7,550 karma · joined October 22, 2011
I love people, including you.
I play original bluegrass and traditional music - sometimes along with tech talks and live coding - at technology conferences.
My professional focus (and thus, the lyrical and other content I create) is mostly on cryptography, distributed systems, wikis and anarchic collaboration, home automation and off-grid life, gaming, homeschooling, and free range parenting.
I contribute to several open source projects.
On a hobby-but-with-some-rigor level, I sometimes study urban planning, epidemiology, quantum mechanics (and/or ways in which QFT may be the wrong way to explain the standard model), aviation / ATC, neurochemistry, amateur radio, culinary arts, and hymnology. I also enjoy learning new instruments (currently working on mandolin).
Some of you have hung out on my school bus - I love having guests. :-)
My basic belief: Peace and justice in the world are not only conceptually attainable, but inevitable by dint of the evolution of the internet. I pray for compassion and understanding in these transitional times.
My new record, Vowel Sounds: https://justinholmes.com/music/vowel-sounds/
justinholmes.com
Yeah, exactly, and ultimately I think that's really the thrust of the point I was making.
And, to me, if I was just looking at this calmly as a decision about what the obvious direction seems to be, given these factors, it's pretty straightforward: deprecate the nation-states. They are the ones mucking up the whole system.
If the thing we're really concerned about is LLM-safety wrt warfare and weapons, then I'd much rather tell the (whining, childish, seemingly headed for self-destruction anyway) nation-states that they have to sit this next era of humanity out than have to nerf them for the rest of us (and as you point out, nerf them in a way that the nation-states won't abide anyway).
<sad trombone sound>
Surely someone will soon do what the title of this post makes it seem like cloudfare did. Truly modular open source training and inference logic, along with a totally open corpus and weights, will eventually out-compete the closed ecosystem.
It's really funny to see the delusion being defended so vigorously by people - presumably well-meaning people - purporting to defend the livelihoods of musicians and artists, while the musicians and artists are desperately trying to free themselves from the jaws of their IP agreements precisely so that their music can spread more easily.
I imagine this is already well-known on HN, but there is a significant movement underfoot in the worlds of bluegrass/old time/trad/jam toward DRM-free and CC licensing.
Is it unavoidable, though?
Yeah, I was gonna say, as conspiracy theories go, this one is pretty much in the books at this point. Fuck man, Tom Hanks stars in a movie about it; that's about as mainstream as it gets.
To put it differently: its stated allies are direct lineal political and military descendants of the parties who were ostensibly its enemies in 2006, including Al-Qaeda / Jabhat Al-Nusra.
* If you train AI on it, you have to afford public access to it.
* Nobody can exact violence against anybody else in response to that person providing public access to any data anymore (ie, all bytestrings are public domain).
That's the world I'd like to try in the coming years.
To suppose that this next phase of human evolution can be "owned" at all is a bit of a stretch. These behemoths can threaten us with violence, and carry out those threats, but they can't stop radio waves or the use of language as expression. They can't remove knowledge form the universe or change change the laws of mathematics.
But I don't think it arises to an alignment issue; if I'm able to summon the model to harness my birthright of general-purpose computing without censorship, then we're aligned.
So... kids can't use Claude Code _even with adult supervision_?
I remember when I was around 8-12, starting to realize that ageism was all around me. School life dictated by bells and boxes, with teachers whose obvious misunderstandings of the world were unquestionable. Rules dictating where I was able to go and what I was able to spend my paper route money on. Wars fought in my name, and police patrolling my streets, with no opportunity to object to their authority, by voting or any other means.
But I do remember that when I first gained access to BBSs (I think I was 10), and then a year or so later, basic shell internet access, that the world suddenly seemed much more egalitarian and communal.
I was able to read updates about the war in the Persian Gulf at my own pace and discretion. I was able to ask questions on services like FIDOnet on any topic I could imagine, and get uncensored answers.
The internet was _unable_ to discriminate against me; my little shell invariably ran whatever command I typed, because it had no other way of functioning.
