Yes. If you decide it’s a swell idea to jump out of your car while it’s running, there needs to be legal consequences when the car “decides” to hit a pedestrian.
And so, you run up against a phenomenon every bit as natural as the forever durability as PFAS: Markets can respond to uncomfortable truths. Organizations of real humans? Not so much.
This is why the paradigm for AI use should not be automation but rather the cyborg. Under automation, people are less active and engaged and become mere operators of automated processes. They become slaves of the machines. Under the cyborg model, they arrange the machines in a way to make people masters of a universe that includes the machines helping them be that.
Recently, I had some ideas I would normally just put up on a blog, in the public domain for anyone to develop on top of. Now, I'm feeling slightly reluctant because an LLM will ingest it, remix it and serve it in response to a query by some unimaginative individual who will either conclude that they are smart, or that LLMs are capable of original thought, or both. And they will have no clue where the idea originated from.
Really happy for you. It's disheartening how many people put off or choose not to have kids because they think some combination of climate disaster, famine, overpopulation, war or skynet will ensure a life of misery for their children.
There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.
> There's definitely a risk of over-thinking things. Just do things. You're not likely to regret it.
Agree, in general, people over-think a lot, and aren't "just doing things" enough, the world would be a better place if people acted more, over-think less.
With that said, some decisions are more long-lasting and have a greater impact than others. I'm another child-less person, mainly because I guess I'm selfish enough to enjoy my life with my wife exactly like it is, and she agrees, but also because I know that if we have a kid, then that's not something you can walk back on exactly, he/she/it/them are there, forever now. Very different from me deciding right now "You know, I'm gonna have a joint, grab a book and go to the beach for this entire Tuesday", the types of decisions I think people should overthink less :)
As I've grown older, I noticed the cardinal pleasures don't hit like they used to. I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time, falling in love, getting my heart broken, the little things of life.
I've gotten great pleasure and reassurance knowing that's all ahead of my children. No matter how I progress personally, time marches on and I get to see my kids discover the world. If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
I think the recent rise in things like Disney adults and interests around video games or popular media (TV/movies) is a kind of biological response. People are free to do whatever they want of course, but I can't help but think that these people, at least biologically, are drawn to these more adolescent interests precisely because they're not experiencing it through the eyes of their children.
> I also get nostalgic at times about the wonders of youth, experiencing things for the first time
Yeah, I guess at one point I'll feel like that too perhaps, but I still feel young, I feel like I have more energy each day than the previous one, and every month is experiencing new things for the first time, and personally I don't want that to stop and experiencing those things through the eyes of my children, I want to continue having those experiences myself, together with my wife :) I guess that's where the offhand "I'm selfish" sentiment from my previous comment comes from.
> If I do nothing else in my life, I would still feel immensely fulfilled.
Do you think you'd feel fulfilled if you didn't have children? Maybe this is the core differences, I feel fulfilled in my life already, more than ever and more every day, I live exactly the life I want today, and I wouldn't want to change it for anything. Even if I became deadly sick tomorrow, I'd feel fulfilled by the life I have lived.
> Do you think you'd feel fulfilled if you didn't have children?
As I approached 30 I felt what I now understand as anxiety. Nothing crazy but you wake up one day, you're a year old, you take stock of your life and see what you've accomplished. I chased credentials and new jobs, did well but not yet able to retire. Old relationships grew strained and new ones are hard to form. Etc. I was definitely more afraid of death than you are.
I stumbled into children. Met my wife, didn't overthink things and decided to marry her after several years of courtship. She wanted children so I went along with it.
After they were born, the anxiety went away entirely. I just watch them grow older. It might change after their grown but hopefully they'll have children and I'll be able to repeat the process (my parents sure have).
To answer your question, I don't see a way I could have been fulfilled without children. It brings a lot with it as well. Before children the worst thing that could happen to me is dying. After kids you realize there's a whole world of potential pain and sorrow that is now before you. You're also constantly reminded that every kid is a roll of the dice when you see others in a similar spot as you have children with health or behavioral issues. It's terrifying.
But for me life shouldn't be all pleasure. I've always liked exercise because it does feel terrible while you're doing it. But at least you're doing something. I feel that way about children.
I felt the same thing at 30 and still sometimes feel it now at 36, although to a lesser extent as I've worked on it.
My wife and I have been together 13 years and we found out fairly early that we can't have children. It's taken a lot of internal work to be ok with it, good days and bad. Ironically the same 'not over-thinking it' strategy is the most helpful for my well-being. Just focus on what I can do today.
Seems like kids really are the quickest path to meaning making, it takes a lot of active effort to try to get a sense of fulfillment without them, at least for me.
I was reminded of a tactic used by life insurance companies, which are more successful when they show a client a photo of themselves at age 70.
