P03 Locke

Holy shit… I finally found one of the screenshots for these loaders:

You could load up a disk full of games and tie it to a boot loader menu like this.

I mean, that’s how we ultimately got them. We must have had most of the popular ATARI XL games in two wooden floppy boxes.

But, you gotta respect the networked distribution even back then. Pirates would create their disk packs, upload it to some national BBS. It gets picked up by more local BBSs, and tech-saavy modem users would download it to floppies. All the while sneakernet would carry it down the last mile to fill in the gaps. Some of this shit even went international, as long as somebody dealt with the long-distance fees (or phreaked their way out of them).

EDIT: Just to give you an idea of the network we were dealing with.

There was a pirate scene even in the 80s, during the 8-bit computer era. Transferring games to floppy from a 300 baud modem.

Parents had a good friend of theirs that gave us a ton of games every time he visited. Most of them were game selection startup menus, because the uploaders wanted to use up all of the space on the floppy, so they crammed it up with 6-8 games each. You can still find these disk copies on certain C64/ATARI XL game torrents.

All the while SPA was still pushing anti-piracy commercials on PBS channels. “Don’t copy that floppy” was always their silly tagline.

And yea, once Napster turned into a household name, piracy was mainstream.

Anna’s Archive should hire this same lawyer.

Well, I can wait for those games’ developers to stop losing their mind and remove the cancer from their game. They aren’t getting one cent from me, otherwise.

More like “AAA games are a big pile of shit, and only AAA games bother trying to fuck over the customer with Denuvo”.

Yes, but how does this connect together? I don’t believe for a minute that it’s coincidence.

I’m curious to know the connections between this and Collective Shout.

Gee, I wonder why.

Posting generational memes from 2016? That’s a bold choice.

Mark Twain started this nonsense.

When they can argue its for “transformative use” or whatever the magic words are? Thats technically fair use in US law.

Well, considering they transformed its use to about 250GB of weights, that would qualify. That’s at least thousands of times less than the size of the books they downloaded, so you can’t really claim “they downloaded the books and put it into the model unaltered”.

It’s not like you can ask one of the models for page 156 of the second Harry Potter book, unless it’s cheating and attached to a search engine to try to find the result. There is no compression technique that can take something to a thousandth of its size without an substantial loss. You can, however, ask it to summarize what happened in the second Harry Potter book, including what the actual title is, without it trying to look it up on its own.

The AI bros might have a serious point within the law, and that should scare actual artists. It should also scare studios like Disney that hold a fuck ton of “intellectual property”.

Actual artists have been fucked over by copyright since its invention. Copyright, patents, and intellectual rights were created under the false pretense that it “protects the little person”, but these are lies told by the rich and powerful to keep themselves rich and powerful. Time and time again, we have seen how broken the patent system is, how it is impossible to not step on musical copyright, how Mark Twain, Sonny Bono, and Disney has extended copyrights to forever, and how the megacorporations have way more money than everybody else to defend those copyrights and patents. These people are not your friend, and their legal protections are not for you.

If the rich end up dismantling their own IP shield that has existed to enrich themselves for centuries in the name of AI progress, I’m going to call that a win.

Meh, go play Terraria. It has less baggage.

Didn’t someone at Google write a memo that was like “we’re kinda fucked b/c you can re-create this stuff with enough resources” like 2 years ago?

Basically, yes. They were specifically decrying the amount of open-sourcing they and their American competitors were doing, because capitalism, of course. Around this time, we had examples like StabilityAI’s StableDiffusion and Meta’s LLaMA as open-source models. And around this time, everybody else started closing their models, despite the fact that the research kept on going out in the open. StabilityAI kept their models open, mostly because they had no choice, but the attitude shifted towards profitability.

So, China took the open-source mantle, and these open/closed lines are being drawn strictly around national divisions as this American vs. China slant. Which is mostly a diversion of the real battle.

Whoever wrote this article didn’t even bother to do the most basic of research.

DeepSeek fully admitted they started with ChatGPT outputs to train its model. And then they released it as an open-source model, so that everybody else can “steal” their work. On the image/video front, the general public has created every possible variation on top of every model you can think of. On top of that, any model that has ever been released with full weights has been spun into whatever variation or VRAM size you want.

The ugly truth that the American companies want to hide is the fact that they are spending trillions of dollars on an oligopoly that they can’t keep long-term. They hope that they can just keep spending more money to add more billions of parameters to their models, and keep technologically competitive with the secondary open-source models. But, they’ve already ran into diminishing returns over a year ago, and the global compute sector physically cannot keep up with demand for another cycle of even more diminishing returns.

The other factor is that realistic miniaturization of models is already here. Some of the smaller sizes aren’t as effective as the 250GB models they use on cloud-based services, but you can still do a lot with a 16GB or 24GB video card, using models of those sizes. Optimization and LLM quantization is getting better and better each year. The AI bubble burst is going to force a cascade shift into a new era of localization. Everybody is sick to fucking death of renting and subscribing to everything. Us pirates already do so on the media front, and soon localization of LLMs is going to become way more popular.

The question isn’t “Can people steal the tech?”. It’s “how long will people notice that it’s already happening?”

Has any pirate site ever been trustworthy?

Yes. Next question.

Tell them to pound sand.

Copyright as it is now is an injustice.

At best, copyright with a limit of 25 years, the law before Mark Twain fucked all of us over, would suck a lot less.

At worst, corporations would still exploit it to totality, because they have money, and you don’t.

Copyright was created with an agreement that the public would receive their public domain dues in a timely manner. The corpos broke that contract with the public. Therefore, piracy is not only justified, but a moral duty to preserve what corporations casually throw away, or exploit with mindless memberberries.

I would not be sad at all to see the entirety of copyright completely abolished. Open source is already doing a damn good job, and AI might end up hammering the final nail.

whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”

I kind of get what he’s saying here, especially when draconian California laws can put 18-year-olds in prison for daring to have sex with a 17-year-old, when they are both in high school. (I think they finally fixed that legal gap, but it existed for a long time.)

But, completely outside the whole age and human brain development “debate”, there’s also power dynamics at play here that aren’t even considered. Epstein is a powerful man that used his influence to coerce girls to have sex with other powerful men. Even if she was 18 or 25, a woman in that position is still being exploited, with human trafficking in the mix.

Download all existing literature to build a library for preservation and you’re called a pirate.

Said library contains petabytes of the exact text of each and every piece of literature.

Download all existing literature from aforementioned library to train an LLM and you’re a tech innovator.

Said model contains gigabytes of a bunch of weights that can never go back to the exact words of the book.

What a strange world we live in.

It’s not strange at all. It’s degrees of compression. You compress a JPEG to the point that it’s unrecognizable, and it’s no longer breaking copyright. It’s essentially like trying to write a book you just read based on memory.