I don't understand why so many people seem so fascinated by constructions like the library of Babel. Yes it contains the answers to all your questions, but there are some significant drawbacks. * It has more wrong information than right information, with no way to tell the difference. * If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at…
> If you had an oracle that could tell you how to get to the book you need, the navigation instructions to get to the book will be at least as long as the book, on average. Only if the oracle has all books that could possibly exist. If you're trying to find a book that already exists, that set is infinitely smaller.
Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
81–88 of 88 posts
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I agree with you. > It's like the idea that the sculptor doesn't create the sculpture, the sculpture was there all along, he just had to remove the superfluous matter to reveal what was already there (i.e. the atoms belonging to the final sculpture). I understand this argument but I have far more trouble applying this logic to real things. I'm not sure the same logic applies once the information is instantiated…
Copyright is not "ownership of numbers". "Intellectual property" is a misnomer. Copyright is an instrumental tool to achieve specific socially desirable things, namely the flourishing of scientific and artistic activity. It's a relatively modern creation, born of enlightenment-style principles in the 18th century. If it were still used according to that spirit, we'd have less problems.
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think they're equivalent. I think invention and creation aren't actually real. There is no "making" or "creating" when it comes to intellectual work. All computer files are sequences of bits. All sequences of bits are integers. All integers already exist in the infinite set of natural numbers. I can even calculate how big those numbers are given their bit count. digits(bits) = ceil(bits * log10(2)) digits(32)…
This conflates mathematical existence with actual instantiation. A 2gb integer might be definable, but until someone encodes a particular arrangement of bits and gives it context, it doesn’t exist in any practical sense. We don’t treat all future novels as "already written" just because their ASCII codes can be mapped to integers.
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#84I think this would be an even better joke if the site was a setup for plausible deniability for piracy. "I didn't share that! It was on infohash.lol first!"
More details here: https://allthemusic.info/faqs/
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Copyright is not "ownership of numbers". "Intellectual property" is a misnomer. Copyright is an instrumental tool to achieve specific socially desirable things, namely the flourishing of scientific and artistic activity. It's a relatively modern creation, born of enlightenment-style principles in the 18th century. If it were still used according to that spirit, we'd have less problems.
Others would say copyright is an instrumental tool to stifle the flourishing of open scientific and artistic activity. Scientific and artistic activity seems to flourish just fine in environments with less copyright.
Intellectual property is just rent seeking by established corporations as well as protection against competition so that others can't enter the market. The days where they protected individual creators and inventors are long gone.
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#86Is this legal? I’m of the impression that publishing infohashes to copyrighted content is illegal under DMCA?
the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material. I believe that downloading is still illegal absent a fair use exemption but it's rarely prosecuted because you have to prove the absence of the exemption. It's uploading copyrighted content that's actually illegal and also e…
I'm of the impression that serving either the infohash or the torrent is considered to violate DMCA. DMCA does not just forbid sharing copyrighted material, but also sharing links to the copyrighted material or generally anything that can help people bypass copyright protections (including software that can decrypt even trivial DRM).
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material. I believe that downloading is still illegal absent a fair use exemption but it's rarely prosecuted because you have to prove the absence of the exemption. It's uploading copyrighted content that's actually illegal and also e…
> the infohash isn't copyrighted, so it's not illegal information in and of itself. serving the infohash isn't serving the torrent, and serving the torrent is also not serving copyrighted material I'm of the impression that serving either the infohash or the torrent is considered to violate DMCA. DMCA does not just forbid sharing copyrighted material, but also sharing links to the copyrighted material or generally an…
Re: Show HN: Every single torrent is on this website
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
This conflates mathematical existence with actual instantiation. A 2gb integer might be definable, but until someone encodes a particular arrangement of bits and gives it context, it doesn’t exist in any practical sense. We don’t treat all future novels as "already written" just because their ASCII codes can be mapped to integers.
I said all novels already exist. That's different from claiming all novels have already been written. The claim is that humans are not "creators" but generators , very much in the random number generator sense. We are interesting number generators.
This kind of imposing or order is an act of lowering the entropy of the sample in a very specific way, parties that know the 'key' to the sample will be able to experience the sample in a way that parties without the key would not, to them the sample is still boring or random. Your reduction of the act of creation to picking a particular number is belying the fact that absolutely nobody that creates something is picking that number: the number is a carrier, it is not the ideas embedded in it. You could translate that novel (or textbook, or sound or video or any other medium) into other media, descriptive, literal or you could even completely transform it. And there would still be a relationship to the original creation, hence the concept of a 'derived work', which for your numbers example would utterly fail: you could not take that number outside of knowing its meaning and come up with any of these derivations without having the key to decode it.
This kind of reductive reasoning is not helpful, it merely attempts to flatten a whole pile of some of the most accomplished and positive contributions by humanity to the generation of interesting numbers. And it is so much more than that.
Besides all this, any kind of attempt to digitize an actual work of art, rather than just a simple text is going to be a lossy process. You are never going to be able to replicate the original to the point that you have created something that is equal. You may be able to get close but it won't be the same thing. More so for sculptures than for two dimensional art, less so for for instance audio where the replication gear is getting really good. But generation loss is a thing and if you re-create and re-digitize then after a surprisingly low number of such generations you will end up with noise.
Authors, sculptors, painters, even programmers and other creative people are so much more than interesting number generators, even if their works can be encoded or approximated numerically. That's flipping the encoding analogy on its head, the map really isn't the territory.