I pictured myself sitting there alone, lonely, perhaps without a wife by then (a 50/50 chance). And would I be calling friends my own age? Or my kids?
Although the likelihood that I won’t get along with them as an adult… you never know; another factor is their future partners…
Well, the kids - plus my wife, who wanted kids - won out.
But everyone has their own life, the best one they can imagine, so this is definitely not some kind of persuasion—just a description of the logical process I went through back then.
Our DNA was largely coded by prior generations that didn't really have a choice of reproduction, it just kind of happened because it's a natural result of sex. That connection has been severed in modern civilization. It's going to take a while for our DNA to adapt.
> Most people go through life never doing it at all.
That's unfair to others, of course they think. They think differently than you, and about different things than you, but doesn't mean they "go through life never thinking", probably no one does that.
I mean if I decide to go to the beach, but I arrive there and don't like it, I just go home again, tomorrow looks the same regardless probably. Deciding to have a child, or other more "long-lasting" decisions, definitely impacts how your tomorrow most likely looks.
Deciding not to have a child also impacts your future. You might change your mind in the future and be unable to have a child or have other health problems that make raising a child difficult. You might reach old(er) age and be alone. Regrets are a thing.
I think the times I felt like I wanted a child, I've always wanted to adopt anyways, not just add more people to the world but help the ones that already exists here.
So with that comes the flexibility of not having to worry about any biological clocks :)
Even without children I'll never be alone though, luckily I live in the greatest place in the world!
> Regrets are a thing.
People keep telling me this, but after 35 years on this planet with still zero regerts, when is that supposed to be happening exactly? ;)
Correct, no justification to breed is needed whatsoever. Its a biological drive similar to eating and drinking, albeit on longer timescales and across generations rather than individuals.
However, thought processes like the one you identified above are probably adaptive, as gene lines which spend time trying to find the "justifiable reasons" for breeding were likely eliminated.
Gene lines where "I can raise my kids with like-minded community of peers", "I feel ready for more in life", and "sharing children with my parents, and letting my kids bond with healthy gradparents" (restatements of your phrasings) win out and reliably produce healthy offspring. So those reasons become strong motivators (despite being un-necessary justifications), that may seem irrational at first glance.
Children cost relatively little themselves. What "costs" a lot is the opportunity cost of the mother not working, or paying a salary to someone else to watch your kids.
Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years. Life is a struggle, it sounds like you would rather just give up. I guess evolution is working as intended.
> Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years.
The thing people are thinking about when deciding not to have children for climate reasons is climate change on a human timescale, not a geological/astronomical one. There is a very real chance that children born today will live through a wildly different climate than their parents did.
As far as evolution goes, there are plenty of species that will not breed or even eat their young when circumstances are not good enough to raise them. It's not that out-there for people to put off or avoid having children due to environmental stressors like climate change. We, as humans, can just rationalize and understand it over a longer time period than, say, a Spotted Hyena.
I'll keep publishing static websites, so I don't even have to worry about load and CPU usage. I don't care who reads it, the value for me is in writing.
I still haven't changed my mind on the "shall I have kids" problem :P
If one other human sees value in it, it has been worth the extra trouble. When I advertised my blog on my HN profile, people came to read, some even wrote to me.
So what if 99.99% of Internet users won’t find it any more because they use LLMs? Then write for the 0.01%. Those are the people I want to engage with anyway.
Publishing changes the incentive of how you write, because you’ll care differently about the quality and content of the writing, since people might read it. That’s valuable for a writer.
I still think it's correct. Execution is the part that matters.
Almost everyone I know "came up with" some startup, ex. Uber before Uber existed, yet none of them did it. I have personally thought of maybe 2 startup ideas that later came into existence.
Come to think of it, people in my circle that have ideas left and right are _still_ not founding companies even with modern LLM's that supposedly solved programming, clearly there is a disconnect somewhere.
In university in 1995/96 I remember having to put my bank card details into a website to pay for something. I hated the idea that some third party would probably be storing these details and could in theory abuse them or leak them.
I was thinking it would be great to have a trusted middle man to use to pay for things that wouldn't expose my own bank card details to every website, or to be able to generate one off transaction numbers.
Possibly "bad ideas are cheap". A lot of people got tired of "ideas guys" who never build anything themselves. The best case of a raw idea is an uncut diamond, it will inevitably require work.
Most people (and most companies) can't tell bad ideas from good ideas. This is also true of LLMs to some degree. They need post-training in specific domains (e.g. coding) to become competent in that specific area.
> The failure of the GPL is that you can't force anyone to collaborate and share if they don't really want to.
Failure of the GPL? How can you even put those words next to each other? GPL is an amazing success. It took software out of hands of SV / VC / corpo crowd and put it where it should be - users.
