Comment by venndeezl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by venndeezl | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In my opinion information wants to be free. It's wild to me seeing the tech world veer into hyper-capitalism and IP protectionism. Complete 180 from the 00s.

IMO copyright laws should be rewritten to bring copyright inline with the rest of the economy.

Plumbers are not claiming use fees from the pipes they installed a decade ago. Doctor isn't getting paid by a 70 year old for saving the 70 year old when they were in a car accident at age 50.

Why should intellectual property authors be given extreme ownership over behavior then?

In the Constitution Congress is allowed to protect with copyright "for a limited time".

The status quo of life of author + 99 years means works can be copyrighted for many peoples entire lives. In effect unlimited protection.

Why is society on the hook to preserve a political norm that materially benefits so few?

Because the screen tells us the end is nigh! and giant foot will crush us! if we move on from old America. Sad and pathetic acquiescence to propaganda.

My fellow Americans; must we be such unserious people all the time?

This hypernormalized finance engineered, "I am my job! We make line go up here!" culture is a joke.

Excuse me, but even if in principle of “information wants to be free”, the actual outcome of LLMs is the opposite of democratizing information and access. It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations.

It is completely against the spirit of information wants to be free. Using that catch phrase in protection of mega corps is a travesty.

LLMs are just a concept, an abstraction. A data type for storing data.

The actual problem is political. Has nothing to do with LLMs.

Those are meaningless words when you know the discussion is about LLMs taking in people's intellectual property and selling it back.

Nah that's still a political resource allocation problem

Don't let politics allocate resources to massive data center projects

> LLMs are just a concept, an abstraction. A data type for storing data.

C'mon. You know good and well that what is being discussed is the _use_ of LLMs, with the concomitant heavy usage of CPU, storage, and bandwidth that the average user has no hope of matching.

> You know good and well that what is being discussed is the _use_ of LLMs

Not the person you're replying to, but I've found that some people do argue against LLMs themselves (as in, the tech, not just the usage). Specially in humanities/arts cycles which seem to have a stronger feeling of panic towards LLMs.

Clarifying which one you're talking about can save a lot of typing/talking some times.

> I've found that some people do argue against LLMs themselves (as in, the tech, not just the usage). Specially in humanities/arts cycles which seem to have a stronger feeling of panic towards LLMs.

Maybe?

The person I responded to said "LLMs are just a concept, an abstraction."

Were that true, were they simply words in some dusty CS textbook, it's hardly likely that the humanities/arts people you describe would even know about them.

No, it's the fact that these people have seen regurgitated pictures and words that makes it an issue.

Nah it's the use of massive amounts of resources to run data centers.

A political problem.

If LLMs weren't sucking up all the resources, bitcoin would be.

Which, yes, is partly a resource/political problem, but there are additional arguments against the use of those resources for LLMs.

> It completely centralizes accesses, censorship, and profits in the hands of a few mega corporations.

Have the biggest models be legally forced to be released in the open for end users, then. Best of both worlds.

Wait a few years, and you'll even be able to run those models in commodity hardware.

Enshittification in order to give returns to shareholders suck. The tech is great and empowering for the commons.

> In my opinion information wants to be free.

But I still need to pay rent.

Well like a plumber then you should string together one paid job after another. Not do a job once and collect forever.

Rent is a political problem.

Perhaps invest in the courage to confront some droopy faced Boomers in Congress.

The thing is, someone will collect rent from IP anyways. LLMs shift rent collecting from decentralized individuals to a handful of big tech companies.

> someone will collect rent from IP anyways

We should work on fixing that, then.

I agree with your point about big tech companies salivating at opportunities to collect rent. IP is part of the problem.

Yeah they will. Because Muricans are too busy belaboring the obvious on social media rather than tackling the obvious political problems.

> In my opinion information wants to be free.

Information has zero desires.

> It's wild to me seeing the tech world veer into hyper-capitalism and IP protectionism.

Really? Where have you been the last 50 years?

> Plumbers are not claiming use fees from the pipes they installed a decade ago.

Plumbers also don't discount the job on the hopes they can sell more, or just go around installing random pipes in random locations hoping they can convince someone to pay them.

> Why should intellectual property authors be given extreme ownership over behavior then?

The position that cultural artifacts should enter into the commons sooner rather than later is not unreasonable by any means, but most software is not cultural, requires heavy maintenance for the duration of its life, and still is well past obsolescence, gone and forgotten, well before the time frame you are discussing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com