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The main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporar
by danudey 2mo ago
The main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporarily.
It might raise the cost for some scrapers, to some degree, but it raises the cost to, effectively, infinity for anyone who needs to use a screen reader, a browser's 'reader' view, or any other assistive technology.
Things like this just remind me of EA's Spore; it released with DRM so draconian that legitimate players were getting locked out of the game during the first week, while people who pirated the game had no problem whatsoever and were playing the game without issue even before its release. The legitimate users of the thing were the only ones punished by the technology designed to stop everyone but them.
This is going to be the same thing; a website which AI will be able to read in short order but which assistive technologies will not be able to read ever.
- jimmaswell 2mo agoI also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?
- r_lee 2mo agoyou mean benefit a private company training their AI model which they market to the public in order to get to their trillion dollar IPO?
- infinite_spin 2mo agoThat seems like an unfair equivalence. Lots of things you enjoy, including this very forum, benefit already wealthy private companies. That doesn't seem like it's a very good litmus test for whether something is overall a benefit to humanity.
- Retric 2mo ago> overall a benefit to humanity. By that metric a complete ban on LLM’s might be on the table, which I don’t think is something you’re advocating for here.
- infinite_spin 2mo agoI'm advocating for a litmus test that can't be easily abused, and I'm advocating against unfair equivalences. I also am not calling "overall a benefit to humanity" a metric, it's more of a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.
- Retric 2mo ago> a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics. That’s dangerous ground because of how you can arbitrarily change weights of different metrics. If the goal is the “overall benefit of humanity” then that’s what’s important not metrics.
- infinite_spin 2mo agoHow do you propose assessing "overall benefit of humanity" without metrics?
- Retric 2mo agoQualitative assessment etc not just metrics. How do you propose to asses “overall benefit to humanity” with metrics?
- infinite_spin 2mo agoNumber of successful outcomes reported (e.g. with disabled students, cancer patients). Labor costs. Latency of services. Scientific discoveries found. Etc. I'm not trying to discount the qualitative approach, but I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.
- satvikpendem 2mo agoThat's why one should advocate for open weight models.
- wesleywt 2mo agoA trillion dollar IPO buys a lot of politicians to make these illegal.
- SideQuark 2mo agoSo jealousy is the argument? If someone reads my work am I worse off? Why would I post it to the web? If someone indexes it so others can find it am I worse off? Should I complain they also make money helping others find it? If someone build on it in a way I did not do, never planned to do, and found really neat new tech from reading lots of works, why should I get so upset? Seems oddly sour grapes.
- neuroticnews25 1mo agoI don't think we should hold our relations to big corporations to the same moral standards we invented for interacting with people, like "don't be jelous" or "don't be petty", because corporations won't reciprocate. They banned my account, so fuck them, simple as.
- JodieBenitez 2mo ago> taking nothing away from you Hosting is not free.
- silon42 2mo agoThat is the problem. I believe web is long overdue for a torrent like model where hosting is shared among all users (and ISPs instead of 'cloudflares').
- brnt 2mo agoOpera Unite. The idea was that hosting HTML should be as simple as browsing it.
- silon42 2mo agoThat is the problem. I believe web is long overdue for a torrent like model where hosting is shared among all users (and ISPs).
- neuroticnews25 2mo agoMarginal cost of serving a text document is ~0.
- pwdisswordfishq 2mo agoMarginal cost of serving a text document repeatedly to hordes of reckless scrapers hiding behind residential proxies is ⋙0.
- GlacierFox 2mo agoIs this bait? Wtf haha
- akramachamarei 2mo agoIf the comment baited you, maybe it's because you're holding onto a popular but nonsensical belief system, and you're experiencing painful cognitive dissonance.
- SiempreViernes 1mo agoAre you intentionally being rude, or is this just how HN raised you to think?
- redsocksfan45 1mo ago[dead]
- akramachamarei 1mo agoIt is not rude to point out that an insubstantial comment, which in particular falls foul of Hackernews guidelines, likely comes from a sublogical mental process. I regret my apparent failure to promote introspection or further inquiry into the issue, but I suppose the rockheadedness to which I reacted would prevent this anyway for the foreseeable future.
- GlacierFox 1mo agoWhat a nonsensical comment. Are you experiencing painful cognitive dissonance?
- Alien1Being 1mo agoAre you hopelessly naive or are you just Sam Altman ?
- teekert 1mo agoWell, as a user of LLMs I also find it annoying, the agents gather information on my behalf, they save me time and money. Are we splitting humanity? Those with info accessible to agents and those who only use their human sense directly? This whole distinction is futile imho. And no, I'm not Sam Altman. I mean training is one thing, you should honor people's licenses, but browsing and gathering information? Why force me to do it with my biological neural net?
- tekne 1mo agoHonestly, I'll take it a step further: what's wrong with training? Having principles means applying them uniformly -- even to large entities or those you hate (it's fine if the principles themselves have size bounds in them, though -- versus them being implicitly glued on -- but then you need a universal justification for why that size. Which is possible and valid.) I think that one should use the best algorithms, the best information, the best knowledge they have access to -- period. I don't like using gimped machines, I don't like making gimped machines, and I certainly don't like being sold them. So I'm not going to turn around and say LLMs need to be gimped via arbitrary restrictions on their training data.
- jimmaswell 1mo agoI agree. As soon as I understood the gist of how modern models do what they do, I found it unreasonable to apply any stricter standards to their "learning" than we do to humans. Humans learn by reading ideas and looking at images, then go on to have ideas and draw images based on that training. We have definitions of plagiarism and copyright infringement that apply to people based on what they put out into the world, not how they trained themselves to get there[0]. Artists literally trace art and study specific examples in detail to learn, and that's not a bad thing. Humans can also accidentally plagiarize or make things identical to past works - it's easy to think a great guitar riff just came to you when it was really based on a song you heard years ago that stuck in a part of your mind but you don't even consciously remember the influence, for example. It would certainly be nice for AI output to provide citations if it realizes it's using a significant chunk of an idea from its training that has a clear source (or many), though this is difficult in the same way it would be difficult for me to cite where I learned about the Towers of Hanoi. The AI frequently does web searches for specific resources to get ideas from these days, which are easy for it to cite. However, it would have a chilling effect on progress as a whole if we all started jealously guarding our ideas so close to our chest that machines couldn't read them and only a select few humans who passed some kind of gate (or even paid us) were allowed to see them. We would be nowhere close to where we are if we had always had such a mindset. --- [0] We use proven absence of viewing certain material as a legal shield against copyright infringement e.g. clean room engineering, but this isn't strictly necessary, and possibly even discouraged with modern precedent: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740 https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740
- customguy 2mo agoSo scrapers are using those people as hostages. So let's have something like a HTML meta tag to link to an accessible version of a website and hard jail for using it for scraping. It's not a technical issue, it's a social one, people behave differently given the same set of possibilities and incentives, and we can and should target those who fuck it up for everyone.
- foobarchu 1mo agoYou can just as easily say that people using these fonts are the ones holding accessibility users hostage, since they are willingly choosing to use exclusionary tools. If an ISP blocks an entire apartment blocks internet in response to one users activity, it's pretty clear the ISP is holding the neighbors connectivity hostage because they made the move. It's the same thing, except the little guy role happens to be flipped.
- nottorp 2mo agoAnd even if you don't use a screen reader, how about search? Reader mode? Saving for later? Oh and lynx/links...