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Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

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Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#31

Post by toofy »

em-bee wrote: post #30
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option." How many people would take it? I know I'd actu…

i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations. i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for pers…

> i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is…

i’m not sure why so many of us have fallen into this… “there is no other future” thing…

there are other options. plenty of them. there is no singular solution. we could always just say “no”. and that’s that. that would be one option.

why do we feel like there is no other way? why are we afraid to say “nah”?

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#32

Post by rightbyte »

api wrote: post #27
rightbyte wrote: post #5

It seems beyond naive, rather malicious, to upload any useful private data to SaaS LLMs. Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporations not panicing over this?

Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option." How many people would take it? I know I'd actu…

Sounds like a children story about not making a deal with the Devil?

The implied part the children already know from other stories is:

The magic elves have a recorded history of laughing at their customers when they are on the toilette, hitting on their husbands/wifes and misleading their children into worshipping the elvendom and wander off into the forest.

The story ends in some sort of catharsis for the protagonist when the elves go one step too far. In the happy ending variant Disney makes a version off it is not too late.

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#34

Post by toofy »

internet2000 wrote: post #10

Information wants to be free! I remember when that was the rallying cry of hackers. I miss those days.

those days are still here, people just want to know where the information is coming from.

the rallying cry from hackers has never ever been “information wants to be free from sources”

and hackers have also never implied “information from a dipshit should hold the exact same weight as an expert”

yet somehow both of those is the world we’re running towards as fast as we can.

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#35

Post by dofm »

Herring wrote: post #29
dofm wrote: post #20

We are at the breathless-but-low-information-posts-about-plain-text-formats point in the cycle.

This comment is another example of "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened." There's a massive push to add unnecessary complexity to everything out there, because complexity pays all our bills.

Oh I don't disagree. I'm not saying it's wrong. It's always right at some point in the cycle.

I'm just saying it is cyclical. Databases => plain text => single-file databases, repeat. shared hosting => dedicated hosting => vms => jamstack, repeat, etc.

Can't sell complexity without oversimplicity or simplicity without overcomplexity.

But this is quite a long blog post, with typical blog flourishes, about not very much.

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#36

Post by hx8 »

I don't understand why Open Knowledge Format improves interoperability, which is the main claim for its value. These LLMs are obviously advanced enough to navigate other MD file organization schemas like Obisidan, or other text files like Emacs Org.

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#38

Post by m11a »

dataflow wrote: post #13
m11a wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most corporations likely have zero data retention agreements with LLM providers, at least for API usage. (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.)

> (Sure, you could be sceptical on whether the LLM provider is upholding that, but I personally do trust them. The trust betrayal if ZDR wasn't actually ZDR would be too great and commercially damaging for them to lie.) Is actual ZDR verbiage in contracts more specific and limited in scope than what we see advertised publicly ("...except where needed to comply with law or combat misuse" in Anthropic's case)? Because…

It depends on the model provider. OpenAI's is very limited and precisely written.

Plus, open-source models hosted on SaaS inference providers tend to come with a strong ZDR agreement too.

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#39

Post by api »

em-bee wrote: post #30
api wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine someone comes to you and says: "You must remove your door locks. Anyone can come into your house any time. You also need cameras across most of your house. But in exchange, magic elves will do all of your home chores: washing, dishes, folding laundry, cleaning, minor home repairs. All of this will be done for pennies on the dollar compared to any current option." How many people would take it? I know I'd actu…

i believe that in the future technology will be so advanced that protection of privacy is impossible. the only way to counter that is education to respect peoples privacy and very harsh punishments for violations. i also believe that we will live in a post scarcity world, which means profit is no longer interesting, so any business case for invading your privacy will go away and therefore it will only happen for pers…

I'd say I generally agree that the privacy problem has no techno-fix and must be solved by regulation.

For example, we could extend HIPAA-style fines for leaked personal data to other forms of intimate data like location, biometrics, local documents, private chats, etc.

Leak someone's location history? That'll be one $$$ fine per incident where an incident is one person data point.

This at the very least converts this kind of data from an asset into a potential liability, incentivizing companies to not collect it, not hold it long, or thoroughly anonymize and aggregate it and then discard specifics.

Re: Knowledge Should Not Be Gated

#40

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

rightbyte wrote: post #5

It seems beyond naive, rather malicious, to upload any useful private data to SaaS LLMs. Like, you are letting them data mine your business. Why are corporations not panicing over this?

When you say private, I assume you mean proprietary. This isn't about HIPAA or PII but rather about trade secrets and the like. Companies are not panicking because no humans are driving that panic, and we aren't driving that panic because either:

- we haven't thought about it deeply, or

- we've thought about it deeply enough to understand that humans don't benefit when companies act as data gatekeepers.

In neither case are we likely to raise the alarm. If we let them, companies will play zero sum games over "intellectual property" ad infinitum while humans get nothing useful out of the relationship. We're better off when they compete on execution and worse off when they compete in court re: the ownership of abstractions, so there's no reason to encourage the latter sort of behavior.

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