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June 2023 Data Dump is missing

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Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that this seems to happen all the time without antitrust issues it probably wouldn't, even though I feel like it should. What we need is a legal way for companies to keep the data open, but also require OpenAI and friends to pay them for it.

> What we need is a legal way for companies to keep the data open, but also require OpenAI and friends to pay them for it. Couldn't that be accomplished by a law or ruling that using something for training AI doesn't exempt you from having to follow its license? OpenAI is already in blatant violation of both the "BY" and "SA" parts of the existing license.

Arguably, a model created by training on a corpus of data is a derived work of that corpus.

Let's say I take a collection of images and use a program to compress them. When decompressed, the images are close to, but not exactly the same as the originals. Despite being in a different format, and despite not being exactly the same as the originals, the copyright to the compressed images is still held by whoever previously held it.

If I take the collection of images from earlier and train a diffusion model based on it, I'm essentially just compressing it a different way. With the right prompt, you can get out something very similar to what you put in.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#52
post #16

This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…

A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It's been demonstrated over and over and over again. Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem.…

I disagree, it worked before and it is the reason the internet even exists.

The core issue is that user generated data is owned by one individual company. There are existing system that don't have this issues e.g. Usenet or bittorrent.

We don't need to idiot proof the web. There are enough people to gather some place for a social network even if it's hard to use. The others can stay and will stay on reddit anyway until one day when they also had enough and learn to use some alternative.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#54
post #16

This, along with recent Reddit goings-on has made me realize a major risk with the current structure of online communication. Take either Reddit or Stack Exchange as examples. They build a platform, and users contribute their time, thought, energy, and knowledge to build a community on that platform. Those companies can then gatekeep and restrict access to all that the community built, when all they did is provide th…

Ever since Gracenote/CDDB it was pretty clear that this is the model. Still pissed off about that.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A decentralized system will never work because 99% of users do not care at all; the centralized systems are easier to sign up for and use. It's been demonstrated over and over and over again. Even if the underlying tech is decentralized, the community will settle around one or a few big instances (for example, Gmail and GitHub) which often end up having significant control over the trajectory of the entire ecosystem.…

I disagree, it worked before and it is the reason the internet even exists. The core issue is that user generated data is owned by one individual company. There are existing system that don't have this issues e.g. Usenet or bittorrent. We don't need to idiot proof the web. There are enough people to gather some place for a social network even if it's hard to use. The others can stay and will stay on reddit anyway unt…

The "value" of Reddit as a website is vastly overrated anyway. There's nothing on Reddit that can't be obtained elsewhere, folks just get stuck in patterns that are familiar and presume it's because options are limited.

The world will continue to spin without Reddit, or if Reddit isn't popular anymore, or if Reddit kicks all of its current users out, and so on.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What we need is a legal way for companies to keep the data open, but also require OpenAI and friends to pay them for it. inherently not possible as then it would not be "open" to begin with.

There are ways to require payment for some uses of things that are legitimately open. As an example, consider the practice of selling exceptions to the GPL, as is done for Qt.

Does this prevent any external contributions in GPL?

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#59
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to require payment for some uses of things that are legitimately open. As an example, consider the practice of selling exceptions to the GPL, as is done for Qt.

Does this prevent any external contributions in GPL?

It means external contributors need to agree to a CLA for their changes to be incorporated into upstream Qt.

Re: June 2023 Data Dump is missing

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decentralized software is not the only alternative. A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”.

> A non-profit site would be much better than a publicly owned one. Further, it could be operated by a co-op and democratically run, with its own “laws”. If it's better why isn't that how these sites are run? Wikipedia for example is an anomaly.

They're hard to capitalize. You need a skilled founder willing to forego profits, or a group of well intentioned devs with management experience, to organize the business side of things. You have to figure out non investment sources of income (charge for services, donations, etc. maybe no ads or at least no ad networks if you're worried about privacy or ethics). It's a lot of work, especially trying to scale that up to where you can actually pay employees salaries and benefits.

It's one thing to have an open source model for software that doesn't necessarily need that level of official organization, but once you start getting into backend infra costs, you can't run that on volunteer labor alone, you eventually have to fundraise for infra costs. If only there were a public or community driven internet... it's too bad the peer to peer models (federation, torrents, etc.) don't work well for real time global communications. Centralized messages are much easier to read and write to.

That doesn't mean such a model can't work or isn't good, it's just much harder, and all for no profit motive.

Realistically I could see a bunch of ex FANGers pooling income into a worker owned coop and starting a tech collective, then maybe handing it over to a 501c3 at some point or just keep it going as a private company without outside shareholders. But someone had to organize all that, and it's not the traditional strong suit of devs.

Fingers crossed though. Would love to see something like that happen.

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