller return than is technically possible if you took the risk and planning effort yourself.
Some people would definitely be better off managing their own retirement, but just due to the way these things work my bet is about half of all people (the left of the bell curve) would be better off with a pension.
Pensions are also risky when you’re young because so much of their value depends on the final salary. Leave a job young without those promotions and 5 years of service can mean almost nothing 30+ years later in retirement.
Where you sit on that bell curve isn’t obvious at age 20, but it’s much clearer at age 40. Benefiting people who have already messed things up and swap.
Thus that single binary choice after college is likely suboptimal.
When my dad started work in the 1970s he only had a pension which he - like most his age - didn't bother participating in. He latter got old enough to realize that he should save (probably when a new job offered a 401k with match) and regretted it so much he looked things up. Turns out that if he joined until that company laid him off he would get $0.75/month from the pension once he turned 65. In short a stupid investment. Those who were older like you say did much better.
there is one big advantage of a pension: you cannot outlive them. If you die at 65 (as my dad did) bad luck, but if you live to 109 you still get that income to live on.
Assuming the entity paying the pension has the cash. Not a problem for the federal government, obviously, but for other governments, and especially non government entities, running out of cash is a possibility.
Another risk is not having it be sufficiently inflation adjusted. An investment in SP500, however, would protect you from declines in the currency’s purchasing power.
Most pensions since the 1970s or prehaps before are government insured in the us. But my family has stories of the relative who worked for a company for decades the company sent bankrupt when he was 60 and the pension was invested in the now worthless company stock.
the above is why I tend to oppose employee owned conpanies. Too much risk for the common man to have so much net worth in their job.
Even insured, they constantly require bailouts by federal Congress because PBGC can’t handle the load, depending on the political influence of the group being bailed out.
Auto manufacturing, teamsters, coal miners, etc. Only question is how much pull your group has in Congress.
The biggest pension (and IRA/401k) bailout, however, is the implicit backstop the US provides the public equity markets. Might as well cut out the middleman and own the inflation protected asset yourself rather than accept a defined benefit in someone else’s control.
I love self hosting useful apps. I wish finding more things was easier. Right now I self host a jellyfin server and home assistant. When I learned a subscription for home security was $75/mo I said “there has to be something out there” and there was. I pay the developer their $6/mo even though everything works without it.
Jellyfin has been amazing for physical media backups. It’s nice to experience old VHSes and DVDs in a user friendly way.
nginx-proxy becomes almost a must have if you have multiple services and prefer remembering domain names instead of port numbers https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy
Most people will use nginx-proxy [0] or Traefik [1] for front ending home labs with LetsEncrypt certs... Beyond that people will protect them with things like Tailscale [2], Cloudflare Tunnels [3] or even just mTLS [4] for protected access.
Home labbing today has a lot of amazing software and it's hard to keep up!
And as for dashboarding [5] on top of all this there are a lot of options.
Also, for those new to the game who want an easier way to approach take a look at Tipi [6].
I use Tailscale for a bunch of self hosted services on a raspberry pi in my house. Port numbers and TLS certs are my current main problems with this setup but it's not annoyed me quite enough yet to do anything about it.
BTW why bother with TLS over already-encrypted and authenticated Wireguard tunnels? Is this just so that browsers won't complain, or do you have a more complex threat model?
Sorry for late reply, exactly that yeah - so the browser doesn't complain. I'm not worried about the security of HTTP over wireguard or anything like that. And domain names are easier to remember than ports so... http://raspberrypi:8123/ vs homeassistant.raspberrypi.local (or something)
> I use Tailscale...Port numbers and TLS certs are my current main problems with this setup
I've been running a Tailscale container, using the `tailscale serve` feature[0], as a sidecar for each containerized service I want to access. External access, TLS (to make my browser happy), and domain names all come for almost free. This allows me to set up `https://my-cool-service.lemur-pangolin.ts.net` with relative ease.
There's a ton of boilerplate, which drives me a bit nuts. But at least copy/paste is easy to do. Looking just now I have 31 Tailscale containers running that are almost duplicates of each other. You could probably do config generation but for a homelab I'm not motivated to really do that.
The command line interface for this tool is a little bit limited and forces you to share the network stack between your service and the sidecar. I would recommend injecting a config file into each container to give you full flexibility. I put up an example config on pastebin[1].
Lots of options to proxy and provide automation for certs. I'm personally a huge fan of Traefik, but I know a lot of folks use NPM since it's so simple and Nginx has great performance overall.
Of course, a service map comes handy, just another simple way of getting it done. What I meant with the proxy was using e.g. jellyfin.example.com and portainer.example.com instead of the ports. Not to mention that two apps might have the same default port.
For those with a multi-machine setup, like running the easy stuff on a 1L machine and having backupservice at multiple locations or the LLMs on a big setup that might even use WakeOnLan the proxy will keep you from having to remember the IPs as well.
That doesn't sound like a bad idea, but it's just as easy to create a bunch of LXC containers with their own MAC address and IP for me (and thus own hostname per service).
Heck you can even cobble stuff together with Home Assistants and various door/window/presence/water/humidity sensors. I was able to build a notification system when doors, windows, or fence gates are open. Same with panic buttons that alert my SO if any of us need assistance when putting kids to bed without whipping out the phones.
All of that can be loaded into HASS using a $26 Sonoff Zigbee dongle and various Zigbee devices like Aqara and others.
