Hacker News Reader

Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

> I'm always reticent to fully engage in "The Dialogue," regardless of its momentary configuration. It's a smoothie made from shibboleths; you have to be able to detect them at only a few parts per million because once these things metastasize, they stop being about whatever they were about and instead become increasingly loud recitations of various catechisms and loyalty oaths.

Boy does that ring true.

View on HN

Side comment: I respect the author’s right to choose words that ring well to them, but jeez, as a non native english speaker, reading this, i am happy my device has a dictionary function.

As a native English speaker, I agree!

That's Jerry's "thing." Jerry Holkins has always enjoyed how weird English is and what you can do to someone's brain with a few precisely-chosen words aligned in the right order; it's his writing style.

If he applied his approach to Python coding, he'd be one of those folks who isn't happy until their entire program is a single `do()` method that executes by using decorators to synthesize classes and metaclasses out of thin air, that themselves generate the Python code as strings, that itself gets `eval()`'d to execute the intended program.

Which is all fun and game until you want to get some actual shit done, or in this case, communicate...

They're into their second half century doing this. Would they have made it this far without being a little weird? Maybe, but it's hard to A/B something like that. I understand it well enough after following the comic that long.

It's not for you.

(this is a reference to an ancient Penny Arcade bit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...)

> It's not for you.

> (this is a reference to an ancient Penny Arcade bit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/24/the-adventures...)

Thank you for posting this. I remember it, had forgotten it, and re-reading it after completely forgetting about it is almost as good as reading it for the first time. It still holds up 20 years later!

I think the point is that this is an artistic choice. I consider that paragraph to be halfway between poetry and prose. It's not the style of writing that you would want for most forms of communication, but if you think of it as being akin to a bit of poetry, then perhaps you will find it more acceptable.

I for one really appreciate seeing language being used so artistically. (Though if I was reading a technical spec, product description, legal contract, etc... absolutely not.)

I'm not a native speaker and I enjoy his writing and have no problems understanding it. In this specific case it helps to be a bit of a nerd about religions/mythology though :P

Yes, the entire post (it's short) is well worth a read.

And from the following day, their paraphrasing of https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/4/23946353/generative-ai-co... is succinct:

> Meta: We stole so much stuff that, actually, we didn't steal any stuff

> Google: If things were different, things would be totally different

> Andreeson Horowitz: But we already spent so much money

> Microsoft: Think about how this would hurt the little guys, like us

> Anthropic: Fucking shut up about it

> Hugging Face: It's super legal but honestly it might not be idk

> StabilityAI: It's legal in places that aren't here

This is a little oblique, but isn't there a parallel to the music piracy debates of the 90s here? The defense of those who steal training data, "It's not stealing because I'm only taking a little tiny piece from a whole bunch of people", seems like a neat inversion of the defense offered by people torrenting mp3s in their dorm rooms.

It's worth noting that, back when it suddenly became technically feasible to copy all songs for free, the response from the rightsholders of music was, essentially, to demand that we all collectively pretend it isn't. It might make sense for the rightsholders of training data to try to do the same, if they could speak with one voice and if they had lobbyists, but I guess the fact that they can't and don't settles that.

I like a good metaphor, so I see your point, though it doesn't quite fit for me.

To me, training a model is less like redistribution and more like reading something and having it influence your thoughts. You may be able to reproduce certain memorable sections of things you've read verbatim (common with poetry, for example) and you may well be able to reproduce a 'style', but you don't have the entirety of the source material memorized in a way that it could be redistributed in full (but if you did, that may be well an infringement at such a time).

I agree that copying music is not all that similar to an AI model using training data, but they're both examples of a superficially similar activity being transformed by automation and scale. The difference between manually copying a song on cassette for a friend and uploading that song to napster resembles the difference between a human learning to draw in an established artist's style to an AI model learning to draw in an established artist's style. In both cases, the offender's defense is a variation on, "It was okay when humans did this slowly..."

but if you call it virtue signaling, you get categorized into the group that uses that loyalty oath most often, instead of the non-group member that is simply frustrated by the accuracy of it occurring

well yeah, because you'd have to be virtuous to be able to virtue signal, and the ones who bring that up generally aren't.

It's the implication of virtue signalling that it's a facade?

If Steve the megarapist is writing articles about the latest popular injustice, does that make Steve virtuous?

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so they say.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com