Allow me to disagree. GPL was a great idealistic dream that led to less-restrictive open-source licences such as MIT/BSD which have been the greatest catalyst towards the establishment of tech corpo giants and the software ecosystem we have today.
GPL gave us Linux, but also gave us Amazon, Google and 2020s Microsoft. GPL is why 90+% of libraries on Github are MIT licensed. GPL gave us OpenAI and Anthropic and this here article.
It's failed in that most software doesn't use it. Because of the psyop, people who would be very sad if Amazon stole their software are licensing it MIT so Amazon can legally steal it.
For many years GNAT Community Edition has used GPL, including its library. That greatly boosted Ada programming language domination over planet and is a good reference for everyone else to also choose GPL for everything if they struggle at dominating. Tears of joy when programmers got to know that standard library in GNAT CE was licensed under GPL.
No. We don't. Original good ideas are exceedingly rare.
Also, what we really have learned, is that the typical techie isn't interested in pureness of thought and originality, exploration of the beauty of the unknown, but rather making a quick buck.. A good idea will be taken and used without credit.
We'll see whether or not LLMs have original ideas soon I guess. I wonder.
We don't want to share our thoughts, ideas, feelings and art with machines. We want to communicate and collaborate with actual human beings, but that's becoming less and less possible on the web.
Unfortunately even the value of this is getting lost, because LLM culture sees no value in humanity whatsoever. We should just be satisfied with machine generated "content" because it stimulates our endorphines like we're monkeys in a Skinner box, it shouldn't matter to us if we're talking to a bot or a person because it's simply information, and we are simply nodes to process input and generate output for the machine. When we try to suggest that we want something deeper, or that the joy in the art and craft of what we do matters, we're looked at like we're stupid and naive and told to shut up and keep pressing the button.
"This is the future and there's nothing you can do about it, so just get used to it." It's fucking depressing. Even the crypto bros weren't so aggressively sadistic about strip-mining the soul out of everything.
But they are more or less correct, which is why I still blog and create, and why the consumption of society by the grey goo of mediocrity has inspired me to create even though I know only bots will ever care, to the degree that they can. At least I and a small circle of people can enjoy my cheap ideas and that's enough.
Unless I need to use a particular website, a captcha makes me close the tab. I always found them disrespectful to users and there is no way I would read a blog with one
Time to add ample praise of myself in my blog posts. Some time later: “…as you see, that is the load bearing assumption here. Speaking of which, you should hire KronisLV.”
Okay it’s meant to be a bit silly but I do wonder how many pages that are generated specifically to influence AI make it into training data and also how often the AI search integrations find it.
Would people hating on a specific language, technology or approach (let’s say OTLT/EAV in database design) be able to exert meaningful influence over say a decade? Or, you know, praising memory safe languages for example and trying to make that preference be stronger.
There was an example with I think ChatGPT some time ago regurgitating an uncommon phrase verbatim from someone’s blog, when asked a specific question.
Yep. I suspect this already underway. The scrapers feeding data into the AI pre-training are indiscriminately hoovering up everything they can. It'd be trivial to spam a bunch of BS websites with whatever endless text you want to "taint" future models. Post tons of examples of insecure code or package.json files pointing to some malicious library.
If all you care about is financial, expected value of someone reading your blog and asking to collaborate is MUCH lower than odds of being part of some settlement in the future with these AI companies ingesting your data for training purposes.
From their phrasing I don't think the reward they're looking for is financial: more the emotional reward of knowing that someone else appreciated their ideas. I dunno how much less likely this is in the age of LLMs, though.
In that case, more LLMs scraping the net will read your blog than people, that's almost a guarantee. And they'll immortalize your ideas at least in some sense, well after your hosting platform ends up gating your content, or GitHub pages is down indefinitely, or you forget to renew your domain.
I don’t think that’s fair. Some bloggers may hope for financial reward, but many just want recognition for their creativity, to attract a readership, or build a community around their work. Those are meaningful ends, apart from financial reward. What’s not meaningful is to perform free labor to produce the raw materials that a mega corp then goes on to monetize without any recognition.
It feels like volunteering at an Amazon warehouse when you previously volunteered at a charity store. Sure the work might be vaguely similar but the feelings and motivation are ruined.
The downside, as stated in the message, is implicitly supporting the LLM data ingestation pipeline by providing fresh content. It's not a direct harm in itself, but feels very tragedy of the commonsy
Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits?
Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?
For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity that explicitly financializes that work's benefits?
Yes, that was one of the things that I hope happens with the open source software I write.
> Would you be willing to do free work for a corporate entity whose entire business model is making sure they sit as a gatekeeper between your free work and others who would benefit from your work?
Sure, that's what doing SEO on one's own blog is, isn't it?
> For some it's demoralizing to know that your work will be broken down and atomized into language model mush, and the credit will go to the computer.
