Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#1

Post by ravenhappy » Fri, Jan 24, 2025, 5:16 AM UTC

Like a station wagon barreling down the highway...

With the advent of enormous models such as R1, do any of you want me to download a model for you, and ship it to you on a storage device?

Having a gigabit connection at my home, I'm lucky enough to be able to download any model that piques interest. I know from experience that this is not the case for everyone.

I'm an established eBay seller since 2000(!), and I can send you the model of your choice, on the device of your choice, by snail mail. Like the car full of hard drives barreling down the highway, except in a well-packaged box, delivered to your doorstep by the courier of your choice.

The way I see this working is I share my ebay account, we establish trust..., you tell me which model, or probably which models you want, I git lfs them (from huggingface or wherever) onto a storage device that you send me, or that I purchase for you, and then I mail the model(s) to you via your preferred postal method, including to international addresses.

Can I help you get your hands on DeepSeek R1 or any other model, by snail mail?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#2

Post by tomcam » Fri, Jan 24, 2025, 7:17 AM UTC

Gigi Hadid, pls

Seriously, what a generous offer. You rock.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#3

Post by FloatArtifact » Fri, Jan 24, 2025, 7:23 AM UTC

That's a really generous offer. However, I feel most people are compute before bandwidth-constrained. I hope over the next years we'll have significantly advanced models 70b without paying $3,000 for something like Nvidia's digit.

Perhaps some may be region locked out of downloading such resources which may be able to take you up on your offer though!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#4

Post by rboyd » Fri, Jan 24, 2025, 2:52 PM UTC

elaborate supply chain attack eventually generates backdoored code

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#5

Post by fsckboy » Sat, Jan 25, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

tomcam wrote: post #2

Gigi Hadid, pls Seriously, what a generous offer. You rock.

you say generous... I think it's great that he's offering the arbitrage, but through his ebay account implies there will be a charge, no? could still be a very reasonable price but...

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#6

Post by ge96 » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 9:49 PM UTC

That could be a movie plot, some drive lost in the mail that has to be recovered. Where is it?! I don't know! Don't give me excuses give me answers!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#7

Post by ClassyJacket » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

FloatArtifact wrote: post #3

That's a really generous offer. However, I feel most people are compute before bandwidth-constrained. I hope over the next years we'll have significantly advanced models 70b without paying $3,000 for something like Nvidia's digit. Perhaps some may be region locked out of downloading such resources which may be able to take you up on your offer though!

In Australia the government legally mandated that I (and most of the country) am not permitted to have a wired internet connection above 25mbit/s. I am very bandwidth constrained.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#8

Post by tonymet » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

no, but xbox prereleases.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#9

Post by headcanon » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 10:00 PM UTC

ClassyJacket wrote: post #7

FloatArtifact wrote: post #3

That's a really generous offer. However, I feel most people are compute before bandwidth-constrained. I hope over the next years we'll have significantly advanced models 70b without paying $3,000 for something like Nvidia's digit. Perhaps some may be region locked out of downloading such resources which may be able to take you up on your offer though!

In Australia the government legally mandated that I (and most of the country) am not permitted to have a wired internet connection above 25mbit/s. I am very bandwidth constrained.

Are you sure? Looking here, it seems the law is minimum 25mbps: https://www.acma.gov.au/sip-rules-and-obligations

Re: Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

#10

Post by gopalv » Mon, Jan 27, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

rboyd wrote: post #4

elaborate supply chain attack eventually generates backdoored code

In the days of 56kbps internet days in India, there was a BBS (run by a cabal of sorts) who would download a linux distro CD and mail you a disk.

The email would have a link to the original .torrent and if a part of a disk was somehow corrupted, you could download just that chunk via BitTorrent instead of redownloading the whole thing or waiting for a new disk out.

Independently sourced checksums fixes most of the trust issues and a block-by-block checksum like what torrents had would allow for repair as well.