Their whole argument is that AI's added efficiency means they don't need to set aside valuable human time anymore. Why can't they just point Claude at Claude Code and ask it to reduce memory usage by 90%?
You can do that. But I'm telling you, in tech (and enterprise shops I've worked at too) they don't care.
I'm using the internal Google tools and it's helping me write code much faster too, but it still takes time. I could make the CLI tool I work on faster, but no one cares except the end users, and their minor concerns have no impact on our internal politics.
At the end of the day you have to do what you're paid to do, unfortunately.
Do you think we could convince hypothetical AGIs to buy NFTs? Since they're not embodied (or at least not limited to one body), it might be the only way they could really properly indulge in fine art speculation.
"An AI can't smell a painting, but it can smell an NFT"
They were widely considered on topic when the price was going monotonically upwards.
Aside from the technical aspects of blockchain, there is a second reason to talk about the direction of the price. There's reason to think that it's falling because of other technology offerings (mostly AI, and increasingly space). So it's a meaningful indicator of the sense of investors in technologies.
I like how 15 years on, we're not even pretending that blockchain has practical uses besides buying drugs and gambling.
There's a certain refreshing clarity in this current kleptocratic moment - everyone is just openly engaged in fraud. Okay, I guess that's better than pretending they weren't.
HN is very, very bitter about being there at the beginning of an interesting, fun, and promising technology that could have easily enriched them. Bitcoin and crypto is very on topic, but pricing not so much.
While the article is mostly about cryptocurrency, my response is in re:
> But what do you do if you already live under tyranny? The rule of law is a great defense, but cryptography alone can't bring about the rule of law. What is the role of technology in this foundational struggle?
My colleague Moti Yung has studied this and there are some surprising results
> Anamorphic Encryption: Private Communication against a Dictator
...
> In this work, as a technical demonstration of the futility of the dictator’s demands, we invent the notion of “Anamorphic Encryption” which shows that even if the dictator gets the keys and the messages used in the system (before anything is sent) and no other system is allowed, there is a covert way within the context of well established public-key cryptosystems for an entity to immediately (with no latency) send piggybacked secure messages which are, in spite of the stringent dictator conditions, hidden from the dictator itself! We feel that this may be an important direct technical argument against the nature of governments’ attempts to police the use of strong cryptographic systems, and we hope to stimulate further works in this direction.
The hypothesis that companies today need to really focus so they can make money ignores the fact that, in fact, most or the major AI companies are not making money relative to their costs.
When was the last time a public pressure campaign caused a company to give up making money? And Google in particular? The company that bans entire GCP accounts on a roll of the dice?
Building a tool that tries (and probably fails) to remove the watermark (due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win) is tacitly accepting the barcode. The hacker ethos should be, first and foremost, to run open source models locally without relying on a corporation.
>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win
Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?
They didn’t win because of DRM. They won because of the regulations that grant a monopoly for a specific term in the form of a copyright. Society has recognized that incentivizing creative acts requires a temporary grant of monopoly to ensure the necessary scarcity to make money and recover the costs of creation. The real problem is Disney keeps expanding that time period so things never enter the public domain
This is again conflating at least two things and this is so prevalent in this context. Let us not conflate how annoying DRM:s are to us users that buy the things, with pirates thinking they somehow have a right to use any software without paying fairly for it. I would even go as far as to say that you pirates are the reason I have to have a DRM in the shit I bought and paid for.
> I would even go as far as to say that you pirates are the reason I have to have a DRM
I think this is largely an incorrect take. DRM is anti consumer, not anti piracy. In fact, it has done very little to deter actual piracy (and remember it only takes ONE person to break the DRM), while affecting some casual pirates and all legitimate users. In the process, they got rid of reselling stuff you own.
It's anticonsumer, not antipiracy, never forget that. It means something like this would have happened regardless of pirates.
They succesfully did away with 2nd hand markets and the concept of "owning" anything. So yes, I would imagine DRM would continue to exist without piracy.
