• 22 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • It’s what happens when copyright gets extended to infinity with no useful public domain to speak of. And then they will force you to rent the shit out of the copyright with a monthly subscription.

    Linux runs on billions of devices. Every device with a microprocessor, except for the tiny portion of desktops, would be useless hunks of garbage without Linux. And Linux would not have those numbers if it wasn’t FOSS. The internet would be a shell of its current self without FOSS and Linux.

    The world needs FOSS, and quite frankly, it’s a direct counterbalance to the invasive force of capitalism. Anybody who think the GPL isn’t political clearly hasn’t read anything its creators wrote.











  • When they can argue its for “transformative use” or whatever the magic words are? Thats technically fair use in US law.

    Well, considering they transformed its use to about 250GB of weights, that would qualify. That’s at least thousands of times less than the size of the books they downloaded, so you can’t really claim “they downloaded the books and put it into the model unaltered”.

    It’s not like you can ask one of the models for page 156 of the second Harry Potter book, unless it’s cheating and attached to a search engine to try to find the result. There is no compression technique that can take something to a thousandth of its size without an substantial loss. You can, however, ask it to summarize what happened in the second Harry Potter book, including what the actual title is, without it trying to look it up on its own.

    The AI bros might have a serious point within the law, and that should scare actual artists. It should also scare studios like Disney that hold a fuck ton of “intellectual property”.

    Actual artists have been fucked over by copyright since its invention. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it “protects the little person”, but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Mark Twain, Sonny Bono, and Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.

    If the rich end up dismantling their own IP shield that has existed to enrich themselves for centuries in the name of AI progress, I’m going to call that a win.


  • You could fit all the spent nuclear fuel humanity has ever used into a single swimming pool.

    Around the U.S., about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste is stored at over 100 sites in 39 states, in a range of different structures and containers.

    I’m fairly sure a swimming pool can’t hold 90 Kilotons of nuclear waste.

    Also, not needing enriched uranium is a pretty big deal, considering it’s an expensive process. And just having an enrichment facility is enough for the UN to stop and take notice, start flailing around with their arms in the air, and scream about nuclear weapons projects.






  • Didn’t someone at Google write a memo that was like “we’re kinda fucked b/c you can re-create this stuff with enough resources” like 2 years ago?

    Basically, yes. They were specifically decrying the amount of open-sourcing they and their American competitors were doing, because capitalism, of course. Around this time, we had examples like StabilityAI’s StableDiffusion and Meta’s LLaMA as open-source models. And around this time, everybody else started closing their models, despite the fact that the research kept on going out in the open. StabilityAI kept their models open, mostly because they had no choice, but the attitude shifted towards profitability.

    So, China took the open-source mantle, and these open/closed lines are being drawn strictly around national divisions as this American vs. China slant. Which is mostly a diversion of the real battle.


  • Whoever wrote this article didn’t even bother to do the most basic of research.

    DeepSeek fully admitted they started with ChatGPT outputs to train its model. And then they released it as an open-source model, so that everybody else can “steal” their work. On the image/video front, the general public has created every possible variation on top of every model you can think of. On top of that, any model that has ever been released with full weights has been spun into whatever variation or VRAM size you want.

    The ugly truth that the American companies want to hide is the fact that they are spending trillions of dollars on an oligopoly that they can’t keep long-term. They hope that they can just keep spending more money to add more billions of parameters to their models, and keep technologically competitive with the secondary open-source models. But, they’ve already ran into diminishing returns over a year ago, and the global compute sector physically cannot keep up with demand for another cycle of even more diminishing returns.

    The other factor is that realistic miniaturization of models is already here. Some of the smaller sizes aren’t as effective as the 250GB models they use on cloud-based services, but you can still do a lot with a 16GB or 24GB video card, using models of those sizes. Optimization and LLM quantization is getting better and better each year. The AI bubble burst is going to force a cascade shift into a new era of localization. Everybody is sick to fucking death of renting and subscribing to everything. Us pirates already do so on the media front, and soon localization of LLMs is going to become way more popular.

    The question isn’t “Can people steal the tech?”. It’s “how long will people notice that it’s already happening?”


  • I can’t blame you because the media is complicit, and everybody loves a story of good guy versus bad guy, but this is the reality:

    No, I acknowledge that the world is a helluva lot more nuanced than “AI bad, military bad, absolute stances good”. Absolutism is what we accuse our smooth-brained right-winged asshats of doing, so we certainly shouldn’t be caught doing the same thing.

    Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy.

    You mean drones? You’re talking about drones. What’s wrong with drones?

    We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner.

    They had a contract with the Pentagon. They literally deal with military operations on a regular basis.

    Hell, most of the pivotal technology developed in the last thousand years started as a military invention before civilian use. Including this internet thing you’re arguing on right now.