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Comment by evdubs | Hacker News Reader

When you download a couple epubs from a torrent site, you're an evil pirate stealing books. When you're a FAANG-affiliated AI company and you download all the ebooks and charge for the derivative works your algorithm produces, you're a visionary changing the future.

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Reminds me of the quote: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic"

And isn't that attributed to Stalin, or something.

Misattributed. It was actually Kurt Tucholsky who was himself quoting an unnamed French Diplomat.

"Der Tod eines Menschen: das ist eine Katastrophe. Hunderttausend Tote: das ist eine Statistik!"

It's supposed to be read ironically,,,,,,, right?

Similarly:

If you owe the bank $10,000, it's your problem. If you owe the bank $100m dollars, it's the bank's problem.

Yeah, this is just capitalism in action. Almost every startup has stories like this, which appears to be why YC's startup school shies away from "goody two-shoes" type people and has questions like "please tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system".

For example, in the early days Amazon famously "leveraged" the purchase of out of print books from their wholesalers to obtain orders that would otherwise be too small to ship.

That's just how capitalism works. You have to be either too small to bother with or too big to fail -- the problem area is in the middle.

I hate that YC question. A "good" answer to that is almost always something that's borderline illegal or otherwise ethically bad.

It's almost as if unethical behaviour is incentivized under capitalism...

I automated applying for apartments in my city's public housing program as they regularly get hundreds of applications within a few minutes and automatically take down the ads again, often before their email notifications even arrive. That way I at least got invited to some viewings without having to check it every few minutes throughout the day, as many people I know have been doing for months. I don't see how that can be considered ethically bad. This is in Berlin.

I wouldn't consider this "hacking a non-computer system" though. Or maybe I just misunderstand the question.

I'm old enough that to me, "hack" doesn't imply anything nefarious. But I'd hope that people who answer this question with something unethical would be excluded from the program.

I don't mean hack as in "hack a system and leak the passwords". But "hack" here implies that you somehow skirted around the rules or did something that you're not supposed to do. You've exploited something to your own advantage. Often times (not always!), many people would consider this unethical behavior.

For example, there's this widely told story about how Airbnb in the beginning exploited Craig's List to list their properties. This is not illegal, it's not that they hacked into Craig's List, but it's for sure not ok. It's ok to break the rules as long you are not caught. Imagine if everybody would start doing that. Therefore, I'm also not surprised that they don't give two shits about city regulations and so on.

> I don't mean hack as in "hack a system and leak the passwords". But "hack" here implies that you somehow skirted around the rules or did something that you're not supposed to do

Right, that's what "hack" doesn't imply to me. I mean, this is "Hacker News", but it is not about nefarious activities. That said, I do understand that's what it implies to the younger generations.

> It's ok to break the rules as long you are not caught.

This is an attitude that seems to be common in SV, and I'm disappointed if YC doesn't reject applicants who demonstrate it.

How would the issue of intellectual property rights to published books be resolved in an alternative, non-capitalist system?

In socialism, as far as I can tell, anyone would totally be able to ingest all these books, as there would be no concept of intellectual property rights. Thus, what you complain about with respect to capitalism, would be a totally normal and acceptable thing to do in socialism.

Do you have some other, alternative system in mind, which would not allow a wholesale exploitation of private intellectual property?

Reminds me of the failure (?) of the Google Books project :

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-ever-happen...

Yeah but what's the alternative?

Not doing it? No one forces you to train ML models on random data and no one forces you to commercialize those models. If that severely limits progress then too bad - lobby for copyright reform for everyone instead of just ignoring the rules you expect others to follow.

Other countries will do it. You're free to kneecap AI development in your country if you wish.

But do you think that China and Russia are going to do the same?

"I have to be bad because if I'm not, someone else will be" is not a valid justification for anything.

The solution should take after Russia, China and Israel: use [the internet, AI, etc.] to violate international laws, not domestic ones.

The western world keeps getting crippled by ransomware attacks and other malware because nobody can practice the dark arts domestically without risking serious jail time. The only people who can advance these skills enough to know how to defend against it (or return fire!) are either CIA, Israeli contractors, criminals, or foreigners abroad. An American will go to jail for hacking a Russian bank, but no Russian goes to jail for hacking an American bank.

Train AI on foreign content only. Understand their culture better than they do. Then learn how to subvert it. It's what they've been doing to us.

Yeah, some malware doesn't even run if the computer's regional and language settings are set to Russian.

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