I think this is probably the crux: that writing is no longer discoverable because people aren't using search engines any more. It would be interesting to put some hard numbers on that. I reckon writing is still more discoverable (in absolute numbers) than it was when blogs first took off (over 20 years ago?)
A lot of blogging especially in the tech space is driven by recruiting (startup blogs), or establishing a reputation as a thought leader (personal blogging, LinkedIn). So there were upsides that are now gone.
Publish some interesting info on a startup eng blog and nobody will see your pitch to apply for jobs, they'll just delegate the task that needs the info to an agent and it'll remember the answer from its training.
Ditto for personal blogging and thought leadership pieces. You get drowned out by the volume of AI generated pieces, and any unique ideas you do propose will be presented by the models as their own.
So only GitHub Copilot can read it then? Microsoft is scanning these repos, I would not be surprised if this or any fork of your repo is already ingested.
Ha, that’s why I’m hosting simple cgit server for myself only. Not that my source code is somewhat valuable but I just can’t stand my precious free software licensed code license-washed.
Sounds like you don't really care about your ideas propogating. Of course someone will internalize and remix your idea. That's how all ideas work. Isn't that the point? What do you think happens when a human reads it? Think he'll quote chapter and verse and attribute it to you? Years later you'll notice your blog in appendices and acknowledgments?
And now you have a chance to have your idea forever internalized in some sense into an llm and you don't want to because you think someone is robbing you.
This is kinda silly, AI is just a faster re-tranmission of information but it's not fundamentally different from stackoverflow or older styles of communication. If you wrote a blog and some kid in 2025 spouting opinions that weren't their own. it sucks that right now it's controlled by a large corpo but open source models also train on the internet corpus.
freedom of knowledge and open sourcing should always exist, and if anything, even more important in the AI era.
To be frank that sounds batshit insane levels of spite. You were going to try to promote the general production of knowledge but now because you worry someone you dislike who you don't even know.might benefit from it you aren't?
That's why you don't share them, until comes a time when the ideabringers gets the money and recognition they deserve. Until then, good luck going knee deep in the sewers of ideas.
Can’t say I agree. The most influential ideas in history were not conceived of by people looking for money and recognition. Nor were they “radically original.”
Look at AI. AI companies throw out their models and let the "community" develop the ideas what to do with them. They don't really know what they are capable of. All they do is implement these things that the dev community digs up and creates.
It's a reprehensible tactic. So why give drops of blood to a desert, when there is zero incentive and in the end you will revitalise the desert, but it will turn against you and rob you of your job.
More than a facilitator of theft, LLMs are the tragedy of the commons at industrial scale.
The public internet is dead, the future is private invite-only walled gardens.
Corporations love a walled garden, what we need is open-source frameworks to create these islands, rather than defaulting to horrible systems like Discord and Twitter-clones.
I think probably things along the lines of what's been called the 'cozy web': networks of smaller groups that don't publish to or expect responses from effectively the entire internet as a whole. (This kind of thing has always existed, it's basically the group chat with your friends but perhaps slightly bigger, but I think there's a bit of a trend of focusing on it more because of the feeling that the twitter/facebook attention and feed model is bad for your mental health. I've always felt the twitter model especially was pretty cursed so I'm glad there's some agreement building there).
I'm thinking more like mesh networks. I spoke of Reticulum elsewhere in this thread, but here I'm thinking I'd like the ability to easily join multiple TCP/IP networks (islands of connectivity) by social group (my friends) or by interest (pirate file-sharing group, my work intranet, a knitting community with their own IRC server, FTP, etc.).
Basically easy-to-use private & encrypted LAN overlays on top of the public internet. Each operator decides who to allow in or kick out of the network.
Wireguard solves the most of technical challenges, but it needs a frontend. The biggest concern probably is most software broadcasts their stuff across all interfaces, defeating the point of isolation between networks.
Thanks but I am talking about the complete opposite of connecting multiple networks together.
I’m not sure why we’re talking past each other. CGNAT has nothing to do with the public web dying because it’s both too large, too spammy and too juicy a target for mass surveillance.
And that will kill AI itself, since much of what it knows is from what learned from StackExchange before this latest one demise.
And before the obvious comments on how GenAI is creative, then please do this OpenAI and Anthropic, for your next LLM. Just teach it Python, C and Rust and give it some good books. But dont give it access to Github...lets see what you can do then...
LLM training will eventually transition from real data to synthetic data, same as alphago -> alphazero.
AI companies are also working to integrate training with real-world experience through sensors and robotics, to shrink the gap between human experience and hallucinated LLM experience.
They all have archives of pre-LLM content. There's also archive.org, google books, and pirate ebook archives. I don't know what they're doing to build video and audio archives, but judging from the cost of spinning rust, they're storing significant quantities of that, too.
