Aaron was the OG. If you've never dug through his blog, do yourself a favor [1]. Also make some time to watch The Internet's Own Boy doc about him [2] and look up some of his talks during the SOPA shenanigans. RIP.
I know I support what aaronsw did and I don’t think he shouldn’t have gotten in any trouble for it, let alone to the tragic level it went to. As for sama, I’m not sure, on one hand I like the innovation and on the other hand it’s very worrying for humanity. I appreciate the post and the fond memories of Aaron but I’m not in complete agreement with the author about sama.
In the photo there are some other faces that I think I might recognise, but I'm not 100% sure. Is there a list of everyone in the picture somewhere on the internet?
Edit I think the lady on the left is Jessica Livingston and a younger PG on the right
Hard to say when there is a profit motive for all industries. Seems like every industry at the moment is not really looking for human advancement, or maybe it is looking at advancing but only if the results are expensive for end users and efficient/proprietary for the company.
I don't understand. If something hurts your civilization but it was free, does that make it better? Like if everyone was able to build a nuclear bomb, would that make the ensuing nuclear winter more moral?
Thank you, Sam Altman and everyone at OpenAI, for creating ChatGPT and unleashing the modern era of generative AI, which I use every day to speed up my job and coding at home.
Signed,
Someone who doesn't care that you're making $$$$ from it
The point is that regardless if you're negative, neutral, or positive of others using data for profit, you would hold those who use it altruistically higher.
I hold both of them high enough. As Aaron, I did my good share of book/articles piracy, even before it was online (here in Mexico it was veery common to Xerox and share whole books with students in the 80s and 90s).
I understand, Aaron became a martyr; even though he died due to depression and not for "a cause". I applaud what he achieved as a person.
You may have that right as long as you agree that others have the right to not care about your right when deciding to use "your" stuff however they want.
No, you should not have that right. Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity. AI does not replicate your work directly. So you can still sell your artificial scarcity even if it is trained on.
At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!
I'll use it to find information , semi-reliably. Hallucinations are still a huge issue. But I can't help thinking that Stackoverflow and Google have self-enshittified to a point where it makes LLMs look better relative to the pinnacle of more conventional knowledge engines than they actually are.
If you take the evolution of those platforms from saying 2005-2015, and project forward ten years, we should be in a much better place than we are. Instead they've gone backwards as a result of enshittification and toxic management.
Aaron Swartz was targeted by some pretty overly zealous prosecution no objection, but lets not forget that what he really did.
He put a laptop in a wiring closet that was DOSing JSTOR and kept changing IPs to avoid being blocked. The admins had to put a camera on the closet to eventually catch him.
He might have had good intentions but the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism.
For all the noise the real punishment he was facing was 6 months in low security [1]. I'm pretty sure OpenAI would have also been slapped hard for the same crime.
> charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison
Any lawyer knows that is stupid math. The DOJ has sentencing guidelines that never add up the years in prison for charges to be served consecutively. The media likes to do that to get big numbers, but it isn’t an honest representation of the charges.
I don’t think charges against Schwartz should have been filed, but I also can’t stand bad legal math.
Swartz own lawyer, writing after his death, said he didn't believe Swartz would have received a custodial sentence even if he had gone to trial and lost. The prosecutors were offering him months in custody, against a 6-7 year sentence they believed they could get (implausibly, if you run the guidelines calculation). Nobody has to take the "35 years" thing seriously; nobody involved directly in this case did. Swartz was exactly the kind of nerd who would have memorized the sentencing guidelines just to win arguments on a message board (that's a compliment) and he had extremely good lawyers.
(I'm ambivalent about everything in this case and certainly don't support the prosecutors, but much of what gets written about Swartz's case is misinformation.)
The index contains a file name that you can append to the CommonCrawl url to download the archive and view.
More detailed information on downloading archives here:
Aaron had an unstable personality and they took advantage of that. A nudge here and there, and here comes the suicide. Look around people who Aaron frequented with to find the culprits...
