Good advice, and pretty standard setup I’d say, even for companies that are trying to build a community.
The one thing I wonder about is whether younger generations will use mailing lists. I never did and I’m already in my mid-30s.
Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
111–120 of 270 posts
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#112> e-mail is a universal protocol
I wonder how long that will be true, considering how difficult hosting your own server for your own domain is these days.
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#113Oh what a delight, the cartoon animal character in the infoboxes is “Krteček” [0], a popular (and quite old) character from my country.
The website says that the guy is from Washington, but his name does sound vaguely Slavic. Interesting.
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there. but you agreed to this, when agreeing to the TOS. > 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 which you didn't sign any contract, and therefore it is a violation of copyright. But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of…
Strong disagree on the last paragraph. It's data online, your data, and it was used for commercial purposes without your consent. In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service. Obviously in a practical sense that is a silly position to take, and in prior cases there is usually an extenuating factor that got the person charged, eg breaki…
> In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service.
If you don't take any steps to make it clear that it's not public, like an auth wall or putting pages on unguessable paths, then it is public, because that is what everyone expects.
Just like you if you have a storefront, if the door is unlocked you'd expect people to just come in and no one would take you seriously if you complain that people keep coming in if you don't somehow make it clear that they're not supposed to.
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#115> 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…
Part of me viscerally agrees because large corporations have monetized UGC. Another part of me though thinks differently. We are a species that builds knowledge from generation to generation. From one person to another. Over years, over centuries. Philosophically this part tends to think that your thoughts and ideas belong to humanity and thus need to be shared with all of us.
There's two decades worth of countless conversations on Reddit alone that would be buried into nothingness but instead ML has revived all that activity as useful data. ML is definitely a great way to bring back utility for a lot of old and unused data.
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#116> 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…
> 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 "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion (...)
> (...) share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.
That attitude, quite commonly expressed on HN these days, strikes me as a peculiar form of selfishness - the same kind we routinely accuse companies of and attribute the sad state of society to.
A person is not entitled to 100% of the value of everything they do, much less to secondary value this subsequently generated. A person is not entitled to receive rent for any of their ideas just because they wrote them down and put on display somewhere. Just because they touched something, and it exists, doesn't mean everyone else touching it owes them money.
The society works best when people don't capture all the fruits of their labor for themselves. Conversely, striving to capture 100% (or more) of the value generated is a hallmark of the late stage capitalism and everything that's bad and wrong and Scrooge-y.
Self-censoring on principle because some company (gasp!) will train an LLM model on it (gasp!!) and won't share the profit from it? That's just feeling entitled to way over 100% of the value of one's hypothetical output, and feeling offended the society hasn't already sent advance royalty cheques.
Chill out. No matter what you do, someone else will somehow make money out of it, that's how it supposed to work - and AI in particular is, for better or worse, one of the most fundamentally transformative things to happen to humanity, somewhere between the Internet and the Industrial Revolution if it's just a bubble that pops, much more if it isn't. Assuming it all doesn't go to shit (let's entertain something more than maximum pessimism for a moment), everyone will benefit much more from it than from whatever they imagine they could get from their Internet comments.
(Speaking of Industrial Revolution - I can understand this attitude from people who actually earn a living from the kind of IP that AI is trained on, only to turn around and compete with them. They're the modern Luddites, and I respect their struggle and that they have a real point. Everyone else, those complaining about "AI theft" the most, especially here? Are not them.)
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#117This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.
To truly self-host anything, you must first invent the universe.
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#118This all sounds like renting to me. Instead you should: - put a rack in your home - buy an IPv4 block - buy dark fibre - start your own ISP - advertise routes over BGP - host your own email - found a registrar and transfer your domains over All easily obtainable for less than a million dollars in capital. Though once your FTTH and undersea cable operations ramp up you'll need further access to capital.
You forgot the steps of pressing your own silicon wafers in the garage, followed by soldering motherboards from zero, and of course, having a steel mill to build racks and computer cases. The only way to ensure true independence. In all seriousness, I am a big advocate for hosting your own infrastructure as much as you can, but that requires you to be REALLY into doing it. Otherwise, it's just a completely unnecessar…
Focusing the wrong problem. You'll also need to own everything that being a part of a nation state provides you, including markets and defense. If you can't do that, you can't live truly rent-free.
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#119> 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…
There's a neat little thing some discords I've seen use, where they honeypot spam bots into a channel-- if someone posts into it, their messages in the last 5 minutes get deleted and their account gets kicked.
Is there a meaningful way to make it so a website shares a resource that automatically updates their blacklist to block the IP address? Knowing that you will lose X but hopefully you'll retain everyone who can read?
Re: Be a property owner and not a renter on the internet
#120> 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…
Based on my experience, I've found that I like using AI (GitHub copilot) to do things like answer questions about a language that I could easily verify in the documentation. Almost basically 'yes/no' questions. To be honest if I were writing such documentation for a product/feature, I wouldn't mind the AI hoovering it up.
I've found it to be pretty crap at doing things like actual algorithms or explaining 'science' - the kind of interesting work that I find on websites or blogs. It just throws out sensible looking code and nice sounding words that just don't quite work or misses out huge chunks of understanding / reasoning.
Despite not having done it in ages, I enjoy writing and publishing online info that I would have found useful when I was trying to build / learn something. If people want to pay a company to mash that up and serve them garbage instead, then more fool them.