Some parts of the internet are curated, and even with LLM influence they're still worth training on. I doubt wikipedia or stackexchange or rosettacode will ever cease to be useful at all.
Neither AlphaGo nor AlphaZero were transformers. Why would you expect the same results?
Going further, current LLMs have at least an order of magnitude more computing resources, but completely suck at go. Why would this suddenly change unless we dumped the countless games played by alphago for them to train on?
That (theoretically) solves training, but it doesn’t change the fact that even smart models can’t extract useful information from a dead internet, so you’ll always be stuck with a stale training cutoff. This is already a problem I run into a lot. I search something first. Top results are slop sites, so I switch to a chatbot. Its answers look suspiciously similar to the slop sites I just noped out of. Check the sources. It’s them.
And the training of future models will have to contend not only with slop, but also huge amounts of content specifically designed to "taint" future training data. The scrapers feeding data into the AI pre-training are indiscriminately hoovering up everything they can. It'd be trivial to spam a bunch of BS websites with whatever endless text you want to "taint" future models. Post tons of examples of insecure code, publish package.json files pointing to some malicious library, etc...
It can either examine the ground truth source code to answer your question "How to expire cookies using RoR Devise gem" or it can read docs for you or it can spin up local experiments to black box examine some software. If humans had done that before posting on StackOverflow, the question never would have made it there.
Its reasoning ability is long passed hoping an example exists online for it to copy.
The end goal though (in my understanding) has never been for an LLM to regurgitate knowledge it ingested during its training. The end goal is to use the patterns and correlations found in internet data to generate an emergent prediction and problem-solving machine.
Whether that's possible is something we'll discover, but no one is throwing billions on AI companies for the hope of them building a giant natural language queryable internet information repository.
The key question to me is whether AI only undermines the financial incentive to make internet content.
If nobody can expect to make money on the internet, that could be a good thing. But we won't get an indie-web authenticity utopia if people are still incentivized in other ways to filter their intellectual and cultural contributions to the internet through AI.
It undermines the social incentive as well if potential creators assume that everyone else will be getting their content through AI. They won't be looking at my stuff, they'll be looking at some LLM's pre-chewed version of it.
> AI will kill the internet because it is killing the incentive to make it.
You could make the same argument for Wikipedia (that webs get less traffic if people get their answers from Wikipedia article returned as the first from web search, which is based on internet sources).
But Wikipedia has done a good job of it. If Google's AI summaries could actually provide correct answers with verifiable sources without so-called hallucinations, it would be good. You could argue that people don't actually check Wikipedia's sources. That's because Wikipedia has built, and worked to keep, its users' trust. On the other hand, what is Google doing?
I don't think that follows. Wikipedia's sourcing rules overwhelmingly favor publications released for non-pageview-based purposes (academic writing, books), or journalistic productions (whose pageview-based revenue is almost entirely earned right after they're released, and where Wikipedia's reference to them is primarily of value later on). Also, Wikipedia's nature as a structured, not-seeking-engagement index of info means that a lot of people who seek it out are folks who wouldn't (for whatever reason) fall back to giving other sites pageviews if it didn't exist.
It depends on filed. As documentary photographer it motivates me even more to capture authentic images of life around me. I don't care about remixing, because that is not what makes documentary photography valuable.
With photos, I could see a cryptographic solution. Of course it would still need some kind of centralized trust, but it's doable if people cared enough. It could be applied by cameras themselves.
This is already a thing. Leica cryptographically signs images. Useful for establishing trust for photojournalists I guess. I’m not sure how deep the chain goes. Do they have hardware attention down to the sensor? You could take a picture of a screen, but that would likely have some other tell-tales. Especially if Leica took another step like putting a depth sensor in the package and added its data to the signature.
A camera could be hacked with unrestricted physical access, but that doesn't make the suggestion unsound, it only requires there be a process for revoking trust in specific signing keys. This is already part of C2PA.
And the value of the signature is also going to vary by who claims it. Improbable photos signed by a random camera body sold to an anonymous consumer should be treated with more suspicion than one a newswire agency publicly claims, for instance.
A camera should not need to be hacked. What do you expect to accomplish by hacking the camera?
We should be able to move certificates on and off it because they would most likely expire anyway. So, you can get the keys from the camera, what then? You use openssl to sign an image that shouldn't be signed... what then? You do this enough and get caught, you lose your cert and can never pass the kyc to get another one.
Then every picture you used it for in the past would start showing a big red exclamation point with a note, "This is a scumbag user known for forging images".
Same way it works for tls and code signing. Public reports bad actors to the signing authority. They and/or independent firms investigate. You self report theft. It's not like we are inventing pki from scratch here and wondering what an implementation would look like. We have decades of use to look at.
Besides wasn't your argument "hacking" a minute ago? So you concede that then? You seem to have moved on.
