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Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

The war on general computing has been ongoing but not made enough inroads to stop people from owning general computing devices (yet)

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Indeed, the death knell could be tolling not for regulation of ai but for general purposes computers. In AI we have four horsemen: copyright infringement, illegal pornography, fake news generation, and democratization of capabilities that large companies would rather monetize.

Given the proliferation of illegal downloads (I can get a bad cam rip of the Barbie movie on release weekend just fine, plus a VPN would protect me from DCMA takedowns), and illegal pornography (just ask a torrent tracker for the fappening), and the proliferation of fake news (esp on eg, Facebook) despite a lack of it needing to be ML model generated, and companies and OSS in the space doing the democratizing and releasing complete model weights, and not just lone individuals trying to do the work in isolation, (aka stability.ai), are they really four horsemen, or four kids on miniature ponys?

I try to bring up as often as possible in conversation that nearly all the progress we're seeing in terms of usability and performance is precisely because of the open source support for these models.

Especially because these tools are so popular outside of the developer community, I think it's worth really beating into peoples minds that without open source AI would be in a much worse place overall.

This is more than a little melodramatic.

https://frame.work/ and the https://mntre.com/ MNT Reform: Exist

If my country decides to ban the ownership of general purpose computers for individual persons, they would order the customs service to stop import of any computer hardware that enabled general purpose computing. Now I would not be able to have any computer shipped to me from outside my country, so I could no longer buy from either of those vendors you linked.

Furthermore, it also would mean that I would not be able to bring any personal computers with me when I travel to other countries. I like to travel, and I like to bring my computers when I do.

Next, it would also be dangerous to try to buy computers locally within the borders of the country. The seller might be an informant of the police, or even a LEO doing a sting operation.

And then next you have to worry about the computers you already have. If you decide to keep the computers that you had since before, after it is made illegal to own them, you will have problems even if you keep them hidden and only use them at home. Other people know about your computers. Some of those people will definitely tip off the authorities about the fact that you are known to have computers.

Let’s hope it never goes as far like this :(

This is a slippery slope to the extreme.

What country outside of North Korea has banned the ownership of general purpose computers, or even considered/tried to?

Banning the import of personal computers would be absolutely disastrous for any possible economy anywhere.

People would take the CPUs out of other devices and use them. A consumer grade router has most of the hardware you need to make a general purpose computer.

That is virtually impossible because Turing-complete systems are everywhere

Can you explain that context a little bit of Turing complete?

You can’t regulate the ownership of computing devices.

It’s too generic. There are too many of them.

They could ban and phase out systems with unsecure bootloaders. That would go a long way. Many vendors have already locked down their boot process.

Just like how making weed illegal is virtually impossible because anybody can grow marijuana in their backyard.

How many regular people would risk owning turning-complete devices that can run unauthorized software if it would net you jail time if caught? Lots of countries are already itching towards banning VPN, corpo needs be damned.

Especially now that the iPhone has shown having a device that can only run approved legal software covers a lot of people's everyday needs.

I'm more referring to the fact that stuff like PowerPoint and Minecraft and who knows what are Turing-complete, albeit with awful performance.

Theoretically, you can have a totally owned device managed by Big Brother, yet generate AI smut with a general purpose CPU built in PowerPoint.

How do you possibly regulate that?

> How do you possibly regulate that?

The government could send an order to the software developer to patch out that turning completeness, and ban the software if it's not complied.

I get what you mean, it's never possible to 100% limit things. But if you limit things 98% so that the general public does not have access that's more than enough for authoritarian purposes.

I wonder if there's an analogy to be made here to DRM. In theory, yes, DRM shouldn't be possible, but in practice, manufacturers have been able to hobble hardware acceleration behind trusted computing model. Often, they do a poor job and it gets cracked (as with HDCP [1], and UWP [2]).

The question in my head is whether the failures in their approaches are due to a flaw in the implementation (in which case it's practically possible to do what they're trying to do although they haven't figured out a way to do it), or whether it's fundamentally impossible. With DRM and content, there's always the analog hole, and if you have physical control over the device, there's always a way to crack the software and the hardware if need be. My questions are whether:

a) this is a workable analogy (I think it's imperfect because Gen AI and DRM are kinda different beasts)

b) even if it was, is there real way to limit Gen AI at a hardware level (I think that's also hard because as long as you can do hardware accelerated matmul it's basically opening up the equivalent of the analog hole towards semi-turing completeness which is also hardware accelerated)

I imagine someone has thought through this more deeply than me and would be curious what they think.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content...

[2] https://techaeris.com/2018/02/18/microsoft-uwp-protection-cr...

Yeah I think it's fair to assume DRM will be a never-ending cat and mouse between developers and end-users.

Netflix for example can implement any DRM tech they want -- ultimately they're putting a picture on my screen, and it's impossible to stop me from extracting it.

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