ADT; there’s a program through my employer where employees get deals and so I made first contact with them. I chatted with a salesperson who walked me through a sign up process before I could ask any questions (I made contact saying I wanted to inquire about services and then said we couldn’t talk until he collected all my information).
He said normally it’s $100/mo but with this deal, it’s $75/mo.
No thanks. $900/yr to $1200/yr + installation fee for home security kinda stinks. I was told the equipment wouldn’t work if I didn’t have the subscription.
I’m sure I was taken for a ride too, being told false information (the equipment really wouldn’t work? It’s really $75/mo?). I indeed felt like I was being treated like a mark. At the end I said delete my information but honestly I doubt they did. But who cares because now I got myself into this pretty fun world of home automation and security through Home Assistant and self hosting.
At my work senior leads and architects always shoot down being able to develop locally, especially when devs bring up wanting the capability. The critique is some variation of “it would be impossible to run all services locally” or “it would be too expensive.”
So we develop the code and deploy into QA, often breaking things. Cycle times are measured in hours to days. Breaking QA is sometimes a fireable offense. Lol.
The leads and architects are correct in my case; it would be impossible and too expensive to do. This is because our services are built on hundreds of bespoke manual configurations made along the way to production. Discovering and pulling into code/automation would be a whole months/year long project in itself.
That said there are ways of developing locally without running everything locally. Pull in the code of the service you want to work on locally and just point to QA for its dependencies. Most times it takes some finagling of code but it usually works.
Even if everything was running locally, often generating usable data is the biggest barrier. In QA thousands of hands have generated partly useable data. It’s a hard problem to solve since I don’t want to have to know about data requirements for every service.
Wow that sounds like the absolute worst. My condolences. In projects I manage I even try not to use containers for the service being developed. (Only for its dependencies.) Everything that affects cycle times must go.
That being said, you should also have a dev environment. QA isn't for development. It'll certainly be cheaper than firing people.
Right? I do the DevOps/architect stuff at my org and one game changer for testing was configuring it to spin up a separate instance per pull-request. Occasionally things get wonky because all the PR instances share an authentication/authorization server, but by and large it is excellent for being able to quickly demo.
But it does mean that you have to be religious about building links and connection-strings in your code.
Once you have 3 environments (which IMHO is the minimum viable number: dev, staging, prod), it tends to be much easier to generalise that to N, at least from the application side (spinning up the extra infra is a separate beast). It tends to weed out many of the "if (prod)"s because there should now be differences between dev & staging that you need to take care of, and sprinkling elaborate switch statements gets tedious really fast - most devs tend to be happier actually simplifying code.
I've seen some really nasty offenders though, e.g. actual business logic hidden behind an "if (window.location.hostname == ...)". Sometimes it takes a lot of patience to explain that this is how you get production-only bugs that QA will never have a chance to find or reproduce.
For us the challenge was our DNS wasn't set up to spin up unlimited subdomains, so we had to run applications on dev.companyname.tld/application_prInstanceID/, so that was the case where we had to make application-level changes to support N instances, since some code assumed they would have their own private sub-domain-name.
You really should have a completely separate domain for all the internal/dev stuff tho, e.g. example.com vs example.net. Even if things like cookies, TLS, control over the DNS zone, etc weren't all involved, it's just hygiene.
Of course, I just mean if you've got one internal.productname.com or .local or whatever, the problem is not having one domain for each branch.
Like, the public product is www.productname.com, and the internal site is dev.productname.local, right?
But since we set up one instance for each active PR, you have to host the sites at
dev.productname.local/PR11235 and dev/productname.local/PR12345 if you don't have the infrastructure set up to spin them up as pr11235.dev.productname.local and pr12345.dev.productname.local
That was the challenge with "one instance per active PR" we hit. Very handy for both automated and manual testing, but took some work to get the product site to run at arbitrary URLs instead of assuming it had a domain all to itself.
I don’t understand some of my colleagues that feel this way either, I’ve been around a long time but having a way to set up a ”local” environment with a local automated build to me seems priority one for any piece of software cloud or otherwise.
By “local” I mean self contained, my “local” environment is right now a single cloud Linux VM with kind for kubernetes, all sorts of k8s local monitoring / cert issuing / stubbed things, metallb and openvpn to access (with a local to my computer dhcpcd for DNS resolution) and so on, all building from local and orchestrated by a python set of scripts. All of this works great and has saved me so many times and made development so much faster compared to teams that rely on ci/cd even for basic development (where every commit takes an hour+ to deploy due to tests builds and so on)
The only issue with this approach can be services / software that has hard dependencies on specific cloud products you can’t run “locally” but even in that case you can always spin up / tear down super small versions of them to use for the setup. Python has been great to glue orchestrating everything with easy to use kubernetes and docker libraries, and aws/azure cli commands as needed.
If you have a product that you can’t easily build or deploy in an automated manner you’re going to have a bad time at disaster recovery time or when the one person that knew how that one piece gets installed is laid off.
I have also seen a prohibition to have a local copy of the code coming from cybersecurity guys worried about laptops being compromised, for example, through an email with a malicious link. "Here is a web-based editor; please develop everything there, and at the bottom, there is a terminal to run your application," they say.
Yes - that’s an indictment of the security group on multiple levels (Kerckhoffs's principle, failure to deploy FDE / MFA, etc.) but depending on the organizational culture the cost might be shifted to the development groups and not everyone has senior technical staff able to challenge it.