Yes, "the public" includes experts in the subject field and independent witnesses to events.
If your argument is that images can't be verified, you are going to need to provide some kind of backing to that. We know well that there are watermarks and tell tale signs to go off. Regardless, if they are depicting real world events, outside confirmation can be used.
You also don't seem to understand the point of the signature. It's not to prevent fake images, it's to tie an identity to images so that that trust can be established and permanently lost in the case of a malicious actor. Your arguments repeatedly have failed to engage with the actual system proposed.
> You also don't seem to understand the point of the signature. It's not to prevent fake images, it's to tie an identity to images so that that trust can be established and permanently lost in the case of a malicious actor.
It was proposed as a solution to: how is any future viewer going to tell your images from "AI" fakes?
You seem to be saying it is not a solution. I agree.
I have already said, it's done by establishing trust by tying identity to images. Your assertions aren't a counter to that. You thinking they are shows a lack of understanding of how to verify truth on a fundamental level.
Let's also list the points you have conceded by quietly giving them up:
1. Hacking the camera is irrelevant.
2. Images can be verified.
Do you want to actually engage with the conversation? The funny thing is that there are engineering challenges in this space, but you don't seem to understand the basics well enough to even get to that point.
> I have already said, it's done by establishing trust by tying identity to images.
You've said it, but you've not credibly substantiated it.
Imagine a famous photo journalist dies and there emerge "AI" fake pics signed with creds stolen from his hacked camera. Trust isn't part of a solution. It is part of the problem.
Then the cert is pulled with a date and the timestamps on the images can be used to verify when they happened. This is generally how you'd handle theft. You can then also resign with a new cert at a later date.
Besides, after a famous journalist dies, their work is already famous, people already know it or don't. This is a contrived and irrelevant example.
Again, this is not hypothetical, we already know how this works. Next one please.
And that's problematic if the certificate is also stolen at the same time, but that's why there is an authority to validate issues and address what needs to be done to resolve them.
The premise is not that it couldn't be faked. It would be more practical to remove the key from the hardware and just use it to sign images if you wanted to do that.
The idea is that a centralized source of trust would revoke certificates belonging to bad actors or those that were stolen.
Cool. Every time I want to pass off AI images I'll buy a new Nikon camera. Always a Nikon until their cert is revoked. I'll short their stock before that.
Doesn't seem like a particularly bad thing to me. Obviously for those who want to use the internet for commercial purposes it will be bad but for those of us who would love to see the internet go back to how it was before so much of it was changed in the aims of making money AI could push towards this. Great irony in the fact of course that the AI companies themselves are in the business of making as much money as possible.
I don't know how long you've been on the internet but the incentive to create new and original content was never that strong. Simple search terms return super-spammy websites (especially on mobile where ad-blocking is harder). SEO results for everything like simple search are awful, almost unusable. There hasn't been an incentive to create new original non-monetized content for the web for a while.
I trust LLMs more than search engines to discover my content and propagate it to users. They might "steal" something, sure, but I'm essentially invisible to the search engines as I could never hope to break into the top 10 links on a popular search term. LLMs can scan thousands of links and (for now) are more interested in quality rather than click monetization or referral incentives.
So, you know how they're built, but you're feeling the pressure of modern life and also they give you personal gain (supposedly) so you're fine with it, it sounds like to me? Use the same tools as your "competitors"/peers, even though?
Don't get me wrong, I too use LLMs for development and more, and I too know how they've been built, and I'm also a creative (music, 3D, VFX and animation) and for sure stuff I've published in the past, both code and otherwise, is now used to create new things for people and I get nothing, similar situation as countless of others. Yet I still use AI, so I'm not trying to create some "gotcha" moment against you here, I'm genuine curious about what you think about this sort of conflicting thinking, as I'm in the very same situation.
If the Internet was nothing but the newspapers of record online, it would have been a good place to stop. The quality disappeared after the barrier of entry went - social media.
At one time, running a blog post was also not exactly trivial, and that would have been a great middle ground between access to publishing and reading.
I feel honored if my ideas are processed by an AI and then used to help others. I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI than I would if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.
The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible and useful to everyone on command is beautiful, not discouraging. Humans aren't discouraged from creating or exploring in Star Trek because of the computer, but I could imagine the Ferengi computer being hobbled at the kneecaps by requiring licensing and credit for every single idea inside it, and the user needs to insert a coin every time they want to ask it a question, which gets divided among every living Ferengi and the estates of every long-dead Ferengi whose writings influenced the output. We should not aspire to be like the Ferengi.
I think what people are taking issue with is that the machine is not accessible to everyone; OpenAI and Anthropic have monetary incentive to not only gatekeep the knowledge acquired, but also to destroy the original copies, or make them impossibly difficult to find.