I think so, because their main goal is to prevent unwanted use of the digital product -- to the detriment of end users -- in more ways than just piracy. In fact, they don't solve the piracy issue.
I am not sure how I am conflating two things, it would be helpful if you could expand or connect to my argument. Perhaps I am misunderstanding.
My argument is that the grant of monopoly is a regulatory decision and the real cause of "winning". No amount of DRM would confer the same benefit because the ability to bypass it through piracy would be totally legal with no economic or other consequences and so a robust cracking and distribution ecosystem would emerge. Thats a drastically different story than when napster gets shut down, and limewire gets shut down and pirate bay gets shut down every time it relaunches. Imagine a world where there is are 1000 pirate bays
Piracy is as easy now as it was pre-DRM. DRM is the digital equivalent to security screws on electronics, in that they’re a mechanism for lawyers to argue their client made an attempt despite being easily bypassed with a trivial amount of effort.
Exactly this. The real power is in the regulatory grant of a monopoly that comes with rights like the ability to sue for damages, issue take down notices etc. the DRM does allow restrictions on distribution because many people can’t be bothered to remove them, but more importantly the act of removing them is evidence of the intent to knowingly violate the copyright which might be harder to prove otherwise
And now that they're trying to push up the margins and the streaming ecosystem is fragmenting making everything into a series of bundles again, piracy is on the rise again.
They did win for a while because they stamped out 99% of piracy. In the early days of streaming it was legitimately difficult to argue for piracy. Streaming was just too convenient and too cheap.
But, they are greedy above all else. And so, we are once again seeing a resurgence of piracy. Large corporations seem to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
By the time you're building (or buying) the necessary highly esoteric and expensive ultracentrifuge setup I think you would be well outside the realm of "hobbyist" unless someone insists on the most unreasonably pedantic definition for the term.
Unless we're only considering final assembly. Just gotta get that weapons grade fissile material supplier lined up. That might or might not qualify as rich hobbyist territory depending on how high a price tag is permissible.
In theory, there's also direct laser-based isotope separation. It's a technology that is being actively suppressed, and that's one case where I very much in favor of that.
This subthread starts off with the argument that the big corps will never beat the little determined hackers, one of the founding myths of the early internet. And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.
I mean reading it all certainly sounds like the people on the little guy's side are overestimating the value of pluck, an observation Hollywood generally makes just before the heroes with pluck win for ever!
> And then every now and then a strong little branch of the argument runs up against an example and it becomes well sure, the little hobbyist hackers don't have anything there but that is because the big corps/gov/billionaires/whatever put so much into beating them.
It's almost never about the level of resources the organization puts in. The usual reason is that there isn't enough incentive to do it. What is a hobbyist going to do with a nuclear weapon? Why spend your time creating one if you, like the overwhelming majority of people, have no desire to blow up a city?
Preventing something that hardly anybody would be trying to do even if it wasn't being suppressed is a lot more practical than preventing something millions of people would do given the chance.
Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
> It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
By which definition they utterly failed.
> Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.
As long as enough people keep the pirate bays open, it will be there as an alternative when the services start their inevitable enshittification.
I for one do not enjoy the “Which service has the classic film I wanted to watch this week?” Nor having to switch services every time I want to see a new TV series.
We need (and have!) similar “free” alternatives to the watermarked generative services. Just like I hate the yellow dots on my printed images, I am not happy to have my creative assets (I do nothing nefarious) stained with SynthID.
> Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy.
But this is moving the goalposts. You can win against piracy either by making piracy less attractive or by making the paid offering more attractive. The first has utterly failed, piracy remains easy as a rule, and to the extent that they've succeeded it's not only disproportionately by doing the second thing, the DRM itself is a net negative because it has such a small effect on the ease of piracy while making the paid offering worse.
It doesn't make any sense at all. That's like saying browsing the internet with an ad blocker and other privacy tools is a tacit acceptance of tracking and ads, and that you should only visit websites that doesn't track or have ads.
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