I literally had a bike rental company in Amsterdam attempt to get me to conspire to report a bike stolen (which had briefly been stolen but was back in my possession), and then when I refused, charged me as if the bike had been stolen!

I reported all this to Amex, and I was never refunded, and to my knowledge, the attempt fraud was never investigated.

Yeah, exactly, and ultimately I think that's really the thrust of the point I was making.

And, to me, if I was just looking at this calmly as a decision about what the obvious direction seems to be, given these factors, it's pretty straightforward: deprecate the nation-states. They are the ones mucking up the whole system.

If the thing we're really concerned about is LLM-safety wrt warfare and weapons, then I'd much rather tell the (whining, childish, seemingly headed for self-destruction anyway) nation-states that they have to sit this next era of humanity out than have to nerf them for the rest of us (and as you point out, nerf them in a way that the nation-states won't abide anyway).

Surely someone will soon do what the title of this post makes it seem like cloudfare did. Truly modular open source training and inference logic, along with a totally open corpus and weights, will eventually out-compete the closed ecosystem.

It's really funny to see the delusion being defended so vigorously by people - presumably well-meaning people - purporting to defend the livelihoods of musicians and artists, while the musicians and artists are desperately trying to free themselves from the jaws of their IP agreements precisely so that their music can spread more easily.

I imagine this is already well-known on HN, but there is a significant movement underfoot in the worlds of bluegrass/old time/trad/jam toward DRM-free and CC licensing.

https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847489

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Is it unavoidable, though?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCuDk18gGRc

Yeah, I was gonna say, as conspiracy theories go, this one is pretty much in the books at this point. Fuck man, Tom Hanks stars in a movie about it; that's about as mainstream as it gets.

To put it differently: its stated allies are direct lineal political and military descendants of the parties who were ostensibly its enemies in 2006, including Al-Qaeda / Jabhat Al-Nusra.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49735645

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

* If you train AI on it, you have to afford public access to it.

* Nobody can exact violence against anybody else in response to that person providing public access to any data anymore (ie, all bytestrings are public domain).

That's the world I'd like to try in the coming years.

To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.

But I don't think it arises to an alignment issue; if I'm able to summon the model to harness my birthright of general-purpose computing without censorship, then we're aligned.