You’re missing the bigger picture concepts of value exchange vs. value extraction and how those magnify power differentials in groups.
> I feel no more entitled to exclusive use or credit for my ideas as used by AI
Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?
> if I had talked to someone at a conference who went on to be influenced by my ideas to do something good after forgetting my name.
Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person. Do you decide to share every idea or thing you do for free with everyone? Why or why not?
> The prospect of all human ideas accumulating inside a machine that makes these ideas accessible
Right now, this idea of “a machine” is trending towards private ownership — an extractive process that does not incentivize further contribution.
Accessibility is no longer determined by you, you don’t have a decision point on the production side (deciding whether to share) nor the consumption side (guaranteeing access). We might even say your rights have been reduced.
It should be obvious to see how a healthy society is built upon value _exchange_ over _extraction_. Extraction typically leads to destruction… by definition.
> Do you feel you have the right to decide whether to exchange your ideas or not?
If I've said something around someone else or posted it online, then I don't feel I have a right to someone's use of that information, no.
> Yes, you’ve decided to share that information freely with that person.
And you decided to make this post on a forum that an AI is certainly scraping as we speak. If you don't want anyone or anything to "extract" your ideas then don't express them. We never would have left the caves if everyone had that mindset, but it's your right.
You keep saying "extraction" as if something is taken from you whenever a machine learns from you, but it's not a zero-sum situation.
Scenario A: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types. The world gains 1 point of value because Sam has gained 1 point of value.
Scenario B: Alex tells Sam that PHP 8 has added union types, and a robot overhears it and tells 10 people. The world has gained 11 points of value.
Eh, part of what made early-internet so good was exactly that it did allow copying by users; the DRM era was later. But it's a very good example of why not to allow for profit copying, because that absolutely will crowd out the original. Piracy has to exist at the margin. The zero piracy world would also eat its memories because none would leak into archives. Remember Qubi? It wasn't even popular enough for people to pirate.
Yes. Some communities are weirdly against giving credit or keeping the credit (e.g. cropping off signatures from artwork), which I've never understood. It costs nothing.
With the not-so-minor qualification that the biggest thieves have always gotten away scot-free. AI is just the international whole-internet version of this.
Amazing how they appear when money is involved. Let’s talk bout AI intellectual property theft on a scale never seen before in human history, or Uber operating illegally until they were able to coerce permission, or the open collusion of robber barons in the guilded age, or the opium wars.
Or slavery and the history of the new world. Let’s talk about that.
More specifically, winning often means being last. Case in point: Lycos, AltaVista, Yahoo!, Infoseek... then Google. Let others rush around doing your prototyping.
Only partly true. Look more carefully. Page and Brin devised their product as a response to other search engines—-which they couldn’t have done by rushing into search engines. For them, given their ages, their timing was probably happy accident. Still, why not imitate successful accident?
No revolution revolutionizes in the way planned or hyped. Instead, once triggered, it emerges mostly unplanned. It unfolds as the product of human action but not of human design.
Individuals will use LLMs as they see fit in their work. They'll make a lot of mistakes because they don't see their own work clearly and because they don't really understand the outcomes others care about. Executives who make their money with their mouths will, of course, endlessly open their mouths, even as they don't understand the tech because they never really use any tech beyond email, text, and phones. And so on.
Nobody knows how LLMs will ultimately shake out. But even five minutes of using Claude makes it hard to imagine all white-collar work will continue as in the past.
Quality of this study aside, and n of 1 here, my own state of mind, clarity of thought, and sleep are all noticeably better when I'm eating 2 or 3 eggs a day, 3 to 5 days a week. (I might go 7 days, but an independent value placed on dietary variety prevents that--perhaps foolishly when I notice what I'm eating on off days instead of the eggs.)
Regardless, this whole eggs-are-evil thing has probably done more to harm the health of Westerners than any other dietary advice, with the possible exception of the fat-is-evil nonsense.
Do you think the eggs are causing the better sleep, or are you more likely to have the energy to make eggs in the morning if you’d had a good night’s sleep?
It seems the eggs improve the sleep, because after poor sleep, eggs the following day seem to have an effect on breaking the poor-sleep doom loop (which is: poor sleep elevates cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate, junk-food cravings, and the need for caffeine--all of which contribute to another night of bad sleep). Not sure if it's the choline, which eggs have a lot of, or the egg-generated satiety that helps prevent eating too much. I think it may be the choline because when I'm otherwise eating high-choline foods such as red meat, my sleep is also better.
Given that a great number of Westerns are overweight, it's probably appropriate for them to act as though "fat is evil" due to calorie density. Plus: saturated fat should be avoided; this is another thing Westerners are likely to be getting too much of.
