Тег: Neural networks

Decentralization of publications, homework

Yesterday, I felt a sudden urge to have my own personal relay for Nostr. My system administration skills are practically zero; even the ancapchan.info site was once built and configured for me without my involvement. But since then, LLMs have appeared, and it would have been a sin not to use them. So, I dug into Grok, and after a few hours of tinkering, the relay relay.ancapchan.info was up and running. This fully revealed the peculiarities of the protocol’s decentralization. For instance, broadcasting a test message only through my single relay turned out to be convenient via the Snort client, syncing relays is convenient via Amethyst on Android, and Nostria knows how to broadcast an arbitrary event as raw JSON, and so on.

The purpose of a personal relay is to store a full archive of my publications, private messages, and everything else, as well as the content of those I follow. This is a good step toward local autonomy, although still far from the ideal I described in the third “Notes on Decentralization”. I still have to figure out backups and content management, and then, perhaps, it will come to providing this relay for use by the local community. And if it proves to be in demand by the community, then it will be, again, a step toward centralization: someone bothers with their own server, and someone uses shared ones—why not.

At this rate, I’ll even properly connect a wallet to Nostr (currently it only works conveniently for receiving), set up a Lightning node, or even start “vibecoding” something…

Readers are also pleasing me with their examples of using neural networks. For instance, one of them opened a resource where they post AI-narrated books for free, including those on libertarianism/Austrian Economics. Of course, a certain amount of cringe remains in AI narration, but it is so much cheaper that it’s a sin not to use it. For those who find it easier to listen than to read, welcome: website, Telegram bot. By the way, the AI narrations of my two books are already there (I’ve already added direct download links to my book pages: Ancap, War).

How do you feel about feeding neural networks all the content from the internet, disregarding copyright and without anyone’s consent?

M1inki

It has long been no secret to my readers that the copyright law appears to me as an entity that is hopelessly obsolete and extremely expensive in terms of enforcement, and therefore will immediately wither away as soon as the state ceases to carry out this very enforcement. However, with the appearance of large language models, all grounds have emerged to believe that copyright will wither away even and significantly sooner than the state.

There are various arguments in defense of copyright. There is the utilitarian one: if everyone takes someone else’s content for free, the incentive to compose this content will vanish, and that is the end of progress. There is the objectivist one: a person has a right to the product of their mind, and damn it, because that’s what Ayn Rand said. There is the ethical one: labor must be paid for.

And then it turns out that to train another, more advanced version of a large language model, it needs to be fed the entire corpus of texts ever created by humanity, and it will devour them and ask for seconds. If this is not done, then a promising direction of information technology development will hit a dead end. Those training the model are not concerned with the artistic merits of the text. For them, whether it is the Bible or a Harry Potter fanfic—it is simply text possessing a key quality: written by a human. Knowledge of the Bible is more important for a language model, but only for the reason that, firstly, it is more voluminous, and secondly, references to it are far more frequent in other texts and in user queries.

And that’s it, we have immediately lost the utilitarian argument, because it is precisely for the sake of progress that texts need to be fed to the neural network. In exchange, we have acquired very wealthy lobbyists for the abolition of copyright, since companies developing large language models can quite well compete in terms of capital size with digital publishing houses. Moreover, even if for particularly widely circulated texts the rightsholders manage to defend the right not to acquaint LLMs with them, who wins from the fact that in response to “summarize such-and-such story by Stephen King” the chatbot will answer “I don’t know a single work by this author, let me instead summarize such-and-such story by David Friedman”? Surely it won’t be Stephen King’s publishers nor Stephen King himself who will benefit from such a thing.

How will content for training neural networks be obtained? Very simple. Content is usually already physically present on the web in free access; it just has a “pirated” label, and therefore law-abiding companies have to pretend it doesn’t exist. However, this is too flimsy a little fence, and it won’t stop those who consider themselves entitled to step over it. The only person a neural network won’t get is some Rodion Belkovich, because he in principle does not post his books on the web, even for money))) This is a huge loss for the future interlocutors of intellectual chatbots, but what can be done, humanity has lost many valuable texts throughout its history, shit happens.