You mean a transparency log? Just sign and publish. Or if it’s confidential, have a timestamp authority sign it, but what’s the point of a confidential blockchain? Sure, we han have a string of hashes chained together á la git, but that’s just an implementation detail. Where does the trust come from, who does the audit? That’s the interesting part.

If your blockchain isn’t distributed, it doesn’t need to be a blockchain, because then you already have trust established.

Git gud

/s

You assume a uniform distribution. I’m guessing that it’s not. The question isn’t ”Does the model contain compressed representations of all works it was trained on”. Enough information on any single image is enough to be a copyright issue.

Besides, the situation isn’t as obviously flawed with image models, when compared to LLMs. LLMs are just broken in this regard, because it only takes a handful of bytes being retained in order to violate copyright.

I think there will be a ”find out” stage fairly soon. Currently, the US projects lots and lots of soft power on the rest of the world to enforce copyright terms favourable to Disney and friends. Accepting copyright violations for AI will erode that power internationally over time.

Personally, I do think we need to rework copyright anyway, so I’m not complaining that much. Change the law, go ahead and make the high seas legal. But set against current copyright laws, most large datasets and most models constitute copyright violations. Just imagine the shitshow if OpenAI was an European company training on material from Disney.

Document databases are the future /s

Or you know, trusted timestamps and cryptographic signatures via normal PKI. A Merkle tree isn’t worth shit legally if you can’t verify it against a trust outside of the tree.

All of the blockchain bullshit miss that part - you can create a cryptographic representation of money or contracts, but you can’t actually enforce, verify or trust anything in the real world without intermediaries. On the other hand, I can trust a certificate from a CA because there are verifiable actual real-world consequences for someone if that CA breaks legal agreements.

I’ll use a folder of actual papers, signed using a pen. Have some witnesses, make sure they have a legal stake and consequences, and you are golden.

Distributed blockchains are useful when all of the below are fulfilled:

• Need for distributed ledger
• Peers are adversarial w.r.t. contents of transactions in the ledger
• Enough peers exist so that no group can become a majority and thus assume control
• No trusted central authority exists

Here, we have a single peer creating entries in a ledger. We can get away with a copy of the ledger and one or more trusted timestamping authorities.

There is an argument that training actually is a type of (lossy) compression. You can actually build (bad) language models by using standard compression algorithms to ”train”.

By that argument, any model contains lossy and unstructured copies of all data it was trained on. If you download a 480p low quality h264-encoded Bluray rip of a Ghibli movie, it’s not legal, despite the fact that you aren’t downloading the same bits that were on the Bluray.

Besides, even if we consider the model itself to be fine, they did not buy all the media they trained the model on. The action of downloading media, regardless of purpose, is piracy. At least, that has been the interpretation for normal people sailing the seas, large companies are of course exempt from filthy things like laws.

Ctrl+Alt+F2

What? Just base64 encrypt it before you store it in the git hub

I need Emacs, a terminal emulator and a web browser to be productive, but basically nothing else. (Give me my tiling window manager, with a config I haven’t bothered to update the past few years for an extra 3% bump in efficiency.)

It’s weird, I know how all the components in a modern desktop environment work and fit together but I don’t want to care anymore. I want someone to hold my hand, manage my system and make all the thinking go away, right up until I ssh out from my desktop and out into a fleet of servers and start spewing out esoteric commands and orchestration.

My dream is to have someone manage my desktop for me, so I don’t even have to think about it.

I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.

• BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
• ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
• ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
• DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.

But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:

The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.

For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.

Bad enterprise admins running companies without auth, MS getting the blame.

I’m a bit of a casual

I have a mac I use for some specific tasks. I’ll agree the Apple is, ehh, Apple.

But mounting network fileshares is dead simple. My SMB share pops right up, authentication works fine, the user interface for it is fine. If I wanted to use it remotely, I’d just export it over my tailnet.

’sshfs’ is good for short stints of brief use, but ultimately it breaks on a protocol level as soon as your socket dies, on any OS.

NFS over TLS exists, but typically you use kerberos for such deployments. Bit too much for home use though…

I’ll extend your RHEL corpo parents with the other children in the family. The majority of their revenue comes from completely legal oxycodone sales, any (alleged) trafficking is just a side hustle.

Rocky: The rich corpo parent’s least favorite child. Chill dude. Gives hugs to his parents victims. Still intends to take over the family business and run an oxycodone-empire - but ethically.

Alma: The other reasonable estranged child. Wants to take over the family business, but considers high quality ”herbal remedies” the only pain medication anyone would ever need.

Oracle: Wants to pivot the family business into more potent opioids and possibly world domination. While it’s obvious he has access to ”stuff”, you suspect he has ties to multiple cartels and possibly the yakuza. For some reason has direct numbers to several heads-of-state in his phone.

I don’t believe those MBA types should be in the discussion at this level at all.

That’s the thing. They are in the discussion. It doesn’t matter what we think about it. If touching Rust risks yielding lower profits this quarter, it’s an automatic ”fuck off you filthy hobbyists”. Even having the discussion costs money.

Rust in the kernel isn’t about technology, it’s about economics and risk management. I’d like to see the discussion move on from ”C bad unsafe rust gud typesaf” to a level where the suggested benefits of Rust are made clear to the people holding the bags of money, preferably presenting some actual monetary benefits. (Oh, and to make things worse, there are thousands of different stakeholders, with different interests, many of which are in conflict. Good luck!)

So yeah, I get that you don’t care about it. But you probably should.

I’m still kind of on the fence about Rust in the kernel. Linux isn’t some random hobby project, there are serious people working for serious companies in the project. Rust has a clear value proposition w.r.t. it’s qualities as a language, but I don’t think it’s as clear on a system level.

Say I’m working for a large company as a dev, maintaining a subsystem (let’s say a driver). Letting other people (filthy casual hobbyists) mess around with their filthy type safety will eventually spill into my subsystem and cause extra work. I don’t want the extra work, I just want to have my driver working and then go home. And even if I’m okay with the extra work, my boss won’t be. Even the risk of extra costs down the line will be enough for some to shut it down completely.

There are boring people working for huge corporations with huge stakes in the Linux kernel. I don’t think they see that much value in Rust at the moment, and I think the Rust crowd might need to hire some MBAs if they want to expand their presence in the kernel.

Just hardcode the DB credentials in your client? Stop making things complicated. _/s