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trevelyan commented on Don't Trust Us; One-Click P2P Encrypted Chat and Video Call on Saito   saito.tech/dont-trust-us-... · Posted by u/mattwilsonn888
trevelyan · 2 years ago
i use this regularly now. highly recommend over zoom.
trevelyan commented on NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances   arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/justinc8687
bugglebeetle · 2 years ago
What will ultimately happen is that OpenAI and all big tech with have to pay out some sizable sum to large copyright holders, and in exchange be granted a de facto exclusive right to develop these technologies further because they’re the only ones who can do so “responsibly” with respect to copyright. It will take a long time to wind its way through the courts, but this could be the death knell for open source LLMs in the US.
trevelyan · 2 years ago
The prompts shown literally invite the LLM to complete the copyrighted text by providing unedited selections and asking the machine to finish those. Even if this is problematic in a small number of cases it is not a use case that undermines the business model of the newspaper since it requires the reader to have access to the original text. Nor will it be easy to demonstrate economic harm since this is not how readers consume news and is very far from how users interact with LLMs. Nor are the archival materials used for training remotely reflective of the "time-sensitive" articles that newspapers sell. And archival materials are easily available elsewhere so where is the case for economic harm?

The courts are going to rule that LLM training is a transformative use case that is protected as fair use under copyright law. They may rule that if an LLM-powered service is explicitly designed to enable copyright violation that is illegal, but there is no way any court is going to look at these examples and see it as anything other than the NYT fishing to try and generate a violation by using the LLM in a way that is very different than the service is intended to be used and which -- even if abused -- doesn't hurt the business model under which the text has been produced.

The most likely outcome is that LLM providers will add some sort of filter on output to prevent machines from regurgitating source documents. But this isn't a court case the NYT can win without gutting fair use protections, and that would be a terrible thing.

trevelyan commented on Canada has fewer entrepreneurs today than it did 20 years ago   cbc.ca/news/business/cana... · Posted by u/amichail
zaptheimpaler · 2 years ago
This article itself is a great case study. The implicit structure of this article is that Lynn got fired and became an entrepreneur because he was forced into it. They never asked him anything about what it would take to get more entrepreneurs or make his life as an entrepreneur easier.

Instead they asked 4 professors of entrepreneurship & govt. ministers who probably weren't entrepreneurs. These people mentioned twice that one of the reasons for low entrepreneurship is because unemployment is too low and jobs pay too well... the whole push for this is coming from callous bureaucrats who've never been anywhere close to entrepreneurship who apparently believe its so bad that the only reason someone would do it is if they have no other options..

What a joke.. it's hard to believe this level of stupidity , it might just be malice (a pretext to justify raising interest rates and increase unemployment)

trevelyan · 2 years ago
Perhaps you are being a bit cynical? There are certainly no problems that can't be solved by giving more money to government initiatives like the MaRS Centre in Ontario. These institutions also create jobs and are businesses of a certain sort, so funding them is supporting business directly.

And who can argue with the results? Several promising entrepreneurs each year take advantage of these critical programs to consult with pro-business advisers who assist in job creation by recommending they apply for 3k tax breaks.

trevelyan commented on Removing Sybils from an Open Network   wiki.saito.io/consensus/s... · Posted by u/mattwilsonn888
SkepticalSense · 2 years ago
The paper is deeply flawed. The most important flaw is admitted by the authors in the paper in the final paragraph of Part 1.:

"Until we reach the point we can formally establish that users are incentivized to broadcast their transactions to multiple nodes, we ask readers to treat this assumption as a design parameter as well."

To put it simply, the proof requires behavior by users which is neither incentivised or enforced. Other egregious flaws are that the "proof" insists that sybil actors do things not required of non-sybil actors, i.e. add unnecessary routing hops, and that sybil actors are arbitrarily excluded from being the orgin node.

trevelyan · 2 years ago
You missed the last paragraph.

The dominant strategy for users is indeed to broadcast two nodes.

trevelyan commented on Removing Sybils from an Open Network   wiki.saito.io/consensus/s... · Posted by u/mattwilsonn888
mattwilsonn888 · 2 years ago
As trevelyan stated, and for clarification: the protocol described in the OP is not PoS. I think that was assumed, but maybe not clear.
trevelyan · 2 years ago
the irony is that POW is actually more complex here, which is why it is vulnerable to these attacks
trevelyan commented on Removing Sybils from an Open Network   wiki.saito.io/consensus/s... · Posted by u/mattwilsonn888
nullc · 2 years ago
One risk in creating cryptosystems is that I think applies very much to these POS systems is that you create something, it gets broken, you revise it, broke, revise it broken, revise it broken, revise it each time adding more complexity... okay no breaks found. Is it now a cryptographically secure system or was it just revised until it was cryptographically secure against review?

