Locally run models use a fraction of the energy. Less than playing a game with heavy graphics.

Broke (cause you have to pay): Win11

Woke: Wine11

The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?

This is entirely my opinion and I’m likely wrong about many things, but at minimum:

1. The model has to be open source and freely downloadable, runnable, and copyleft, satisfying the distribution license requirements of copyleft source material (I’m willing to give a free pass to making it copyleft in general, as different copyleft licenses can have different and contradictory distribution license requirements, but IMO the leap from permissive to copyleft is the more important part). I suspect this alone will kill the AI bubble, because as soon as they can’t exclusively profit off it they won’t see AI as “the future” anymore.

2. All training data needs to be freely downloadable and independently hosted by the AI creator. Goes without saying that only material you can legally copy and host on your own server can be used as training data. This solves the IP theft issue, as IMO if your work is licensed such that it can be redistributed in its entirety, it should logically also be okay to use it as training data. And if you can’t even legally host it on your own server, using it to train AI is off the table. And the independently hosted dataset (complete with metadata about where it came from) also serves as attribution, as you can then search the training data for creators.

3. Pay server owners for use of their resources. If you’re scraping for AI you at the very least need to have a way for server owners to send you bills. And no content can be scraped from the original source more than once, see point 2.

4. Either have a mechanism of tracking acknowledgement and accurately generating references along with the code, or if that’s too challenging, I’m personally also okay with a blanket policy where anything AI generated is public domain. The idea that you can use AI generated code derived from open source in your proprietary app, and can then sue anyone who has the audacity to copy your AI generated code, is ridiculous and unacceptable.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

I hate this take. “Open source” is not “public domain” or “free reign to do whatever the hell you want with no acknowledgement to the original creator.” Even the most permissive MIT license has terms that every single AI company shamelessly violate. All code derived from open source code need to at the very least reference the original author, so unless the AI can reliably and accurately cite where the code it generates came from, all AI generated code that gets incorporated into any publicly distributed software violates the license of every single open source project it has ever scraped.

That’s saying nothing about projects with copyleft licenses that place conditions on how the code can then be distributed. Can AI reliably avoid using information from those codebases when generating proprietary code? No? And that’s not a problem because?

I absolutely hate the hypocrisy that permeates the discourse around AI and copyright. Knocking off Studio Ghibli’s art style is apparently the worst atrocity you can commit but god forbid open source developers, most of whom are working for free, have similar complaints about how their work is used.

Just because you “can’t” obey the license terms due to some technical limitation doesn’t mean you deserve a free pass from them. It means the technology is either too immature to be used or shouldn’t be used at all. Also, why aren’t they using LLMs when scraping to read the licenses and exclude anything other than pure public domain? Or better yet, use literally last century’s technology to read the robots.txt and actually respect it. It’s not even a technical limitation, it’s a case of doing the right thing is too restrictive and won’t allow us to accomplish what we want to do so we demand the right thing be expanded to what we’re trying to do.

Open source only has anywhere between one and two core demands: Credit me for my work and potentially distribute derivatives in a way I can still take advantage of. And even that’s not good enough for these AI chuds, they think we’re the unreasonable ones for having these demands and not letting them use our code with no strings attached.

This is where many creators find themselves today, particularly in response to AI training. But the solutions they’re reaching for — more restrictive licenses, paywalls, or not publishing at all — risk destroying the very commons they originally set out to build.

Yeah blame the people getting exploited and not the people doing the exploiting why don’t you.

Particularly with AI, there’s also no indication that tightening the license even works. We already know that major AI companies have been training their models on all rights reserved works in their ongoing efforts to ingest as much data as possible. Such training may prove to have been permissible in US courts under fair use, and it’s probably best that it does.

No. Fuck that. There’s nothing fair about scraping an independent creator’s website (costing them real money) and then making massive profits from it. The creator literally fucking paid to have their work stolen.