Yeah, this is the situation being argued against. If you don't focus on making your environment reproducible, you wind up tangled in a mess no-one can understand. I imagine you also don't expect to be able to get things running again after a disaster strikes.
The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models. So funny that copyright is important when it protects elites but not when a billion thefts are committed by LLM folks. Poor incentives for creators to create stuff if it just gets stolen and replicated by AI.
I’m hungry for more lawsuits. The biggest theft in human history by these gang of thieves should be held to account. I want a waterfall of lawsuits to take back what’s been stolen. It’s in the public’s interest to see this happen.
The only entities that will win with these lawsuits are the likes of Disney, large legacy news media companies, Reddit, Stack Overflow (who are selling content generated by their users), etc.
Who will also win: Google, OpenAI and other corporations that enter exclusive deals, that can more and more rely on synthetic data, that can build anti-recitation systems, etc.
And of course the lawyers. The lawyers always win.
Who will not win:
Millions of independent bloggers (whose content will be used)
Millions of open source software engineers (whose content will be used against the licenses, and used to displace their livelihood), etc.
The likes of Google and OpenAI entered the space by building on top of the work of the above two groups. Now they want to pull up the ladder. We shouldn't allow that to happen.
Honestly the most depressing thing about this entire affair is seeing not the entire, certainly but a sizable chunk of the software development community jump behind OpenAI and company’s blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products of probably literally billions of people (not the least of whom is other software developers!) with absolutely not the slightest hint of concern about what that means for the world because afterwards, they got a new toy to play with. Squidward was apparently 100% correct: on balance, few care about the fate of labor as long as they get their instant gratification.
Do you consider it theft because of the scale? If I read something you wrote and use most of a phrase you coined or an idea for the basis of a plotline in a book I write, as many authors do, currently it's counted as being all my own work.
I feel like the argument is akin to some countries considering rubbish, the things you throw away, to still be owned by your person ie "dumpster diving" is theft.
If a company had scraped public posts on the Internet and used it to compile art by colourising chunks of the text, is it theft? If an individual does it, is it theft?
This argument has been stated and re-stated multiple times, this notion that use of information should always be free, but it fails to account for the fact that OpenAI is not consuming this written resource as a source of information but rather as a tool for training LLMs, which it has been open about from the beginning is a thing it wishes to sell access to as a subscription service. These are fundamentally not the same. ChatGPT/Copilot do not understand Python, they are not minds that read a bunch of python books and learned python skills they can now utilize: they are language models, that internalized metric tons of weighted averages of python code and can now (kind of) write their own, based on minimizing "error" relative to the code samples they ingest. Because of this, Copilot has never and will never write code it hasn't seen before, and by extension of that, it must see a whole lot of code in order to function as well as it does.
If you as a developer look at how one would declare a function in python, review a few examples, you now know how to do that. Copilot can't say the same. It needs to see dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them to reasonably accurately be counted on to accomplish that task, it's just how the tech works. Ergo, scaled data sets that can accomplish this teaching task now have value, if the people doing that training are working for high-valuation startups with the objective of selling access to code generating robots.
That's not necessarily my position. I think laws can evolve, but they need to be applied fairly. In this case, it's heading in a direction where only the blessed will be able to compete.
>blatant theft on an industrial scale of the mental products
They haven't been stolen; the creators still have them. They've just been copied. It's amazing how much the ethos on this site has shifted over the past decade, away from the hacker idea that "intellectual property" isn't real property, just a means of growing corporate power, and information wants to be free.
> It's amazing how much the ethos on this site has shifted over the past decade
It hasn't. The hacker ethos is about openness, individuality, decentralization (among others).
OpenAI is open in what it consumes, not what it outputs.
It makes sense to have protections in place when your other values are threatened.
If "information want's to be free" leads to OpenAI centralizing control over the most advanced AI then will it be worth it?
A solution here would be similar to the GPL: even megacorps can use GPL software, but they have to contribute back. If OpenAI and the rest would be forced to make everything public (if it's trained on open data) then that would be an acceptable compromise.
> The hacker ethos is about openness, individuality, decentralization (among others).
Yes, the greatest things on the internet have been decentralized - Git, Linux, Wikipedia, open scientific publications, even some forums. We used to passively consume content and internet allowed interaction. We don't want to return to the old days. AI falls into the decentralized camp, the primary beneficiaries are not the providers but the users. We get help of things we need, OpenAI gets a few cents per million tokens, they don't even break even.
I'm sorry, the worlds knowledge now largely accessible by a laymen via LLMs controlled by at most, 5 companies is decentralized? If that statement is true then the world decentralized truly is entirely devoid of meaning at this point.
1. Decentralized technologies you can operate privately, freely, and adapt to your needs: computers, old internet, Linux, git, FireFox, local Wikipedia dump, old standalone games.
2. Centralized technologies that invade privacy, lead to loss of control and manipulation: web search, social networks, mobile phones, Chrome, recent internet, networked games. LLMs fall into the decentralized camp.
You can download a LLM, run it locally, fine-tune it. It is interactive, the most interactive decentralized tech since standalone games.
If you object that LLMs are mostly centralized today (upfront cost of pre-training and OpenAI popularity), I say they are still not monopolies, there are many more LLM providers than search engines and social networks, and the next round of phones and laptops will be capable of local gen-AI. The experience will be seamless, probably easier to adapt than touchscreens were in 2007.
