Comment by j2kun
6 hours ago
Building a tool that tries (and probably fails) to remove the watermark (due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win) is tacitly accepting the barcode. The hacker ethos should be, first and foremost, to run open source models locally without relying on a corporation.
>due to the arms race that large corporate machines will win
Much like how the entirety of Hollywood, book publishers, academic publishers, and game developers have won against piracy despite being some of the largest corps on earth and dedicating untold billions to the issue over the past 30 years?
They won the long game. Everything is rented and DRM now. Very little of what most people buy digitally is truly owned.
they didn't win by attacking piracy head-on though, they made capitulation easy & nice enough for us to happily go along.
They have a finite # of employees, a finite budget, and a finite amount of time.
Hobbyists do not. ROI is not a factor.
As yes, the hobbyist built nuclear weapons program.....
Legalize recreational plutonium.
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What? Some nerds on private trackers and kids on 123movies or whatever is not piracy winning by any material stretch.
Yes. Winning against piracy doesn't mean you completely eliminate piracy. It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
> It means you scare enough people into not doing it and make it a bit harder to do for others.
By which definition they utterly failed.
> Losing to piracy would see companies like Netflix and Spotify not thriving.
Not at all. Netflix and Spotify do well because they are a good value proposition for the average customer. Piracy is free at point of "purchase" but is (and always has been) expensive in terms of various sorts of overhead.
This is the “instead of using seatbelts, we should invest in trains” argument.
> No use messing with Google's watermark, fellas. Go do something else that's 100x harder instead.
> works for Google
Gee, I wonder why...
> [fighting against the system] is tacitly accepting the barcode.
I don't really see it. I think it's important to win on both fronts.
Especially as the open weight models are really generated by corporates, and they could stop releasing them at any time.
But we'd still have them. It's not like we're gaining much with new training anymore anyway
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They also have built in dystopian government authority enforcement in them unless you go to pains to sever those neurons.
Fighting within the system is accepting the system.
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