If a kid learns that carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere or how to calculate compound interest thanks to an editor’s work on a Wikipedia article, does it really matter if they learned it via ChatGPT or by asking Siri or from opening a browser and visiting Wikipedia.org?

Yes. And the fact that it’s stolen isn’t even the biggest problem by a long shot. In fact, even Wikipedia is a pretty shitty source, do what your high school teacher said you should do and search Wikipedia for citations, not the articles themselves.

Don’t let AI teach you anything you can’t instantly verify with an authoritative source. It doesn’t know anything and therfore can’t teach anything by definition.

Instead of worrying about “wait, not like that”, I think we need to reframe the conversation to […] “wait, not in ways that threaten open access itself”.

Okay, let’s do that then. All AI training threaten open access itself. If not by ensuring the creator can never make money to sustain their work, then by LITERALLY COSTING THE CREATORS MONEY WHEN THEIR CONTENT IS SCRAPED! So the conclusion hasn’t changed.

The true threat from AI models training on open access material is not that more people may access knowledge thanks to new modalities. It’s that those models may stifle Wikipedia and other free knowledge repositories, benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into supporting them while also bleeding them dry. It’s that trillion dollar companies become the sole arbiters of access to knowledge after subsuming the painstaking work of those who made knowledge free to all, killing those projects in the process.

And how does shaming the victims of that knowledge theft for having the audacity to try and do something about it help exactly?

Anyone at an AI company who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with the commons.

[…]

And yet many AI companies seem to give very little thought to this,

“Anyone at a Southern slave plantation who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with their black slaves.” Yeah, they know. That’s the point.

I think having a TPM enables a number of worthwhile security features.

But most of those security features place the TPM at the root of trust, something that is SEVERELY undermined by the fact that it is not open source, meaning it is inherently untrustworthy.

Is it not the one chip we should demand and accept nothing less than complete openness in its implementation and complete control by the person who owns the device? I also think the types of protections it grants in theory are very good, but the fact that it’s proprietary means it’s terrible at actually granting you those protections.

Thank you!

Ok, so if my main router is on 192.168.1.1 and my new OpenWrt router I plan on connecting to VPN is 192.168.1.2, I should set the OpenWrt router’s gateway to 192.168.1.1, set any devices I want on the VPN to use gateway 192.168.1.2, and any devices I don’t want on the VPN should stay on 192.168.1.1, right?

Would devices on the VPN still be able to access the local network and devices that have 192.168.1.1 as their gateway? I assume it would only route internet bound traffic and the OpenWRT router would be able to just pass through local network traffic the same way as the main router?

Also, would the OpenWrt router be able to deal with the main router handling DHCP if I configure it to give it a static IP? Will it just know what devices it’s talking to when the main router assigns them their dynamic IPs?

Sorry for all the noob questions, networking is not one of my strengths.

just get a cheap Pi-type device, install OpenWRT, setup your VPN connections, then create a route on your network to point at this new device for whatever you need it for.

Can I just set its IP address as the default gateway on my devices instead of the main router and expect it to forward everything to the main router through the VPN? Or is there a more complicated setup procedure to get the two routers talking properly?

I briefly tried to make my server a default gateway in the past but couldn’t get it to work, and I’m generally not super experienced with networking. But that was on a general non-router OS. Does OpenWrt do the gateway and routing/forwarding configuration by itself more than a general Linux OS?

Hmm, basically make a container with the VPN client and proxy server, and expose the proxy port through it? Not sure how to route the host server’s traffic through that but I suppose I can just point all the important stuff to the local container’s proxy port. I’ll see if that’s more reliable than modifying the host network configurations. Thanks!

I’ve also been thinking of switching to Nix so I can just configure it once and rebuild the entire system with all the condigurations at any time without going through manually setting everything back up with individual commands/file edits. Though I’m not sure if that’d be more reliable given it’s broken randomly on Fedora when I didn’t even change any network configurations.

I don’t have custom firmware on my router and frankly don’t trust the stock one to handle VPN connections securely without sending “analytics” back to the manufacturer.