Disagree. There should be no distinction between the two. Those kind of distinctions are what cause unfair advantages. If the information is available to consume, there should be no constraint on who uses it.
Sure you might not like OpenAI, but maybe some other company comes a long and builds the next magical product using information that is freely available.
Treating corporations as "people" for policy's sake is a legal decision which has essentially killed the premise of the US democratic republic. We are now, for all intents and purposes, a corporatocracy. Perhaps an even better description would simply be oligarchy, but since our oligarchs' wealth is almost all tied up in corporate stocks, it's a very incestuous relationship.
The idea of knowledge as a source of understanding and personal growth is completely oppositional to it's conception as a scarce resource, which to OpenAI and whomever else wants to train LLMs is what it is. OpenAI did not read everything in the library because it wanted to know everything; it read everything at the library so it could teach a machine to create a statistical average written word generator, which it can then sell access to. These are fundamentally different concepts and if you don't see that, then I would say that is because you don't want to see it.
I don't care if employees at OpenAI read books from their local library on python. More power to them. I don't even care if they copy the book for reference at work, still fine. But utilizing language at scale as a scarce resource to train models is not that and is not in any way analogous to it.
I am sorry you are too blinded by your own ideology and disagreement with OpenAI to see others points of views. In my view, I do not want to constrain any person or entity on their access to knowledge, regardless of output product. I do have issues with entities or people consuming knowledge and then prevent others from doing so. I am not describing a scenario of a scarce resource but of an open one.
Public information should should be free for anyone to consume and use how they want.
> I am sorry you are too blinded by your own ideology and disagreement with OpenAI to see others points of views.
A truly hilarious sentiment coming from someone making zero effort to actually engage with what I'm saying in favor of parroting back empty platitudes.
I would never have imagined hackers becoming copyright zealots advocating for lawsuits. I must be getting old but I still remember the Pirate Bay trial as if it was yesterday.
I'm all for abolishing copyright, for everyone. Let the knowledge be free and widely shared.
But until that is the case and people running super useful services like libgen have to keep hiding then I also want all the LLM corpos to be subject to the same legal penalties.
This is the entire point of existence for the GPL. Weaponize copyright. LLMs have conveniently been able to circumvent this somehow, and we have no answer for it.
Because some people keep asserting that LLM’s “don’t count as stealing” and “how come search links are on but got reciting paywalled NYT articles on demand is bad??” Without so much as a hint of irony.
LLM tech is pretty cool.
Would be a lot cooler if its existence wasn’t predicted on the wholesale theft of everyone’s stuff, immediately followed by denial of theft, poisoning the well, and massively profiting off it.
>Because some people keep asserting that LLM’s “don’t count as stealing”
People who confidently assert either opinion in this regard are wrong. The lawsuits are still pending. But if I had to bet, I'd bet on the OpenAI side. Even if they don't win outright, they'll probably carve out enough exemptions and mandatory licensing deals to be comfortable.
You are singling out accidental replication and forgetting it was triggered with fragments from the original material. Almost all LLM outputs are original - both because they use randomness to sample, and because they have user prompt conditioning.
And LLMs are really a bad choice for infringement. They are slow, costly and unreliable at replicating any large piece of text compared to illegal copying. There is no space to perfectly memorize the majority of its training set. A 10B models is trained on 10T tokens, no space for more than 0.1% to be properly memorized.
I see this overreaction as an attempt to strengthen copyright, a kind of nimby-ism where existing authors cut the ladder to the next generation by walling off abstract ideas and making it more probably to get sued for accidental similarities.
Exactly this. If we have to live under a stifling copyright regime, then at least it should be applied evenly. It's fundamentally unfair to have one set of laws (at least as enforced in practice) for the rich and powerful and another set for everyone else.
True, though paid language models are probably just a blip in history. Free weight language models are only ~12 months behind and have massive resources thanks to Meta.
That profit will be squeezed to zero over the long term if Zuck maintains his current strategy.
That can change on a dime though, if Zuck decides it's in his financial interest to change course. If Facebook stops spending billions of dollars on open models who is going to step in and fill that gap?
That depends on when Meta stops. The longer Meta keeps releasing free models, the more capabilities are made permanently unprofitable. For example, Llama 3.1 is already good enough for translation or as a writing assistant.
If Meta stopped now, there would still be profit in the market, but if they keep releasing Llamas for the next 5+ years then OpenAI et al will be fighting for scraps. Not everybody needs a model that can prove theorems.
Hackers are against corporations. If breaking the copyright laws make corps bigger, more powerful and more corrupt, hackers will be against it rightfully so. Abolishing copyright is different than abusing it, we should abolish it.
In the world of the mainstream media - the default media diet of most americans excludes Hacker News, funnily enough.
All sorts of more taboo stuff gets said on hacker news. It's not exactly a cultural bellwether that ideas outside of the overton window are entertained here.
Wearing a che guevara t shirt is similarly "allowed" in public, but the last article about him in the new york times is fawning admiration for his assassin.
It's not, that's playing the victim. There are hundreds or thousands of posts daily all over HN criticising capitalism. And most seem upvoted, not downvoted.
i find quite ironic whenever i see a highly upvoted comment here complaining about capitalism because for sure i don't see yc existing in any other type of economy.
