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FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

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Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#531

Post by 999900000999 »

Aachen wrote: post #514
999900000999 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, >I'm Not a Robot (film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27m_Not_a_Robot_(film)

Oh my, a Dutch film that actually sounds good?! I get to watch a movie that's originally in my native language for perhaps the second time in my life, thanks for linking this :D Edit: and it's on YouTube in full! Was wondering which streaming service I'd have to buy for this niche genre of Dutch sci-fi but that makes life easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VrLQXR7mKU Final update: well, that was certainly special…

Glad to help.

I have to assume the Dutch movie industry just isn't too big.

I guess it's a side effect of America's media, but when I went to Europe including the Netherlands almost everyone spoke English at an almost native level.

It almost felt like playing a video game where there is an immersive mode you can just turn off if it gets too difficult ( subtitles in English at all public facilities).

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#532

Post by Galanwe »

tremon wrote: post #474
tecleandor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even worse, lots of them are using barely legal residential proxies so the requests are coming from everywhere. In Drew DeVault's article linked in this post he complained precisely about the residential-looking source IP addresses [0]. And I think I remember something about a Chinese company, some months ago, very aggressively scraping using that method. Companies like DataImpulse [1] or ScraperAPI [2] will happi…

Are these "residential proxies" assumed to be infected devices part of a botnet or malicious apps on users' phones?

A lot of these residential proxy as a service companies just use regular ISPs to run their automated headless browsers. It doesn't need to be illegal.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#533

Post by AtomBalm »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #277
rectang wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look at the primary economic claim offered by AI companies: to end the need for a substantial portion of all jobs on the planet. And this is why AI training is not "fair use". The AI companies seek to train models in order to compete with the authors of the content used to train the models. A possible eventual downfall of AI is that the risk of losing a copyright infringement lawsuit is not going away. If a court d…

I've pointed this out to a few people in this space. They tend to suggest that the value in AI is so great this means we should get rid of copyright law entirely.

We should, but not for those reasons.

If software and ideas become commodities and the legal ecosystem around creating captive markets disappears, then we will all be much better off.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#534

Post by joquarky »

integralof6y wrote: post #353
dbingham wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That value is only great if it's shared equitably with the rest of the planet. If it's owned by a few, as it is right now, it's an existential threat to the life, liberty, and pursuit of a happiness of everyone else on the planet. We should be seriously considering what we're going to do in response to that threat if something doesn't change soon.

> That value is only great if it's shared equitably with the rest of the planet. I think this should be an axiom which should be respected by any copyright rule.

You are correct, but the real problem is that copyright needs complete reform.

Let's not forget the basis:

> [The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Is our current implementation of copyright promoting the progress of science and useful arts?

Or will science and the useful arts be accelerated by culling back the current cruft of copyright laws?

For example, imagine if copyright were non-transferable and did not permit exclusive licensing agreements.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#535

Post by mary-ext »

yyhhsj0521 wrote: post #450
mary-ext wrote: post #350

I do wonder if it's a customer on Alibaba Cloud that's doing all this or if it's entirely Alibaba's own doing that's been wrecking havoc on everyone's sites (mine included) I don't really like blocking an entire ASN, especially since I don't mind (responsible) crawling to begin with, but I was left with no choice

I doubt Alibaba uses its own cloud. It doesn't work like that at most cloud provider companies.

right, then the claim of this being caused by "AI companies" feels a lot more dubious because at least this time the perpetrator has just been this one customer on Alibaba Cloud, and we don't actually know what they're up to.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#536

Post by joquarky »

tadfisher wrote: post #447
dbingham wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That value is only great if it's shared equitably with the rest of the planet. If it's owned by a few, as it is right now, it's an existential threat to the life, liberty, and pursuit of a happiness of everyone else on the planet. We should be seriously considering what we're going to do in response to that threat if something doesn't change soon.

AI is going to implode within 2 years. Once it starts ingesting its own output as training data it is going to be at best capped at its current capability and at worst even more hallucinatory and worthless.

Forget what it eats to continue improving.

Realize what it already has.

A foundational language model with no additional training is already quite powerful.

And that genie isn't going back into the bottle.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#537

Post by devit »

Ndymium wrote: post #529
devit wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps switch to well-engineered software actually properly designed to be served on the public Internet. Clearly generating zip files, writing them fully to disk and then sending them to the client all at once is a completely awful and unusable design, compared to the proper design of incrementally generating and transmitting them to the client with minimal memory consumption and no disk usage at all. The fact t…

Just noting that the archives are written to disk on purpose, as they are cached for 24 hours (by default). But when you have a several thousand commit repository, and the bots tend to generate all the archive formats for every commit… But Forgejo is not the only piece of software that can have CPU intensive endpoints. If I can't fence those off with robots.txt, should I just not be allowed to have them in the open?…

Well then such a cache needs obviously to have limit to the disk space it uses and some sort of cache replacement policy, since if one can generate a zip file for each tag, that means that the total disk space of the cache is O(n^2) where n is the disk usage of the git repositories (imagine a single repository where each commit is tagged and adds a new file of constant size), so unless one's total disk space is a million/billion times larger than the disk space used by the repositories, it's guaranteed to fill the disk without such a limit.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#538

Post by yifanl »

blibble wrote: post #285
xena wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no way to really make a progress bar make sense, it's a luck-based mechanic.

more, easier proof of works and the law of large numbers will do the rest

That's multiplying the work the server has to do by a large number so it can show a nicer progress bar.

Seems very counter to the purpose.

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#539

Post by joquarky »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #503
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've pointed this out to a few people in this space. They tend to suggest that the value in AI is so great this means we should get rid of copyright law entirely.

What an infantile worldview.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

#540

Post by greenchair »

Analemma_ wrote: post #389
mistrial9 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

obviously China is going full forward and better at it, with no "Capitalism" involved

China has been communist-in-name-only since Deng, you're accidentally proving the parent's point instead of refuting it.

ha, thanks for that!
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