skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The OP made the ridiculous absolute statement that NOBODY can afford a home unless they’re a rich person who also moves every 5 years.

That’s simply not true. Thousands of people buy homes suburban DC every year. And not all of the white collar buyers plan to move in 5 years.
I've seen that video. Are you honestly going to tell me that there aren't similar pinch points on nearly every other vehicle on the road?
I can see this being useful for custom linters.
Spotify has been missing almost every hip hop b-side I've ever looked for. Like, the eps and lps that got these artists careers started aren't there. I had no idea how many b-sides some of them have until I started looking them up on soundcloud etc too.
Not if Gabe has a word to say about it.
“Well it was great meeting you, going to try and chat with some other folks now!”
I love that way of embedding precedence tables without the "classic" repetitive EBNF pattern.
I will shamelessly steal this for my next parser library. Also, your documentation is outstanding.

(tiny typo - "Pratt" is spelled "Prett" in one sentence on your page)
I pay through the apps. I have a password manager. There were a couple transactions that took me a couple seconds to recall. I’m single, but this whole thread is about _personal_ responsibility. I would trust my spouse to also keep up with her expenses. I also wouldn’t give my kids credit cards. Cash works fine when it’s needed, that’s what my parents did and I was just fine.

I never put any sort of subscription on ACH. All subscriptions go onto credit cards. There were gradually increasing amounts from Netflix, which I got emails about, which I cancelled once I got the emails telling me the price was increasing once again. I waited 6 months because I already had an idea of what I was paying for, when I checked, it turned out there was nothing unexpected.
>My guess would be this is an overzealous AI-generated content detector.

Maybe not. If you go by the screenshot of the email from Amazon in the Mastodon link, the book was removed for violating "Community Guidelines" instead of the actual content of the book itself.

This is the "Community Guidelines" url in that email: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

So taking Amazon's reason at face value, it means Amazon thinks the author (or author's friends) manipulated the "community" ... i.e. such as creating fake reviews, 5 stars ratings, etc.

An example of tripping the Amazon "community guidelines" algorithm would be something like a suspicious # of reviews coming from different Amazon customers but they're all from the same ip address.

As an example of "inadvertently" setting off Amazon's community guidelines detector... if you're going to ask friends & family to leave positive reviews for your book, make sure they don't do it while they're all there at your house for Thanksgiving dinner.

In the email, the author offered to take down his reviews in hopes that Amazon would reverse its decision.
>Like Glaze, Nightshade is computed as a multi-objective optimization that minimizes visible changes to the original image.

It's still noticeably visible.
I happily pay for anything I can get DRM free.

Not interested in paying to rent access to something which requires giving shady companies like Netflix control over my graphics pipeline (which also prevents me from watching the thing I am renting on any device I want because, for example, my mediacentre PC is not blessed by the right big-corps to work with the intrusive DRM software).

If movie publishers had an easy and convenient way to donate, I would probably donate an appropriate amount every time I pirate some of their media to allow me to watch it on my TV.

You can argue "just buy the bluray and pirate it then" but I feel this just encourages these companies to continue relying on these intrusive DRM technologies.

I know my boycott is insignificant but it's a matter of principles more than anything else.
Ancient temple filled with gold and silver jewels discovered in Greece
"Cameras are a tool of captial to fuck over human portrait artists"

It's funny that these people use the langauge of communism, but apparently see artwork as purley an economic activity.
This will also roughly be true for Bandcamp (albeit for each commercially failed band there's at least 3 friends and a mom, who will buy something off of the store and at a show, once when given the chance but I hope no one is cynical enough to argue about that being a lot better than $0).

The fact that every creative endeavour or sport is a mix of a few pros and a lot of amateurs (in the sense that they do not make a living) is not an issue.

The value of Spotify and the like to most artists is enabling them to publish to everyone for basically free, no matter how fringe or bad, and to do it all the time. I think that's wonderful.
> Personally, I pay for content and services that I find value adding

While it would be a convenient reality, the people on HN are not even close to representative of the general population, and you can't generalize their tendencies. How many Kagi and Fastmail users are there compared to Google and Microsoft? Look at Google Play reviews for apps that front paid services: even for astonishingly cheap ones, a considerable percentage essentially say "not free: uninstalled! Those conniving bastards!"

And if you're willing to pay for services instead of using ad-supported platforms, you must pay all of your music and other content, then? You don't even have to stomach the DRM from Apple Music, Amazon, e-reader platforms, et al with music shops, book stores, movie theaters, Bandcamp, Patreon, Substack -- there are so many services through which you can exercise your principles and pay for content directly.

