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Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

This smells a lot like the misguided crypto export laws in the 90s that hampered browser security for years.

And don't forget the amazing workaround Zimmerman of PGP fame came up with - the source code in printed form was protected 1A speech, so it was published, distributed, and then scanned and OCR'd outside the US - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy#Criminal_i...

And don’t forget Thawte which ended up selling strong SSL outside the US, cornering the international market thanks to US restrictions, and getting bought by Verisign for $600M.

I hope this time we finally get a Supreme Court ruling that export controls on code are unconstitutional, instead of the feds chickening out like last time

I doubt that would work for model weights because they are generated algorithmically rather than being written by humans, which probably means that they are not speech.

Not to mention how much paper it would take to print 500B weights

I for one would love to see model weights published in hardcover book form.

What a throwback to the time when some edgy folks would share printed codes in Pascal… I even remember seeing a hard copy of a binary in hex which was best not to execute.

It might be somewhat prohibitive to print the model weights for any sufficiently large model, though.

Using 2d barcodes you can fit ~20MB per page. Front and back you could probably fit a model that violated the rule on less than a thousand pages.

Edit: maybe 10k pages

Skip the barcodes - just cast it to 24bit RGB data, add in some error correction, and print as a high-DPI bitmap (or a series of them, one per page).

Printers that can keep all the color channels lined up all the way down to their tightest dot pitch are few and far between. That is why piql used black and white for the boxing code they used to print out all of github. I'm not sure why greyscale wasn't used.

> Printers that can keep all the color channels lined up all the way down to their tightest dot pitch are few and far between.

It only takes one for a PoC. It only takes few to establish a service. Spatial and color accuracy is going to be a challenge, but I imagine there already exist methods to correct for that - e.g. printing reference patterns along with the data, so the scanner/digitizer can calibrate to it on the fly.

I’m doubtful that barcodes would qualify as free speech.

how about printing URL to download the weights file?

It hampered the security of a lot of things. That wasn't misguided -- that was the point.

China, Russia, and Iran used Internet Explorer too.

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