This only holds if your thinking on the subject of economic systems is only as deep as choosing your character’s class in an RPG game. There’s no need for us to make every last industry a state owned enterprise and no one who’s spent longer than an hour or so contemplating such things thinks that way. I have no desire to not have a variety of companies producing things like cars, electronics, software, video games, just to name a few. Competition does drive innovation, that is still true, and having such firms vying for a limited amount of resources dispatched by individuals makes a lot of sense. Markets have their place.
However markets also have limits. A power company competing for your business is largely a farce, since the power lines to your home will not change. A cable company in America is almost certainly a functional monopoly, and that fact is reflected in their quality of service. Infrastructure of all sorts makes for piss-put markets because true competition is all but impossible, and even if it does kind of work, it’s inefficient. A customer must become knowledgeable in some way to have a ghost of a clue what they’re buying, or trust entirely dubious information from marketing. And, even if somehow everything is working up to this point, corporations are, above all, cost cutters and if you put one in charge of an area where it feels as though customers have few if any choices and the friction to change is high, they will immediately begin degrading their quality of services to save money in the budget.
And this is only from first principles, we have so many other things that could be discussed from mass market manipulation to the generous subsidies of a stunning variety that basically every business at scale enjoys to the rapacious compensation schemes that have become entirely too commonplace in the executive room, etc etc etc.
To put it short: I have no issue at all with capitalism operating in non-essential to life industries. My issue is all the ways it’s infiltrated the essential ones and made them demonstrably worse, less efficient, and more expensive for every consumer.
I would argue that markets are a necessary step towards capitalism but it's also crucial to remember that markets can also exist outside of capitalism. The accumulation of money in a society with insufficient defenses will trend towards money being a stand-in for power and influence, but it still requires the permission and legal leeway of the system in order to actually turn it corrupt; politicians have to both be permitted to, and be personally willing to accept the checks to do the corruption in the first place.
The biggest and most salient critique of liberal capitalism as we now exist under is that it requires far too many of the "right people" to be in positions of power; it presumes good faith where it shouldn't, and fails to reckon with bad actors as what they are far too often, the modern American Republican party being an excellent example (but far from the only one).
100%. Markets are a really useful tool for distributing goods and services to people and allocating resources.
In the US, IMO the problem is that markets are the primary tool for a huge number of services; take utilities for one.
There is a saying that when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
You wouldn’t see YC existing on a world full capitalist :) It depende heavily on open source, the biggest and most succeassful socialist experiment so far
I'm not sure if you're being disingenuous, or if you genuinely don't understand the difference.
Pirate Bay: largely facilitating the theft of material from large corporations by normal people, for generally personal use.
LLM training: theft of material from literally _everyone_, for the purposes of corporate profit (or, well, heh, intended profit; of course all LLM-based enterprises are currently massively loss-making, and may remain so forever).
Nonsense. Computer piracy started with sharing software. Music piracy (on computers) started in the late 90s when computers were powerful enough to store and play music.
It affects hackers how? By giving them cool technology at below cost? Or is it further democratizing knowledge? Or maybe it's the inflated software eng salaries due to AI hype?
Help me understand the negative effect of AI and LLMs on hackers.
It's trendy caste-signaling to hate on AI which endangers white-collar jobs and creative work the way machinery endangered blue-collar jobs and productive work (ie. not at all in the long run, but in the short term you will face some changes).
I've never actually used an LLM though - I just don't have any use for such a thing. All my writing and programming are done for fun and automation would take that away.
On the one hand, we've got, "Pirating something because we find copyright law to be restrictive and/or corporate pricing to be excessive". On the other, we've got, "Massively wealthy people vacuuming up our creative output to further their own wealth".
And you're trying to suggest that these two are the same?
Edit: I don't mind downvotes, karma means nothing, but I do appreciate when folk speak up and say why I might be wrong. :)
People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies.
What they think how copyright works: When you take someones work as inspiration then everything you produce form that counts as derivative work.
How copyright actually works: The input is irrelevant, only the output matters. Thus derivative work is what explicitly contains or resembles underlying work, no matter if it was actually based on that or it is just happenstance / coincidence.
Thus AI models are safe from copyright lawsuits as long as they filter out any output which comes too close to known material. Everything else is fine, even if the model was explicitly trained on commercial copyrighted material only.
In other words: The concept of intellectual property is completely broken and that is old news.
With all due respect, the lawyers I've seen who commented on the issue do not agree with your assessment.
The things that constitute potentially infringing copying are not clearly well-defined, and whether or not training an AI is on that list has of course not yet been considered by a court. But you can make cogent arguments either way, and I would not be prepared to bet on either outcome. Keep in mind also that, legally, copying data from disk to RAM is considered potentially infringing, which should give you a sense of the sort of banana-pants setup that copyright can entail.
That said, if training is potentially infringing on copyright, it now seems pretty clear that a fair use defense is going to fail. The recent Warhol decision rather destroys any hope that it might be considered "transformative", while the fact that the AI companies are now licensing content for training use is a concession that the fourth and usually most important factor (market impact) weighs against fair use.
Lawyers commenting on this publicly will add their bias to reinforce the stances of their clientele. Thus somebody usually representing the copyright holders will say it is likely infringing and someone usually representing the AI companies will say it is unlikely.
But you are right, we don't know until president is set by a court. I am only warning people that laying back and hoping that copyright will apply as they wish is not a good strategy to defend your work. One should consider alternative legal constructs or simply not releasing material to the general public anymore.
