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Posted by u/ravenhappy 7 months ago
Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?
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?

rboyd · 7 months ago
elaborate supply chain attack eventually generates backdoored code
gopalv · 7 months ago
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.

ivanmontillam · 7 months ago
It still baffles me how BitTorrent is not used more for legit use cases of unreliable Internet connections.

I remember installing Silkroad Online (the MMORPG) and noticing the installer used to be a clever BitTorrent client packaged with a single torrent of the game.

Server load balancing on its own.

FloatArtifact · 7 months ago
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!

ClassyJacket · 7 months ago
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.
headcanon · 7 months ago
Are you sure? Looking here, it seems the law is minimum 25mbps: https://www.acma.gov.au/sip-rules-and-obligations
FloatArtifact · 7 months ago
Could you expound on the rationale of why there's such an imposed limit?
senectus1 · 7 months ago
you forgot to add a /s
sourcecodeplz · 7 months ago
Nice initiative, but I feel the ones who can afford to run R1 locally also have the resource to download it
hartator · 7 months ago
Yeah, 404 of GPU ram is quite the gpu cluster.
matt_heimer · 7 months ago
Why not make a snail mailer download service?

Mediawiki dumps, Linux distros, AI models, etc.

tomcam · 7 months ago
Gigi Hadid, pls

Seriously, what a generous offer. You rock.

fsckboy · 7 months ago
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...
ge96 · 7 months ago
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!
tonymet · 7 months ago
no, but xbox prereleases.