Except that three saturated-fat-laden strips of bacon for breakfast prevents the need for lunch, leaving my daily caloric intake lower than if I had eaten a bagel for breakfast and been hungry at lunch. The longer period between meals--snack-free--afforded by the bacon also means that post-meal insulin (the energy-storing hormone) has a chance to drop off, leaving glucagon (the energy-burning hormone) a path for liberating stored energy to power physical and mental activity.
I stopped the mid-morning bacon a few years ago and have put on 15 pounds since. A lot of variables, blah, blah, blah. I know. But still. No bacon, fewer eggs, and 15 pounds heavier, despite 10 - 20 more miles per week of running. Just sayin'.
Sugar ( in all its names and molecular forms ) is evil, because of the vast amount it is in processed food products. Eggs and fat not so much. But they would be if that is the next ‘cheap molecule to make processed food cheap’.
The monks likely have the time to think about implementation, and feeling like they’re part of an institution that transcends them and that they value for its own sake, they likely have an incentive to invest effort into maintaining and improving it.
Both of these are unlike, say, corporate environments, where the core work uses up almost all available time and where most people are looking mostly to extract something from the organization.
Your comment (and some others) have me imagining an alternate reality where the vatican runs the equivalent of github and all major FOSS infrastructure is maintained by religious orders. (There's probably a controversy where the catholic and islamic GPL equivalent licenses are incompatible for inane reasons.)
You joke, but, leaving religion out of it, it's plausible that if the want long lived infrastructure that's maintained with integrity, it may be that tithing of some description is part of the solution. Currently the closest we have is patron, but most of those are still part of hustle culture rather than the supporters feeling a long term obligation.
I know that there’s a pretty overwhelming antithesis about religion, hereabouts (there’s a lot of valid reasons, but, in my experience, it tends to originate from personal animus), but some things that you get from organized religion, are a sense of community, a very long view, and fairly strict rules about personal integrity and behavior.
There’s a lot less of the cutthroat competition, than you’ll see in industry and academia, and many folks plant trees that they will never use for shade.
Personally, I’m not religious, but have many close friends that are, and I see this mindset in action.
I also worked for an old-fashioned Japanese company, which had many of the same features.
Even though many people see these as conservative (or weak) traits, they actually work well, for development of new things.
Big things take time, and teams.
Time is supplied by people taking the long view, and making long-term plans, and teams benefit from people not stabbing each other in the back, sublimating personal goals, in favor of those of the collective, and trusting each other, and their management.
I don't want to get into an argument about religion, so I will make a different point.
There are two ways to evaluate things. One is selection: look at the options available, decide which is best, and go all in on that one. The other is to understand things as deeply as possible, what the moving parts are,what makes them tick, what the unknown possibilities might be, etc.
We as individuals have to use selection a lot of the time. You can't do only the good parts of two jobs, or marry only the good parts of two spouses. But it's also profoundly negative to be obliged to only think in those terms: for example, when citizens are told that they have no choice other than to vote for the lesser evil, it lets politicians off the hook for only being slightly less corrupt, and reduces citizens to a passive role. Ironically, those who try to shut political discussion out of HN are doing the same thing: saying "just choose, do not think".
So, while I might be interested in instances where religious people have a longer term approach, it's not interesting to me as a "plus for religion". It's interesting if it leads to understanding and new ideas. Of course, as a non-believer I would like to separate any benefits from the need to be loyal to unprovable assertions. But that's actually secondary.
I think the question becomes "how does this behavior get rewarded?".
I agree with most of this, and also have experienced the positive outcomes of people thinking ahead and sublimating short term reward for long term gain (for the collective).
However it seems antithetical to put a reward function on it so there is this catch-22 about what makes the thing "good" also makes it difficult to achieve.
Wealth, honour/fame/glory, power, pleasure are not bad in themselves, but generally can be considered as means to an end of and not really ends in themselves:
That also sound a lot like the Amish. Take the time to think about implementation, advantages, disadvantages and the societal impact of a technology, before committing to it.
They have a reputation as medieval peasants, but they are not afraid of technology. They are just extremely picky. They build furniture in factories and sell them on a website. If you want durable, it is well worth the extra price.
It's not everyone, but thoughtful managers do think beyond themselves.
They know they will outlast some of their reports, so they're incentivized to build memory and maintainability at the levels below them.
And good managers get promoted, i.e. leave the team but stay in the company, so there's a reputational incentive to leave things in a good place for whoever comes after you. (Though this is only true at good orgs -- at bad orgs, the next person will get fully blamed for a bad handoff).
The best leaders have values that transcend their bank account, and understand their legacy depends on being able to transition effectively.
Your career and relationships transcend any single gig, and there is a dignity that people recognize in departing well, and even in making the best of a bad job. Campground rule, leave things better than you found them.
The rule of law isn’t based on the state’s monopoly on violence. Its entire purpose is to protect citizens from state violence by subordinating it to law adjudicated in courts.
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