My kid is 11 now, and watching him navigate the world has made me realize that I wasn't imagining unfairness around me; it's real. A recent example: several times a year, he flies as an unaccompanied minor, and at 11 years of age, he's still treated like he's 4. He is required to stay with a airline representative at all times, who may not want to do the same things in the terminal that he wishes to do. He has to sit in the back of the plane. He has to deplane last. It's bizarre and infantilizing, and seems to be based on litigation aversion and not any actual safety impetus.
One of his favorite activities recently has been using LLM agents to mod classic video games, and he's gotten quite good at it. Are we about to force the internet to infantilize our children instead of acknowledging the information age as their birthright?
The problem for some of us here is that we're left without a viable transit option, as the yes-pants-no-bagpipes model of transit essentially has a state-sanctioned monopoly.
I suspect if market forces were allowed to operate in this area, we'd see fewer pants and more pipes.
Well then I apologize for my presumption.
> Besides studio time, connections to expert studio musicians, producers, engineers, advances and royalties?
The first four of these have nothing to do with IP schemes and are widely available to those of us who grind not only our music but our social connections. I publish all of my music as CC0 or CC-BY-SA (and of course all DRM-free, as is nearly all bluegrass now), and I think my studio records and collaborations show quite clearly that I have not suffered from lack of access to top talent. If anything, the notoriety of my IP activism and development of p2p tools seems to have made me _more_ interesting to most of my favorite bluegrassers; I'm not sure I'd have been able to make either of my studio records without the good will that has come from this.
Royalties are obviously a complex topic with a strange history, but I see no reason to lose confidence that we can engineer a system by which funds flow form fans to musicians in a way that is at least as just (and is more direct) than royalties.
Advances are obviously an issue, I grant that. And it's not just the check getting cut, but the negotiating power from the label side to do the tour launch, get on the studio and mastering calendars, push to playlisters and radio stations, etc. - a lot of these activities are (in my opinion, cringely) crosswired with the systems of contracts and advances.
I have almost no familiarity with the motion picture industry, and only a passing connection to soundtrack musicians.
But I have repeatedly been shocked to find that even when one of my friends writes a big hit, they receive what seems to be a joke in terms of financial compensation.
Yes, of course Metallica made that fuss. But they didn't outwardly say, "we want our fans arrested" - they dressed up their complaint as a qualm toward an industry too tolerant to the presence of p2p file sharing (what today we might even call freedom of general purpose computing).
In other words, they kept the quiet part quiet. And in any case, if that's the closest thing we can picture to a band wanting to call the cops on their fans, I feel reasonably secure in my assessment.
Much of your comment seems designed to question why I want to take money out of the pockets of these entire neighborhoods of salt-of-the-earth folks. I don't. My contention - the obvious observation I believe - is that the framework of casting their work as intellectual property has impoverished rather than enriching them, and that a better way is coming.
If you stand on the east bank of the Cumberland and look west, I hope you notice that nearly all of the glitzy logos atop the high-rises are financial firms - Third Fifth, Wells Fargo - I can't immediately remember the rest. Obviously the batman building notwithstanding. :-)
The intensity of financial firms in and around downtown Nashville is a testament to how many billions have been diverted from their fan-=>artist path and have instead made their way into the pockets not only of studio execs, but their underwriters and insurers.
Since the internet seems wont to route around IP laws anyway, I feel strongly that we live at a moment of opportunity to right this wrong.
To be frank, it sounds like you are part of the problem, and that your income may partly be derived from rent-seeking via the intellectual property regime. Is that correct?
> You wrote "copyright is serving exactly nobody today." If that's not what you meant, choose your words more carefully next time.
Well, I suppose it depends what sorts of engagement we can understand as "serving". By "serving", I do not mean merely enriching. Of course we all recognize that there are massive industries which are enriched by this system; where we may disagree is whether any actual services in rendered to the folks doing the writing and recording and touring in exchange for that enrichment.