As much as our brain contents are unlicensed copies to the extent we can reproduce copyrighted work: If the model can recite copyrighted portions of text used in training, the model weights are a derivative work. Because the weights obviously must encode the original work. Just because lossy compression was applied the original work should still be considered present as long as it's recognizable. So the weights may not be published without license. Seems rather straightforward to me and I do wonder how Meta thinks they get around this.
Now if the likes of Openai and Google keep the model weights private and just provide generated text, they can try to filter for derivative works, but I don't see a solution that doesn't leak. If a model can be coaxed into producing a derivative work that escapes the filter, then boom, unlicensed copy was provided. If I tell the model to mix two texts word by word, what filter could catch this? What if I tell the model to use a numerical encoding scheme? Or to translate into another language? For example assuming the model knows a bunch of NYT articles by heart, as was already demonstrated: If have it translate one of those articles to French for me, that's still an unlicensed copy!
I can see how they will try to get these violations legalized like the DMCA safe-harbored things, but at the moment they are the ones generating the unlicensed versions and publishing them when prompted to do so.
Also, the desired interpretation of copyright will not stop the multi-billion-dollar AI companies, who have the resources to buy the rights to content at a scale no-one else does. In fact it will give them a gigantic moat, allowing them to extract even more value out of the rest of the economy, to the detriment of basically everyone else.
Unfortunately not how it works, or at least not to the extend you wish it to be.
One can train a model exclusively on source code from the linux kernel (GPL) and then generate a bunch of C programs or libraries from that. And they could publish them under MIT license as long as they don't reproduce any identifiable sections from the linux kernel. It does not matter where the model learned how to program.
That is not relevant to the comment you are responding to. Courts have been finding that scraping a website in violation of its terms of service is a liability, regardless of what you do with the content. We are not only talking about copyright.
True, but ToSes don't apply if you don't explicitly agree with it (e.g. by signing up for an account). So that's not relevant in the case of publicly available content.
If I write code with a license that says that using this code for AI training is forbidden then OpenAI is directly going against this by scraping websites indiscriminately.
Sure, you can write all kinds of stuff in a license, but it is simply plain prose at that point. Not enforcable.
There is a reason why it is generally advised to go with the established licenses and not invent your own, similarly to how you should not roll your own cryptography: Because it most likely won't work as intended.
e.g. License: This comment is licensed under my custom L*a license. Any user with an username starting with "L" and ending in "a" is forbidden from reading my comment and producing replies based on what I have written.
No, it would not be enforceable. Your license can only give additional rights to users. It cannot restrict rights that users already have (e.g. fair use rights in the US, or AI training rights like in the EU or SG).
> You can absolutely write a license that contains the clauses I mentioned and it would be enforceable.
A license (copyright law) is not a contract (contract law). Simply publishing something does not make the whole world enter into a contract with you. Others first have to explicitly agree to do so.
> Sorry, but the onus is on OpenAI to read the licenses not the creator.
They can ignore it because they never agreed to it in the first place.
> And throwing your hands in the air and saying "oh you can't do that in a license" is also of little use.
It is very useful to know what works and what does not. That way you don't trick yourself and your work to be safe, don't get caught by surprise if you are in fact not and can think of alternatives instead.
BTW, a thing you can do (which
CaptainFever mentioned) and lots of services do because licenses are so weak is to make people sign up with an account and have them enter a ToS agreement instead.
> They can ignore it because they never agreed to it in the first place.
They did by accessing and copying the code. Same as a human cloning a repository and using it's content or someone accessing a website with Terms of Use.
By default, copying is disallowed because of copyright. Your license provides them a right to copy the code, perhaps within certain restrictions.
However, sometimes copying is allowed, such as fair use (I covered this in another comment I sent you). This would allow them to copy the code regardless of the license.
> Same as a human cloning a repository and using it's content or someone accessing a website with Terms of Use.
I've covered the cloning/copying part already, but "I agree to this ToS by continuing to browse this webpage" is called a clickwrap agreement. Its enforceability is dubious. I think the LinkedIn case showed that it only applied if HiQ actually explicitly agreed to it by signing up.
> People crying for copyright in the context of AI training don't understand what copyright is, how it works and when it applies.
People are complaining about what's happening, not with the exact wording of the law.
What they are doing probably isn't illegal, but it _should_ be. The problem is that it's very difficult for people to pass new legislation because they don't have lobbyists the way corporations do.
Copyright law is intended to prevent people from stealing the revenue stream from someone else's work by copying and distributing that work in cases where the original is difficult and expensive to create, but easy to make copies of once created. How does an LLM do this? What copies of copyrighted work do they distribute? Whose revenue stream are they taking with this action?
I believe that all the copyright suits against AI companies will be total failures because I can't come up with a answer to any of those questions.
Here is a business model for copy right law firms:
Use source-aware training, use the same datasets as used in LLM training + copyrighted content. Now the LLM can respond not just what it thinks is most likely but also what source document(s) provided specific content. Then you can consult commercially available LLM's and detect copy right infringements, and identify copyright holders. Extract perpetrators and victims at scale. To ensure indefinite exploitation only sue commercially succesful LLM providers, so there is a constant new flux of growing small LLM providers taking up the freed niche of large LLM providers being sued empty.
The only 2 reasons big LLM providers refuse to do it is
1) to prevent a long slew of content creators filing class action suit.