That's very much the history of POS systems but it's even worse than that, because as the revisions went they added new conditions to the assumed security model so at the end of the day the security assumptions are very different from where they started. They might be secure but for example a function whose security definition is that whatever the function does it correct is always "secure". :P

There is one prominent POS cryptocurrency (I'll not name it because it's not relevant and naming it will just invoke vicious shills) which has a formal security proof that starts with the assumption that all participants have a network that faithfully delivers all messages without loss and in the same order. It's trivial to have a consensus system that is secure in that model because you don't even need a consensus system in that model: "first transaction out of any competing set wins" is an adequate policy, the network in that case is equivalent to a consensus system. (Maybe the system provides some useful security properties, but its security proof won't tell you anything about them)

In any case we're largely in violent agreement. I think.

While I can agree with your argument that some of the friction in these systems may have practical utility even if it doesn't meet a strong security criteria, the danger that worries me is that people don't actually have a clear mental model for what they do provide or what risks they have. This may lead them to expose themselves in ways that they wouldn't if the properties were better known, and ultimately result in losses greater than the benefits.

Or maybe not: lots of things work fine on fully centralized systems, or works fine even when their security rests on no one bothering to attack. But there is a little pedantic voice inside me that weeps at the obfuscation and misrepresentation.

trevelyan · 2 years ago
The sybil-proof mechanism here is not POS but a variant of POW.
trevelyan commented on Removing Sybils from an Open Network   wiki.saito.io/consensus/s... · Posted by u/mattwilsonn888
somezero · 2 years ago
Sybil attacks [1] came out about a decade before the Red Balloons paper [2] or the DARPA Challenge itself [3]. It is proven in [1] that CA is necessary for a Sybil-proof system, which made people to talk about Sybil resistance eg [4] - all before Bitcoin or the DARPA challenge.

Unless I’m categorically missing something, Claims like network centralization is much less likely in a Sybil-proof system, is just plain wrong and confusing, to say the least, if discussed “formally” and “mathematically”.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/the-syb...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1111.2626.pdf

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Network_Challenge?wprov=...

[4] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-85230-8_...

trevelyan · 2 years ago
I think perhaps you should read the paper if you want to have a deeper discussion? An understanding of how the mechanism works should make it clear how the solution enables outbound payments to network nodes, which -- in turn -- creates a for-profit incentive to run access points and network infrastructure.

Self-provisioning networks are indeed more strongly resistant to "centralization" than those which are deployed by outside parties. The alternative in the blockchain space is a reliance on outside parties and business models like Infura to provide access nodes and APIs. Unfortunately, any external business model capable of monetizing such infrastructure requires closure around data-and-money-flows, which creates key points where cartelization and monopolization emerges.

Looking at the links you've provided, afaict you seem mostly concerned that the term "sybil-proof" is used to describe a situation in which not using multiple identifies to collude is a dominant strategy instead of an "impossibility according to the laws of physics"? Four points here:

The first is we're dealing with an academic term that is used in a specific context ("no information propagation without self-cloning") and even more specifically in the context of an impossibility proof that has stood for a decade; showing that this impossibility proof is not actually valid is a substantive step forwards and nitpicking terminology is missing the point.

The second is that your definition isn't better. Even networks with trusted third parties cannot prevent sybilling by this definition since it creates a definitional impossibility. While a certificate authority can limit entry, it can never truly know that two distinct identities are not controlled by the same person. All a CA really does is provide a point of closure (monopolization, centralization) which can theoretically identify and tax colluding participants.

The third is that achieving a dominant strategy in which sybilling is disincentivized is a massive step forward. It does not make sense to refer to this as "sybil-resistance" in a field in which mechanisms without this property are considered to have "sybil-resistance".

Finally, and most importantly, one of the consequences of this mechanism that is that all attack vectors that can be carried out using multiple identities are more efficiently carried out with a single identity. So it is not the existence of multiple identities or the collusion between them that is the source of the problem.

trevelyan commented on Removing Sybils from an Open Network   wiki.saito.io/consensus/s... · Posted by u/mattwilsonn888
katella · 2 years ago
Why should routing nodes be rewarded at all.
trevelyan · 2 years ago
Do you want your transaction fee to pay for mining, or do you want it to pay for the servers that run the network? If it pays for mining, who pays for the servers that run the network?

u/trevelyan

KarmaCake day2937February 24, 2007
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