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Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

den.dev

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Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#61

Post by gavinhoward »

BSOhealth wrote: post #16

I have vr.dev and want to do something meaningful with it, additive to the community, and not just a trash content blog. any ideas? who’s down?

I just beat a video game for the first time in my life. It was such a confidence boost and exactly what I needed because I bought the headset to fight depression (exercise).

I realized that VR, as a medium, is uniquely tuned to people, and I think you would have a great blog if you focused on just that: people.

What are some ideas for how can VR help people? Can it help people fight depression? Can it be used for physical or emotional therapy? Can it help them safely build skills that could improve their lives?

On that last one, I am reading a book about ship handling. It was a Christmas present because I will never be a captain in my life. But ship handling would work so well in VR. Even the commands are so standardized that players could give voice commands, a real bridge.

How many Make-a-Wish kids or others could have a wonderful time doing that? And that isn't even considering the idea of extending that game into space with Star Trek USS Enterprise or Star Wars Star Destroyers.

Your site could be the nexus of those great ideas. You could even have guest posts. I'd write one.

Anyway, sorry for the novel. VR has helped me feel better than I have in a long time.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#62

Post by dend »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #59
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

> I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted. I've reached the same conclusion. All data is just bits. Numbers. Once it's out there, trying to control their spread and use is just delusional. People should just stop sharing things publicly. Even things like AGPLv3 are proving to be ineffective against their exploitation…

I can relate to the sentiment. For what it's worth, I also know that if someone's personal site/repos/pictures are used to train AI, they have no recourse short of said person having TONS of money to go and fight the legal battles similar to how media companies do.

But you know what, I grew up in a family of educators whose whole life mission was to help others by sharing their knowledge. That's what I am doing through my blog. I learned something? Blog about it. I built a reverse-engineered wrapper over some API? Share it openly. For every AI ingress job over this content there will be a few people that will read my code or blog post and either learn from it, be inspired, ignore it, or unblock themselves from a problem that they tried to solve. I think that makes the effort worth it to me.

For what it's worth, even before AI emerged, I've seen sites that would shamelessly rip off my content and re-publish it on their own domains under a different author. One even tried charging people for it. On several occasions I fought it and won with the help of Google/Bing. Other times, nothing happened. And that's fine. Such is the fate of online content. If my content helped at least one person, it was worth sharing it in the open.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#63

Post by scarface_74 »

drewcoo wrote: post #60

This used to be a forum for startup-folk, not wanna-be-FAANG-employees. There's a lot of sense in this post. There's not a lot of sense in the reaction here.

What do you think the goal of “startup folks” were if not to get acquired by FAANG or other BigTech adjacent companies?

Out of the literally thousands of companies that YC has invested in, only about a dozen have gone public.

YC is not interested in “lifestyle companies” that are a profitable ongoing concern it is interested in the “exit”

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#64

Post by [deleted] »

dend wrote: post #47
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

Nothing to disagree in this statement, for sure. If it's on the open internet, it will almost surely be used for AI training, consent be damned. But it feels like even at a rudimentary level, if I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse to pursue the matter and prevent them from using my content. In contrast, if I uploaded something to…

[deleted]

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#65

Post by pembrook »

drewcoo wrote: post #60

This used to be a forum for startup-folk, not wanna-be-FAANG-employees. There's a lot of sense in this post. There's not a lot of sense in the reaction here.

An accurate rebrand could be renaming this place from “hackernews” to “middle manager IT dad news.”

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#66

Post by bulatb »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #59
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

> I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted. I've reached the same conclusion. All data is just bits. Numbers. Once it's out there, trying to control their spread and use is just delusional. People should just stop sharing things publicly. Even things like AGPLv3 are proving to be ineffective against their exploitation…

Yeah, I hear this. Anything I put online is feeding the machine that will replace me.

Maybe I can carve myself a niche if I can find an audience, and maybe turn that into something kind of reward-shaped, but that's not happening without me feeding the machine. And almost certainly I won't succeed, and I'll just make it harder for myself and everyone like me to succeed in the future.

It seems the only thing to do is do it anyway and try to be unique enough to make it work. And somehow just be fine with pulling up the ladder behind you.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#67

Post by Terr_ »

rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

IANAL, but lately I've had this quixotic daydream of a combination accept-cookies / agree-to-TOS page that comes up, and the Terms of Service says by proceeding they agree to give the site-owner an perpetual, irrevocable, and royalty-free to use and re-license any future content that they create using any generative AI that was trained using the website contents.

Then you carefully log what LLM user-agents/IPs go past that agree, along with some very distinctive secretly crawlable pages which have contents that can be distinctively reproduced back out of the model if needed.

Then whenever SomeShittyLLM posts "articles", everybody with that TOS that was crawled gets to duplicate it without ads for free. :P

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#68

Post by dni0 »

muglug wrote: post #6

This is good advice for people whose livelihood depends on the attention of anonymous strangers. For everyone else, it’s probably ok to ignore.

Indeed. If you only use social media to connect with friends and family... good luck getting them to visit literally any other website.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#69

Post by dend »

wavewrangler wrote: post #56

Rules to live by… Although I swear this was posted on here just recently, was it not?

Honestly, while I put this together, I know that the ideas on this are not unique to me by any stretch. It's just another arrow in the bunch.

I added a few extra reading materials/references at the bottom of the article.

Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet

#70

Post by liontwist »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #57
rpcope1 wrote: post #44

> Exploiting user-generated content. You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transfor…

You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. So? What do I care? If some stuff I posted to my website (with no requirement for attribution or remuneration, and also no guarantee that the information is true or valid) can improve the AI services that I use, great.

Even if no attribution etc is your personal policy that’s not everyone else’s.

The end result is that any authors who care about copyright protection will become less accessible. It’s a gold rush for AI bots to capture the good will of early internet creators before the well runs dry,

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