It's pretty common for the tech crowd to wag their finger at people who feel entitled to free commercial software and services (e.g. Kagi, Fastmail,) yet do the same exact thing with arts and entertainment. Getting access to content on ad-supported services isn't your right. There are alternatives.

I'm not saying you must uninstall your ad blocker-- there are many unavoidable and essential things-- e.g., things for work-- that contain ads even when they really shouldn't. But you can't just assume that since you pay for some stuff, then everybody else is paying for some stuff, and since the distributors are real jerks, you have ethical carte blanche to take people's work without any payment. Creators don't have a choice to use these systems because people won't pay (directly) for things.
Clashing Cosmic Numbers Challenge Our Best Theory of the Universe
No. His critique is one of process, not of output quality.

He is asserting the existence of an "unconscious human spirit", asserting that ChatGPT "is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination", and that we should fight against AI as we would fight against genocide: "just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world."

Incidentally, I agree with the importance of struggle and soul-work. I agree with the general valence of the lament, but come away with a very different call to action. In particular: I just don't think I have the right to impose luddism on the rest of the world for my particular niche while benefiting lavishly from the rest of the world's alienation form their much more essential labor.

To me, it's the ravings of an angry, arrogant, and entitled elitist who fears being dethroned from his comfortable luxury and refined status. And a hilariously hyperbolic one at that. Of all the actual evils I would write something like this about, AI Art probably isn't even in the top 1,000,000. Can you imagine looking at the world today and writing that last paragraph? My god.

---

Quotes:

> ChatGPT rejects any notions of creative struggle, that our endeavours animate and nurture our lives giving them depth and meaning. It rejects that there is a collective, essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence, connecting us all through our mutual striving.

> ChatGPT is fast-tracking the commodification of the human spirit by mechanising the imagination. It renders our participation in the act of creation as valueless and unnecessary. That ‘songwriter ‘you were talking to, Leon, who is using ChatGPT to write ‘his’ lyrics because it is ‘faster and easier ,’is participating in this erosion of the world’s soul and the spirit of humanity itself and, to put it politely, should fucking desist if he wants to continue calling himself a songwriter.

> This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.
source for OpenAI paying anyone a dime? don't you think that would set a precedent that everyone else deserves their cut?
This is all about who do you trust.

We are about to enter a world of zero secrets and zero privacy.
Everything we do is either tracked or inferred or easily guessable (hmm what does a forty something man think about each day)

And the issue is not how do I stop people finding out my stuff but since everyone will have access to my stuff how do we prevent that being exploited?
What I Learned as the U.S. Government's UFO Hunter
You should read the book Black: The History of a Color by Michel Pastoureau. He analyzes the history of symbolism using the color black in Europe.
this site really needs to prune its image-to-text generated crap.
If it were a derivative work[1] (and sufficiently transformational) then it's allowed under current copyright law and might not be the slam dunk ruling you were hoping for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
Why Aren't We Made of Antimatter?
> hurtful

Listen, the man publicly defended Epstein's system of coercion and claimed that his victims were "willing". If you seriously think it's the people pointing that out who are the ones lacking empathy and behaving "hurtfully", there's something very broken with your moral compass.
As a human artist I don't feel the same as you, and I somehow doubt that you care all that much about what we think anyways. You already made up your mind about the tech, so don't feel the need to protect us from "a tool of capital [sic]" to fortify your argument.
> I can't imagine a single worse strategy as a leader than to choose 'reduce pay' and 'imply laziness'

Don't forget he also employed the 'fire senior team members, hollow out teams' strategy
The technique is also described in the awesome book "Crafting Interpreters" by Robert Nystrom.
Taking revenue from all artists you like because you dislike one artist is madness.
I think of that every time someone proclaims that some time bomb like that will force the Congress to make a deal. That’s the instinct of a bygone era and I no longer feel safe counting on it.
Also interesting that English is one of their official languages, the other being Maltese, making Ireland and Malta the only EU countries with that status now. There's a big scene of English schools and young Europeans going there to learn English in summer, which translates to a lot of partying.

I definitely recommend visiting if you get a chance. It packs so much in for a small country.
> nor uses Electron

> Flutter

…
Better title - mixed case text takes up more space when compressed.
It's an arms race the bigger players will win, and it undermines the quality of the images. But it feels natural that artists would want to do something since they don't feel like anyone else is protecting them right now.
their useless AI has to be trained on something
Marginally, yeah, since you're not supporting the development of more capable labor-saving devices in this category.

I'm still not a fan, though.
Hang out and see what you see.

Good luck.
AI improves faster than economies adapt. A singularity?