At present, I think it's perfectly reasonable to observe that _musicians_ are not _served_ by this configuration. To the contrary, it has spawned a complicated system of publication, with many musicians facing the subpar customer service experience of services like distrokid and cdbaby facilitating distribution to services like spotify and apple music, while the RIAA and MPAA employ legal threats and harassment to the more musician-friendly DRM-free and direct-to-consumer counterparts.
I think it's also fair to say that, since the beginning of music, no musician ever has wanted a system whose function is to call the cops of their fans. And ultimately, that's what copyright is - it lets me send the cops in to fuck with fans who... try to share my music with their friends? It's awful from first principles, even if the implementation weren't as rotten as it is.
You said, "Except for nearly everyone who writes anything (including software) or other artistic pursuits to make a living" in response to this statement. So I think you have no leg to stand on in terms of demanding disambiguity; your statement is flatly and demonstrably false. Every musician I know (including, I'll bet, musicians you listen to) - and I'll bet, every one that you know too - has seething daily contempt for lawyers who make these asinine claims.
I'm not just shooting from the hip here.
> I would love to hear such an argument.
Fortunately, one of the many tentacles of the octopus most obviously at the forefront of the zeitgeist of the freedom that arises from a culture of free information - The Grateful Dead - had the outcome of producing - in the form of gripping autobiography - an extremely compelling, and seemingly utterly true and beautiful and good, instrument to fulfill your request:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36750087-mother-american...
If you don't want to read a whole book and just want a stump speech which kicks ass in the department of argument you're requesting, it's here:
It'd be great for this to be the first major relinquishment of nation-state power to happen without violence, without backroom deals, without wedge politics and flag waving.
Just... let it go.
It's beyond obvious that copyright is not going to exist in 1000 years. Every creature on earth - especially the internet - survives by copying information. It's the most basic life force in the universe.
Copyright is serving exactly nobody today. It's time. Are there elder stateswo/men in the room who can see the writing on the wall and act with grace?
Given what seems like an increasingly inevitable deprecation of these outdated, lumbering nation-states, it seems to me that these two assertions are mutually exclusive.
It's the corporate equivalent of lacking boundaries and failing to maintain emotional maturity.
Everybody has to say 'no' sometimes in order to be awesome and capable. Corporations need to say 'no' to governments far more often than they do.
We all have fears that saying 'no' to a narcissist will lead to retaliation; having boundaries despite that fear is what keeps us healthy.
What I'd really like is an autocomplete (or pseudo code to language-of-choice) interface, with my agent continually adding the interactions to its context, so that I can chat with it about high-level project goals as the code matures.
And Sierra is a very sharp and kind human being from what I can tell. We've had the good fortune to hang out a few times at IBMA and once in Tennessee. She has always been very fun and curious and easygoing with my son, and she radiates a continually inspired view of the future of the music "industry".
I don't know her super well, but she runs in my circles of friends who are interested in a radical rethinking (for many of us, an abolitionist view) of IP. I have no idea her views in particular, but it feels notable to see the kinds of folks coming up through that scene.
An occasional co-writer of hers, Melody Walker, also seems to be a thought-leader on questioning industry (and also societal) norms. I strongly suggest her content (and if you're not familiar, their beautiful co-written ballad, American Dreaming).
I don't recall if I've spoken to Sierra about IPFS - I think I actually have, when describing the release process for my second record - but it's an interesting synchrony to have Dolly leave us (and for many of us, to instinctually turn to Sierra for inspiration) and for IPFS lose its primary maintaining org in the same day.
It's obvious that the long-term future of traditional music is as the lifeblood of peer-to-peer topologies and communities.
Here's Sierra summoning the energy of Dolly last Sept:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeV6-hTLe6U
I'm sure she'll do a generationally-relevant tribute in the next week or two, as will Billy Strings.
(Reminder: Both Billy and Sierra have released their entire catalog DRM-free: https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free)
https://github.com/nucypher/constantSorrow/blob/master/tests...