I’m thinking about seeing if I can get OpenWrt on it though, but I’m worried it won’t be reliable enough and I really don’t want to be in a situation where I have no internet period after my experiences with just the proxy server breaking. The only reason I’ve been able to troubleshoot it is because the internet itself still works.

TIL companies have Mac fleets

My biggest issue with Windows is the lack of control I have of the actual hardware I own. I don’t own my work computer to begin with nor am I entitled to have full control over it so it doesn’t matter.

I do use WSL, but mainly because I’m more familiar with Bash than Powershell and don’t have to constantly figure out how Powershell does things I already know how to do.

It’s the same reason I have no problem using my company’s OneDrive for work files when I go out of my way to avoid putting any of my personal data on the cloud. It’s their data and they don’t care so I don’t care either.

It’s also nice because I can set up a Linux-only file server at home with things like SSHFS and the Windows computer can’t even see it since it has no SSH access doesn’t even support the network share protocol. If I had an SMB share it would show up on my work computer because it autodetects it.

parallel, easy multithreading right in the command line. This is what I wish was included in every programming language’s standard library, a dead simple parallelization function that takes a collection, an operation to be performed on the members of that collection, and optionally the max number of threads (should be the number of hardware threads available on the system by default), and just does it without needing to manually set up threads and handlers.

inotifywait, for seeing what files are being accessed/modified.

tail -F, for a live feed of a log file.

script, for recording a terminal session complete with control and formatting characters and your inputs. You can then cat the generated file to get the exact output back in your terminal.

screen, starts a terminal session that keeps running after you close the window/SSH and can be re-accessed with screen -x.

Finally, a more complex command I often find myself repeatedly hitting the up arrow to get:

find . -type f -name '*' -print0 | parallel --null 'echo {}'

Recursively lists every file in the current directory and uses parallel to perform some operation on them. The {} in the parallel string will be replaced with the path to a given file. The '*' part can be replaced with a more specific filter for the file name, like '*.txt'.

Wonder if it’s cloudflare again

Anyone know whether the Fairphone 6 supports Canadian/North American wireless bands? If I can get confirmation it works with any Canadian carrier I will pay a third party to ship me one from Europe again because I’m so damn sick of having phones with sealed in batteries.

My Fairphone 5 had to be relegated to a glorified iPod Touch because it stopped connecting to my network. And it will probably still outlast my new phone. I will get a new battery for it when the time comes, I still use it at home and it’s awesome.

Is it possible to use LUKS with a password with a Windows NTFS partition and just have GRUB decrypt it to let Windows boot? Don’t intend to dual boot Windows ever but just curious.

Frankly I trust a password stored in my brain way more than whatever keys the TPM is storing. No way something being pushed this hard by Westoid tech corporations doesn’t have a backdoor that just unlocks everything for “approved” parties.

Pff you know how many layers of abstraction HolyC still has? Real computing enthusiasts write their OS in machine code. Not assembly, that’s an abstraction too, literally tapping out high and low electrical pulses like you’re in the Marconi room on the Titanic.

Yeah ambiguity is for C code /s

KDE is second-class to GNOME on Fedora.

It is? I ask because I’ve always used Fedora KDE and honesty it’s been the best KDE experience I’ve had. Now I’m curious how much better the Fedora GNOME experience might be if it’s prioritized so much more, but I’ve never seriously used GNOME so I don’t think I can make a fair assessment. In what ways is KDE deprioritized?

are tucked away behind unintuitive context menus

That are well documented and don’t change once you figure out where they are. “UX” is code for “we’ll rearrange everything you need twice a year and force you to constantly re-learn our app because fuck you.”

if you open the app for the first time and immediately think “this looks like it was last updated in 2003”, it’s not a good thing

Why not? To me it’s reassuring because it means the procedures I memorized years ago probably haven’t changed. It’s the same reason people like the command line so much. Office software UI is a solved problem and arguably peaked in 2003 before MS Office started adding all the bullshit, it doesn’t need to be updated every single year.