The main impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions were that it became much more difficult to walk onto MIT’s campus and access journal articles from a laptop without being a member of the MIT community. I did this for a decade beforehand and this became much more locked down in the years after his actions due to restrictions the publishers pushed at MIT. Aaron intentionally went to the more open academic community in Cambridge (Harvard, his employer, was much more restrictive) and in the process ruined that openness for everyone.
I don't understand the singling out of Altman here. If there's shade to throw at Altman, it's that his company occupies a position similar to that of Tesla: an early mover to a technology that appears to be on a path to universal adoption, including by large incumbents. It's hard to see what would be different about things were Altman not in the position he occupies now.
They were in the same YC batch standing next to each in a photo, so someone looked at the photo and chose to juxtapose their work and fates on the day Aaron Swartz died. If this is what you mean by "singling out", I don't see what's hard to understand.
Readit News
[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ&rco=1
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22196
Edit I think the lady on the left is Jessica Livingston and a younger PG on the right
1. zak stone, memamp
2. steve huffman, reddit
3. alexis ohanian, reddit
4. emmet shear, twitch
5. ?
6. ?
7. ?
8. jesse tov, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/simmery
9. pg
10. jessica
11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name)
12. phillip yuen, textpayme
13. ?
14. aaron swartz, infogami at the time
15. ?
16. sam altman, loopt at the time
17. justin kan, twitch
Chris Slowe
Clickfacts had 3 founders so probably that's 3 of your ?s.
The photo has no 13 btw.
Signed,
Someone who doesn't care that you're making $$$$ from it
I understand, Aaron became a martyr; even though he died due to depression and not for "a cause". I applaud what he achieved as a person.
What about if I’m an artist and I don’t want my work included in the training data for an image generation model?
No
You could choose not to publish, and be read
If you are read you can be used to learn from
At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!
If you take the evolution of those platforms from saying 2005-2015, and project forward ten years, we should be in a much better place than we are. Instead they've gone backwards as a result of enshittification and toxic management.
Dead Comment
He put a laptop in a wiring closet that was DOSing JSTOR and kept changing IPs to avoid being blocked. The admins had to put a camera on the closet to eventually catch him.
He might have had good intentions but the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism.
For all the noise the real punishment he was facing was 6 months in low security [1]. I'm pretty sure OpenAI would have also been slapped hard for the same crime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...
Edit: added link
I didnt think people on “hacker news” would be defending what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Any lawyer knows that is stupid math. The DOJ has sentencing guidelines that never add up the years in prison for charges to be served consecutively. The media likes to do that to get big numbers, but it isn’t an honest representation of the charges.
I don’t think charges against Schwartz should have been filed, but I also can’t stand bad legal math.
(I'm ambivalent about everything in this case and certainly don't support the prosecutors, but much of what gets written about Swartz's case is misinformation.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42660377
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624
CommonCrawl archives robots.txt
For convenience, you can view the extracted data here:
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You are welcome to verify for yourself by searching for “wiki.diasporafoundation.org/robots.txt” in the CommonCrawl index here:
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The index contains a file name that you can append to the CommonCrawl url to download the archive and view. More detailed information on downloading archives here:
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From September to December, the robots.txt at wiki.diasporafoundation.org contained this, and only this:
>User-agent: * >Disallow: /w/
What Aaron was trying to achieve was great, how he want about it is what ruined his life.
Would that I were that kind of dumb.
Throwing soup at paintings doesn’t make the paintings available to the public.
What he did had a direct and practical effect.
The main impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions were that it became much more difficult to walk onto MIT’s campus and access journal articles from a laptop without being a member of the MIT community. I did this for a decade beforehand and this became much more locked down in the years after his actions due to restrictions the publishers pushed at MIT. Aaron intentionally went to the more open academic community in Cambridge (Harvard, his employer, was much more restrictive) and in the process ruined that openness for everyone.