Present LLMs are glorified search. As they approach real-time training, Google will go away, finally disrupted. (Google's 20% time was meant to avoid this very thing, but you need a whole organization behind an idea to disrupt, however small: e.g. IBM's PC developed in startup-like separate business unit.)
Remember when the music industry tried to use technology to stop music pirating?

This will work about as well...

Oh, I forget, fighting music pirating was considered an evil thing to do on HN. "pirating is not stealing, is copyright infringement", right? Unlike training neural nets on internet content which of course is "stealing".
Great guide, this about sums it up.
I've thought a lot about exactly these limits to AI. The reliability problem will be solved sooner or later. Same for tacit skills that somebody trains into AI (manage people, do laundry). But if your job is specifically about being human ("nostalgic jobs", judge, athlete, surrogate mother...), or some niche tightly guarded ability (how to breed some special spice, how many oil barrels ship thru Suez Channel), you are safe - until some unforseeable rearrangement of the economy, at least.
> Your question sounds confused.

Yeah maybe. I am basically tried of the social media algo now and don't want to stick it with anymore.

> my creations speak for themselves.

I disagree. I've had multiple creations, but the one that worked was the one I marketed it.
I guess basic human decency and respecting the privacy of your customers is too much to expect from Tesla. Elon will make for a fascinating case study for business schools someday, building a spectacular brand and burning it all down.
That makes sense but why should employees have easy access to it?
Why is that reassuring? You can also grow monkshood in the backyard.
> Is it art? I don't know. I don't care. I was not able, now I am able, and the people who are able complain.

> Screw 'em. This is what tools are for. The strong should not tell the weak they cannot use props.

Really? This famously maligned group of people, who have endured a lifetime of jokes about their useless art school degrees and student loans they'll never repay, we're now calling "the strong"?

Artists aren't upset because a few developers made a machine that can generate pictures. They're upset because the machine couldn't have existed without their work, which they did not consent to being used, and it's now on the way to destroying their livelihoods all across the globe.

Can't you see the tragedy in their story?
I'm a spring chicken too here
Yeah, I've seen multiple artists complain about how glazing reduces image quality. It's very noticeable. That seems like an unavoidable problem given how AI is trained on images right now.
How's writing articles tedious in the era of large language models? I'm not a SEO expert, far from it, but for my understanding you can just rewrite any article out there by having an AI focusing on specific keywords. Rinse and repeat.
OT, but an old joke:

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are now flying over Secausus. If you wish to flush, please do so now."
I like the idea that iteration is faster, for people learning to manage AI vs people.
Google scrapes copyrighted material every day and then presents that material to users in the form of excerpts, images, and entire book pages. This has been ruled OK by the courts. Scraping copyrighted information is not illegal or we couldn't have search engines.
Definitely skeptical at first but I can attest that I've had some interesting conversations already. Have to say I prefer this over to text chats by a mile. Very fun start to my morning
It's roughly in the same spot as reliably detecting if you have permission to use the image for your data training set in the first place.

If it doesn't matter, then neither does the poisoning matter.
If cozying up to content makers is their revenue path moving forward, then it seems it's only a matter of time before they succumb to studio pressure and start deprecating/removing self-hosting features.

What a crappy way to treat the customer base who has helped fund your growth thus far.

The only thing worse than abandoning your self-hosting customers would be to turn snitch on those customer.
He's not insisting that people already familiar with functional programming concepts not use the terminology they have historically used, he's using concrete metaphors as a teaching strategy.
"sufficiently transformational" is carrying a lot of water here. At minimum it would cloud the issue and might expose anyone using AI to lawsuits where they'd potentially have to defend each generated image.
TSMC only does fabrication, no chip design. Pretty much everyone making high-performance parts other than Intel sends uses them, AMD included. This is typically known as the “foundry” business. They are the biggest pure foundry by far, and all of their competition has some downside (Intel and Samsung aren’t pure foundries, you have to compete with their in-house demand, Global Foundries is behind and isn’t competing for the smallest nodes anymore, and SMIC is a state-owned Chinese company and, among the other concerns that brings up, they can’t get access to the latest photolithography machines for geopolitical reasons).

Speaking of politics TSMC, is in a unique geopolitical position. Their government sees being the chip foundry for the whole world as an existential issue. China would like to take over Taiwan for historical reasons, and they can’t possibly build a large enough army to defend themselves against a really motivated full-strength attack. So instead they have put themselves in a position where any attack would be incredibly disruptive to the global economy and anger everybody.

The silicon industry is famous for very long roadmaps, very long investment payback times, cyclic demand, and winner-take-all competition. It is brutal. TSMC, serving everyone and with a friendly government at their back, is in a good position to out-endure everyone.