2) to keep regulators in the dark of how feasible and actionable it would be, once regulators are aware they can perform the source-aware training themselves
Perhaps what we should be pushing for is a law that would force full disclosure regarding the training corpus and require a curated version of the training data to be made available. I'm sure there would be all kinds of unintended consequences of a law like that but maybe we'd be better off starting from a strong basis and working out those exceptions. While billions have been spent to train these models, the value of the millions of human hours spent creating the content they're trained on should likewise be recognized.
It's been pretty incredible watching these companies siphon up everything under the sun under the guise of "training data" with impunity. These same companies will then turn around and sic their AIs on places like Youtube and send out copyright strikes via a completely automated system with loads of false-positives.
How is it acceptable to allow these companies to steal all of this copyrighted data and then turn around and use it to enforce their copyrights in the most heavy-handed manner? The irony is unbelievable.
> The thing I’m tired of is elites stealing everything under the sun to feed these models.
I suggest to apply the same to property law: make a photo and obtain instant and unlimited rights of use. – Things may change faster than we may imagine…
There is no copyright with AI unless you want to implement the same measures for humans too. I am fine with it as long as we at least get open-weights. This way you kill both copyright and any company that's trying to profit out of AI.
I like the stone soup narrative on AI. It was mentioned in a recent Complexity podcast, I think by Alison Gopnik of SFI. It's analogous to the Pragmatic Programmar story about stone soup, paraphrasing:
Basically you start with a stone in a pot of water — a neural net technology that does nothing meaningful but looks interesting. You say: "the soup is almost done, but would taste better given a bunch of training data." So you add a bunch of well curated docs. "Yeah, that helps but how about adding a bunch more". So you insert some blogs, copy righted materials, scraped pictures, reddit, and stack exchange. And then you ask users to interact with the models to fine tune it, contribute priming to make the output look as convincing as possible.
Then everyone marvels at your awesome LLM — a simple algorithm. How wonderful, this soup tastes given that the only ingredients are stones and water.
The stone soup story was about sharing, though. Everyone contributes to the pot, and we get something nice. The original stone was there to convince the villagers to share their food with the travellers. This goes against the emotional implication of your adaptation. The story would actually imply that copyright holders are selfish and should be contributing what they can to the AI soup, so we can get something more than the sum of our parts.
From Wikipedia:
> Some travelers come to a village, carrying nothing more than an empty cooking pot. Upon their arrival, the villagers are unwilling to share any of their food stores with the very hungry travelers. Then the travelers go to a stream and fill the pot with water, drop a large stone in it, and place it over a fire. One of the villagers becomes curious and asks what they are doing. The travelers answer that they are making "stone soup", which tastes wonderful and which they would be delighted to share with the villager, although it still needs a little bit of garnish, which they are missing, to improve the flavor.
> The villager, who anticipates enjoying a share of the soup, does not mind parting with a few carrots, so these are added to the soup. Another villager walks by, inquiring about the pot, and the travelers again mention their stone soup which has not yet reached its full potential. More and more villagers walk by, each adding another ingredient, like potatoes, onions, cabbages, peas, celery, tomatoes, sweetcorn, meat (like chicken, pork and beef), milk, butter, salt and pepper. Finally, the stone (being inedible) is removed from the pot, and a delicious and nourishing pot of soup is enjoyed by travelers and villagers alike. Although the travelers have thus tricked the villagers into sharing their food with them, they have successfully transformed it into a tasty meal which they share with the donors.
First gen models trained on books directly. Latest Phi distilled textbook-like knowledge down from disparate sources to create novel training data. They are all fairly open about this change and some are even allowing upset publishers to confirm that their work wasn't used directly. So stones and ionized water go in the soup.
I suspect the greater issue is that copyright is not always clear in this area? I am also not sure how you prevent "elites" from using the information while also allowing the "common" person to it.
It's the other way round. The little guys will never win, it will be just a money transfer from one large corp to another.
We should just scrap copyright and everybody plays a fair game, including us hackers.
Sue me because of breach of contract in civil court for damages because I shared your content, don't send the police and get me jailed directly.
I had my software cracked and stolen and I would never go after the users. They don't have any contract with me. They downloaded some bytes from the internet and used it.
Finding whoever shared the code without authorization is hard and even so, suing them would cost me more than the money I'm likely to get back. Fair game, you won.
It's a natural market "tax" on selling a lot of copies and earning passively.
I do like how the internet has suddenly acknowledged that pirating is theft and torrenting IS a criminal activity. To your point, I'd love to see a massive operation to arrest everyone who has downloaded copyrighted material illegal (aka stolen), for the public interest.
This is such a misrepresentation of the issue and what people are saying about it. They call it "theft" because corps are, apparently-indiscriminately and without remuneration of creators, "ingesting" the original work of thousands or millions of individuals, in order to provide for-profit services derived from that ingestion/training. "Pirates", on the other hand, copy content for their own momentary entertainment, and the exploitation ends there. They aren't turning around and starting a multi-million-dollar business selling pirated content en masse.
Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in. It has been putting fences around everything it wants and IP is one such fence. It has always been about protecting the powerful.
IP has had ample support because the "protect the little artist" argument is compelling, but it is just not how the world works.
> Capitalism started by putting up fences around land to kick people out and keep sheep in.
That's factually wrong. Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm.
> Capitalism is about moving wealth more efficiently: easier to allocate money/wealth to X through the banking system than to move sheep/wealth to X's farm.
