I'm pretty bearish on the idea of AI becoming Skynet from Terminator 2, but I do think there's some credibility to the bioterrorism argument. When I used to talk with people that work in orgs tasked with preventing terrorism, this was the thing that was keeping them up at night, and this was before AI.

Aside from that, it's claiming to be based in Europe instead of the US and proposing that as the value proposition. We have servers all over the world, including in Europe, but we're required to be in the US for the pretty simple reason that we live here, and nobody in Europe has offered me citizenship yet (by all means!)

I've explored potentially operating out of other countries when crazy internet regulations come up but in practice, crazy internet regulations is currently, unfortunately, a bi-partisan, multi-country phenomenon, and I wouldn't bank on being "based in Europe" to solve this.

I also wouldn't assume that being based in Europe will prevent the US from enforcing a law on a platform either. US companies still have to adhere to European internet laws if they want to operate there. If we used cookies for anything except session login, we would need to do a cookie pop-up like most other sites do.

It might help me to understand the concern if I was given a specific internet law. If your concern is age check IDing for example, how are you more concerned about the US states than the entire country of France, which is attempting to do the same thing?

We used to make fun people like Ted Stevens for calling the internet "a series of tubes" and now we're just totally cool with letting a failed, bankrupt state in the US dictate what code needs to go into voluntary open source software. We need to fight back, now.

For the same cost, you could run on a frontier model on a pro plan for two years. The economics dont make a lot of sense for this to me, so I would love some input on why people want to do this instead (privacy, for fun, etc).

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187663

Points: 37

# Comments: 12

Very cool this can be done in such a small amount of memory.

For those unfamiliar, 2B2T was a Minecraft anarchy server that had almost no restrictions. It devolved into roving gangs of people trying to kill each other, use cheats to find secret bases, etc. The trick to hiding on this server was to go as far away as possible from the center, which led to an enormous map size.

I joined with a friend several years ago to see if we could survive, and it took days just to get out of the spawn, which was completely destroyed, surrounded by massive walls, and flooded with Withers (very difficult to kill enemies).

Fascinating study and perhaps the biggest metaverse experiment that's ever happened (but definitely the most lawless one).

This is what spawn looked like from above https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/vrKyqEBoNvRVbCtHoG6BGX-970...

And the other thing is, you can use a gun to murder people. If you try to use a porn site to murder someone, you're fundamentally hitting them with a laptop.

A major reason nobody can think clearly about this anymore is that there are people out there that genuinely believe porn sites and social media are as dangerous to human health as assault rifles and cigarettes. I'm almost as disturbed that people can't differentiate between harm risks as I am about horrible internet age checking laws.

Farewell to freedom on the Internet and the days of wild abandon.

Not surprising to me at all that their software is a similar high quality experience, but in general I think it's weird that cars have to be connected to the Internet anyways and I doubt the competition is substantially better.

I'm just not sure if "this time it's different". There was abundant decisive political smearing and conspiracy theories on Geocities. They had an entire section called Area51 (https://geocities.restorativland.org/Area51). There was a politics neighborhood that had a bunch of crass political bashing (it's pretty funny to read about someone off his rocker about Janet Reno). There was also the Art Bell show playing in every radio market with him interviewing vampire experts and whatnot. The old Internet/culture really wasn't all that different than it is today.

His response would have been "go to hell", and he would have figured out a way to get around it anyways. Unless they're actually planning to track one government ID per person in a database, a truly horrifying idea that this project is slippery sloping towards (because if the current design is easily defeatable, then why do it at all?)

Having access to the entire internet, warts and all, as a kid did not ruin my life, it was an escape from the people I did not fit in with in the place I grew up, it taught me about humanity and ultimately led to a successful career for me.

Dave Bohnett, the founder of Geocities, stuck his neck out to protect the LGBT section of the site so that young adults could find a place to have community despite often growing up in places where it was dangerous to be gay, like it was for him when he grew up in a very conservative suburb of Chicago.

I don't think anyone has said more negative stuff about Facebook then I have, and I literally made a platform eager to try to destroy it, but this is not the way to do it. We should be thinking very, very carefully about when we let the government become our parents in scenarios like this when the unintended consequences seem quite likely be enormous and when there's no mechanism for retracting the law once it's implemented and we find out that, surprise surprise, it didn't magically cure depression in young adults.

Assuming this isn't just a supply issue on their side, nothing says "ethical AI" like only allowing mega corporations to use it through cost barriers.