Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights • Hacker News Board

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#91

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:03 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #89

matheusmoreira wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the services part they really dislike is just the part where your credit card gets charged when you click the buy or rent button. You think wrong. My Steam account has 300+ games on it. I pay for several streaming services. I have a physical media collection that even includes a copy of windows vista, to my eternal regret. > Doing all of the piracy stuff with VPNs and navigating torrent sites and getting a…

If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right? That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality. If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. no…

> presumably you pay for the source material

I do. Multiple times, even.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#92

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:04 AM UTC

defrost wrote: post #88

Aurornis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was. Regardless, the…

> the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time. More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating. This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Aus…

You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it”

This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it.

This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges their credit card. Piracy lets them skip that part.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#93

Post by defrost » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:08 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #92

defrost wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the content can’t both be worthless and worth pirating at the same time. More commonly, at least in Australia which at various times has had record level piracy, content can be worth _something_ and also not worth "that much" and hence worth pirating. This has been seen with games - once charged in Australia significantly more than in Europe or the US. Game piracy was rife and didn't really drop in volume until Aus…

You’re moving the goalposts from “contributing nothing” to “actually it’s valuable but I don’t want to pay that much but I also don’t want to not watch it” This is still a silly argument. If the price of something is higher than you want to pay, that doesn’t justify taking it. This has come all the way back to supporting what I said above: The only service problem is that people don’t like the part where it charges t…

> You’re moving the goalposts

Nope. I'm a first time commentator in this subthread I'm stating a position held in one part of the world.

Maybe it'd require moving your "goalposts" to get there .. but I'm not moving anything, just pointing out exactly how the ground has lain here for decades.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#94

Post by kyriakos » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:09 AM UTC

perpetuallunch wrote: post #62

bladeacidic wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's apps for that these days. Not going to names them, but if you're still downloading a torrent file on a computer, you're behind the times. It's as easy as Netflix on an Android TV with a remote these days.

Don’t all those apps also expose you to VPN services using your connection as a gateway, or enrol you in a botnet, or exfiltrate your watch history to this weeks popular bad-actor, or expose everything on your local network to the internet?

No there are services that provide global cdn access to torrents. Your provider sees https traffic from your closest cdn edge. You don't share back at any point. These things are a couple of steps more to setup than getting a Netflix subscription and work almost an any device.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#95

Post by Aurornis » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #91

Aurornis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t mind paying for things and your only concern is the quality, then presumably you pay for the source material and then also download the best quality pirated version you can find, right? That would satisfy both of your claims: That you don’t mind paying for things and you only do piracy to seek out the highest quality. If you selectively choose not to pay for things where you can get away with it (e.g. no…

> presumably you pay for the source material I do. Multiple times, even.

Okay great. Then can you acknowledge that when everyone else is talking about piracy, none of us are talking about you?

You are the 0.001% of pirates, but you make assertions here like all pirates are high minded people who are secretly actually paying for the content and are only interested in some extra video quality. That describes such a vanishingly small number of pirates that it’s meaningless in the broader discussion about piracy.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#96

Post by matheusmoreira » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:18 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #95

matheusmoreira wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> presumably you pay for the source material I do. Multiple times, even.

Okay great. Then can you acknowledge that when everyone else is talking about piracy, none of us are talking about you? You are the 0.001% of pirates, but you make assertions here like all pirates are high minded people who are secretly actually paying for the content and are only interested in some extra video quality. That describes such a vanishingly small number of pirates that it’s meaningless in the broader dis…

I acknowledge nothing. Especially not those made up numbers.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#97

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:21 AM UTC

I don't understand what we're talking about here. The cryptography debate was won because the government was wrong. PGP for example is not dangerous, it's a safe and well-behaved piece of software that prevents certain messages from being read by people other than their intended recipient. If PGP had "escaped containment by finding a zero-day in a package proxy and reached production infrastructure at Hugging Face, exploiting additional zero-days along the way", everyone including Phil Zimmermann would have immediately agreed that this is a dangerous product which needs to be handled carefully.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#98

Post by femto » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:26 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #84

ronsor wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're tolerating a measles outbreak, our economy is in the trash due to tariffs and draconian immigration enforcement. Basically every sector that's not AI has been poisoned in one way or another in order to drive sufficient investment towards AI. Incompetence is not sacrifice.

Yeah, I'm not sure if I would call it "incompetence", but it wouldn't be hard for the U.S. public or private sectors to afford MMR vaccine doses for the whole population (or merely the portion that has missed doses on the recommended schedule). Those doses would have a super-low opportunity cost.

MMR vaccines would be a net positive to the US economy, to the tune of $3.5B in direct savings (14x benefit/cost) and $7.6 billion (26x benefit/cost) in wider societal benefits [1]. Those are 2004 figures, so the dollar amount savings would be even bigger now.

To a point made further up the chain: The US's woes aren't driven by AI investment, but the self-interest of a select group. Compare it to a thief who causes $20,000 damage to steal a $100 stereo from a car.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15106102/

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#99

Post by vermilingua » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:36 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #86

vermilingua wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I read these mental gymnastics comments about being leashed to half a dozen providers for “convenience” and wonder if these people have actually tried to learn how to use something like a NAS. I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. Inventing strawmans abou…

> I think the part they really dislike is the undermining of the moral superiority they claim by donating their money to corporations that contribute ~nothing to the actual evolution of culture. My local farmers and grocery stores contribute ~nothing to actual evolution of culture. I still think they deserve to get paid for what they do. I don’t think this is as smart of a point as you thought it was. Regardless, the…

I never said the content was worthless, I said the distributors are worthless. If I can get the same content, at a higher quality, more efficiently and cheaper (free) through piracy than legal means, the distributors are by definition not providing value.

I absolutely pay for physical media, for which a much higher share of revenue goes to the actual creators of content than the leeches who extract rent from it.

This is exactly why Steam has and continues to dominate the gaming market, they made it easier than piracy, and didn’t fall victim to the terminal-stage capitalism that has turned every previously decent streaming platform into hot garbage.

Re: Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights

#100

Post by antonvs » Sat, Aug 01, 2026, 4:40 AM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #85

Aurornis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Piracy is a service problem > Meanwhile the pirates offer Blu-Ray remuxes with commentary tracks, subtitles for every language, DRM free files that just work on your video player of choice. I think the only people who believe that pirating is easier than using the streaming services are people who spend so much time with computers that they round the mental overhead of navigating torrent websites, finding the corre…

> Nobody is ever going to convince me that pirating is actually easier than finding the thing I want to watch and putting it on my credit card. That's just because you're fine with consuming the low quality slop they stream out. Doesn't mean people who care more than you do are engaging in "mental gymnastics". We don't want the same things. I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncen…

> I want the best version of everything. The highest quality version. The uncensored version. The uncompressed version. The lossless version. The DRM-free version. The best version.

Basically the same greed that every billionaire has, just with negligible economic impact.