It's not. That's what money's about. Any system with an abstract concept of money admits that it's easier to allocate wealth with abstractions than physically moving objects.
Capitalism is about capital. It's an economic system that says individuals should own things (i.e. control their purpose) by investing money (capital) into them. You attempted to correct the previous commenter, but provided an incorrect definition. I hope that clears up the relevance issue for you.
> Capitalism is about capital. It's an economic system that says individuals should own things (i.e. control their purpose) by investing money (capital) into them.
Yes. It's not about stealing land and kicking people out and raising sheep there instead. That (stealing) happens of course but is totally independent from any capitalist system.
JFC, the same sentence could have been said with communism in mind.
> You attempted to correct the previous commenter, but provided an incorrect definition. I hope that clears up the relevance issue for you.
You are confusing the intent of capitalism - which I gave the general direction of - with its definition. Does that clear up the relevance issue for you ? Did I fucking not write wealth/money intentionally ?
The OP is talking about (land) enclosure, not stealing exactly, and enclosure is a precondition of capitalism. To be fair, it's a precondition of feudalism as well. But in order to turn resources that are essentially held in common (like land, and ideas) into capital, they have to be made private. That's what happened with the literal commons in medieval Europe, and it's what's happened with the intellectual commons in the last hundred years.
You didn't describe the intent or the definition of capitalism. You just mentioned that moving resources from A to B is easier if they're abstract. The intent of capitalism is that the society is improved when people who have a vested interest (literally vested, as in with money) in a company determine its actions.
Can you calm down, please? You were the one who started saying my comment was irrelevant. I don't think it makes much sense to parrot that back to me.
You calling it piracy is already a moral stance. Copying data isn't morally wrong in my opinion, it is not piracy and it is not theft. It happens to not be legal but just a few short years ago it was legal to marry infants to old men and you could be killed for illegal artifacts of witchcraft. Legality and morality are not the same, and the latter depends on personal opinion.
I agree with you they're not the same, but to build on that, I would add that they're not entirely orthogonal either, they influence each other a lot. Generally morallity that a society agrees on gets enforced as laws.
The usual argument is less about piracy as a term and more the use of the word theft, and your use of the word "taking". When we talk about physical things theft and taking mean depriving the owner of that thing.
If I have something, and you copy it, then I still have that thing.
Did you read that original comment and wonder how Sam Altman and his crew broke into the commenter's home and made off with their hard drive? Probably not and so theft was a fine word choice. It communicated exactly what they wanted to communicate.
Even if that's the case, the disagreement is in semantics. Let's take your definition of theft. There's physical theft (actually taking something) and there's digital theft (merely copying).
The point of anti-copyright advocates are that merely copying is not ethically wrong. In fact, Why Software Must Be Free made the argument that preventing people from copying is ethically wrong because it limited the spread of culture and reuse.
That is the crux of the disagreement. You may rephrase our argument as "physical theft may be bad, but digital theft is not bad, and in fact preventing digital theft is in itself bad", but the argument does not change.
Of course, there is additional disagreement in the implied moral value of the word "theft". In that case I agree with you that pro-copyright/anti-AI advocates have made their point by the usage of that word. Of course, we disagree, but... it is what it is I suppose.
I'm sorry if this is strawmanning you, but I feel you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law, which historically hasn't worked out so well for the public.
Copyright as far as I understand is focused on wholesale reproduction/distribution of works, rather than using material for generation of new works.
If something is available without contractual restriction it is available to all. Whether it's me reading a book, or a LLM reading a book, both could be considered the same.
Where the law might have something to say is around the output of said trained models, this might be interesting to see given the potential of small-scale outputs. i.e. If I output something to a small number of people, how does one detect/report that level of infringement. Does the `potential` of infringement start to matter.
Nah. What he is saying is that the existing law should be applied equally. As of now intellectual property as a right only works for you if you are a big corporation.
> you're basically saying it's in the public's interest to give more power to Intellectual Property law
Not necessarily. An alternative could be to say that all models trained on data which hasn't been explicitly licensed for AI-training should be made public.
I think the second alternative works too: either you sue these companies to the ground for copyright infringement at a scale never seen, OR you decriminalize copyright infringement.
The problem (as far as this specific discussion goes) is not that IP laws exist, but rather that they are only being applied in one direction.
HN generally hated (and rightly so, IMO) strict copyright IP protection laws. Then LLMs came along and broke everybody's brain and turned this place into hardline copyright extremists.
What do you mean by this? All I see in this thread is people who have absolutely no legal background who are 100% certain that copyright law works how they assume it does and are 100% wrong.
The difference is that before, intellectual property law was used by corporations to enrich themselves. Now intellectual property law could theoretically be used to combat an even bigger enemy: big tech stealing all possible jobs. It's just a matter of practicality, like all law is.
ok the "elites" have spent a lot of money training AI but have the "commoners" lifted a single finger to stop them? nope! its the job of the commoners to create a consensus, a culture, that protects people. so far all i see from the large group of people who are not a part of the elite is denial about this entire issue. they deny AI is a risk and they dont shame people who use it. 99.99% of the population is culpable for any disaster that befalls us regarding AI.
Input stream = output from the perspective of the consumer. Things come out of this stream that I can programmatically react to. Output stream = input from the perspective of the producer. This is a stream you put stuff into.
…so when this article starts “My input stream is full of it…” the author is saying they’re seeing output of fear and angst in their feeds.
Am I alone in thinking this is a bit unintuitive?