That’s the business part. The science and engineering is over my head, and I think sort of hard to talk about. Each node is a new engineering marvel basically.
This seems to introduce levels of artifacts that many artists would find unacceptable: https://twitter.com/sini4ka111/status/1748378223291912567

The rumblings I'm hearing are that this a) barely works with last-gen training processes b) does not work at all with more modern training processes (GPT-4V, LLaVA, even BLIP2 labelling [1]) and c) would not be especially challenging to mitigate against even should it become more effective and popular. The Authors' previous work, Glaze, also does not seem to be very effective despite dramatic proclamations to the contrary, so I think this might be a case of overhyping an academically interesting but real-world-impractical result.

[1]: Courtesy of /u/b3sn0w on Reddit: https://imgur.com/cI7RLAq https://imgur.com/eqe3Dyn https://imgur.com/1BMASL4
We need temporary relief, immediately. But long term, how about we shrink the size of the federal government? Then we don’t have to flog small businesses to death to feed the massively inefficient and wasteful machine!?
What does it mean to "work"? Some stars on Github? Millions in revenue?
The newer laptop is half the wattage of an older laptop, and therefore half the CO2 output. That’s the error in your calculation.
"Sorry, this is not art, is AI generated trash."
You can use older images, collected from before the "poisoning" software was released. Then you don't have to.

This, of course, assumes that "poisoning" actually works. Glaze and Nightshade and similar are very much akin to the various documented attacks on facial recognition systems. The attack does not exploit some fundamental flaw in how the systems work, but specific characteristics in a given implementation and version.

This matters because it means that later versions and models will inevitably not have the same vulnerabilities. The result is that any given defensive transformation should be expected to be only narrowly effective.
Belgium and the Netherlands without any doubt
What happens if it gets hot water, but expects cold? Seems like if it's not too hot to melt plastic parts, it would be ok?
Google is not presently selling "we trained an AI on people's art without permission, and you can type their name in along with a prompt to generate a knockoff of their art, and we charge you money for this". So it's not really a 1:1 comparison, since there are companies selling the thing I described right now.
The problem is that I have to pay for another thing just to watch the thing I was already paying for.

Piracy almost always is caused by a lack of convenience, namely:

"I get the service, have a (sometimes very) limited selection of stuff, and have to pay for it, and if I want that other thing I have to pay for another entirely different service"

or

"I get anything I want with a little hassle, but for free"
Amazing site :))
The F-16 at 50: Why it's still in demand
Why do people have to be so creepy?
I haven't been able to use my OpenVPN server since August 2023. All connections are reset. Surprised someone could still use it. Perhaps it was rolled out on a per-ISP basis.
Typing class on Underwood mechanicals.

Then another on Selectrics.

Both with an audio tape audioing "F F F Space."

Good luck.
Doesn't seem to use the full unicode set either.
My issue with this line of argument is that it’s anthropomorphizing machines. It’s fine to compare how humans do a task with how a machine does a task, but in the end they are very different from each other, organic vs hardware and software logic.

First, you need to prove that generative AI works fundamentally the same way as humans at the task of learning. Next you have to prove that it recalls information in the same way as humans. I don’t think anyone would say these are things that we can prove, let alone believe they do. So what we get is comments like they are similar.

What this means, is these systems will fall into different categories of law around copyright and free-use. What’s clear is that there are people who believe that they are harmed by the use of their work in training these systems and it reproducing that work in some manner later on (the degree to which that single work or the corpus of their work influences that final product is an interesting question). If your terms of use/copyright/license says “you may not train on this data”, then should that be protected in law? If a system like nightshade can effectively influence a training model enough to make it clear that something protected was used in its training, is that enough proof that the legal protections were broken?
Both versions find their origins in Latin: exprimere. Both have the same meaning. More importantly, the purpose of language is communicate. If the sender and recipient achieve mutual understanding then language has been used effectively.

Spelling and grammar are meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive.
What counts as "niche knowledge"? Less than 5% of the workforce knowing it? 3%?

Software engineers collectively are 2.54% of the total USA workforce; the only time I've used YACC was at university, and given what it does I have to assume that (despite the large number of languages out there) YACC knowledge is relatively niche… and it's something ChatGPT "knows".

It might not be reliable enough (yay, I still get to be paid for my existing skills!), but I think it absolutely does have niche knowledge.
But all lowercase gets annoying as well; at least CSS can be used to kind of straighten it?
I don’t understand why political leaders don’t look to LKY for insight the way business leaders look to Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. Singapore is the closest thing to a deliberate, systematic experiment in developing a third world country into a first world country.
Isn't high-quality open image generation almost entirely dependent on Stability releasing their foundational models for free, at great expense to them?

That's not something you'll be able to rely on long-term, there won't always be a firehose of venture capital money to subsidise that kind of charity.