I find it far more ironic that they are called Reclaim the Internet.
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model. So I don't think AI will lead to more centralization. Besides local models, the interface itself - prompt based steering - is eminently more open ended that apps or websites ever were. Cloud or local, you get more control now as a user.
But you cannot train an open weight model by yourself, and maybe there could some distributed training net ran by thousand of volunteers around the world in the future, but until we get there we will still be tied to BigCo (American, Chinese or wherever in the world) decisions.
You would need institutions to do this? What do we have besides global megacorps with the resources for this? Universities perhaps training models for their local catchment?
This is exactly why I believe LLMs are fundamentally divergent from the trajectory of internet service path we have been on. It allows us to create space and disconnection from an otherwise tethered experience.
It is possible that models are only the byproduct of what frontier labs are doing. In other words, what you call AI is just a log, a trace of what the real AI, for which only frontier labs have access to, did.
> You can't host the internet on your machine, or download a "Google" or "Meta" but you can download a local model.
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
You do understand that was an example, right? Did you know there are other websites you can download? Anna has one that is pretty big and full of information. I’m pretty sure the AI labs know about it too.
> the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
The Internet Archive isn’t a single zip download. You understand you can pick and choose what you want to download, right? And also, that it was just another example of many?
A local model has more data than Wikipedia and the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
How would a soviet style implosion of the US work in real life? A civil war is far more likely and we already have historical precedence for that.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
The US and particularly its armed forces don’t look at all like the 1800s, so another civil war of that nature is not possible. Sabotage, terrorism and political violence could be a new form of civil unrest, but full out civil war without a divided military with entire divisions defecting, is very unlikely.
Yes, we are unlikely to get to a point of an 1800s civil war, of course. But I mean, if things do get that bad, we cannot rule out a divided military as well. How that would work in practice, I'm not sure, since, as you mentioned, armed forces work these days differently as well, and defection like that might not even be feasible, I guess.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
Nuclear war is a civilization-ending tool that AI could realistically exploit. It would only need to hack a weaker nuclear nation to send a ICBM our way, sabotage communications and let our draconian nuclear war strategy do the rest. There’s a book by Annie Jacobsen that explains from a plausible military perspective how this could rapidly unfold. It was poorly plagiarized by Netflix and turned into a mini series but the book is much more better at scaring the s out of you.
Let me add a few more layers just for some fun and profit :-D
Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)
I live in Spain and can still enjoy access to this site. This is enforced by major ISPs (Vodafone among others), so anyone sane just opts for a local ISP (if they have a choice)
Works fine for me, also Spain, Vodafone as the ISP.
Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?
Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
Apparently all of south western europe blocks half the internet in the name of football. Besides Spain there's also Italy, France, Portugal and surprisingly the UK somewhat.
Your comment has got me genuinely intrigued. Would you care to elaborate how football has anything to do with the internet at all? (I'm writing this from northern Europe & as someone who has been avoiding football like the plague most of his life)
The TV rights holders for football matches want to block pirate streams by any means necessary. Spain appears to be the worst, people get arrested in the UK for profiting off streams (so far, but the communication is pretty aggressive towards consumers too), I don't know about the other countries mentioned.
Personally, I welcome this. Archive.today has been blocking my country from using the site for years and for no good reason. Maybe if enough countries block the site, someone more reasonable will build an alternative.
Access to information feels to me like a human right. Blocking that by any means (legal blockade, price unrealistic high) feels like an infringement on a Human Right.
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
Idealistically, I agree with access to information. But how do you square that (and I don’t have a solution) with the proliferation of misinformation used to manipulate the population or the access to dangerous information such as building bombs and bio weapons?
That knowledge is already available and generally people don’t build bombs or bioweapons. Otherwise they could still go to university and learn all that if they so wish
It is available, and searching for it is a good way to end up on a list. It is hilarious how you gave “go to university” as an option, as if all universities were accessible to anyone and taught classes on this.
I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.
Fun fact I learned in Spain recently. They block Cloudflare Edge IPs during soccer games. Took me a long time to figure out why I was having intermittent outages.
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
> Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
> a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
You can still get arrested in spain for saying a joke about Luis Carrero Blanco being Spain's first astronaut.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.
> fastest growing European country by many metrics
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
> With all that said it would be strange if they would be further, prosperity comes from hard work and discipline.
It must really suck for all of you living outside of Spain, looking at us taking naps and being "inefficient" with all our communism, yet we have health care, and work/life balance and have time enough for family and hobbies.
Of course, best is to just see it like there is no prosperity in the country, because there are no startup unicorns or billionaires buying up our media.
You don't know how hard is to maintain a country when you have to run in front of the bulls while making a paella at the same time you dance some flamenco./s
I guess that's your view of Spain, you should read and view things from more modern years than the 1950's. Also talk or Morocco and his allies USA and Israel about the immigrants that the mafia sent into Spain and Spain has never been communist or socialist, unless you don't what socialism and communism is.
I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...
I understand it to be a stand off between western special services on behalf of the media empires, and some random russian… criminals? their own intelligence or adjacent criminals? Just randos on a mission?
Since a few months archive.is is "unstable" from Spain. I thought the reason is the ISP but sometimes by just reloading it works...
Can anybody shed some light?
Since a few months archive.is is unstable regardless of where I connect from, Spain or not. Are others not seeing the same thing? Maybe 20% of the times I try to use it the servers aren't responding.
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
An article about internet censorship of an archive site that requires an archive site to read!
That’s Brilliant! :D
I am dating myself, but I remember the Internet. It’s rather ironic too that the actual Internet, literal and figuratively free internet, was always doomed from the start, just like AI is effectively doomed in terms of it being some kind of productivity tool or amazing thing you can use to build your own thing, because the logical conclusion is very bad for most people, including the technorati types here that think themselves above it and immune.
If you’re shocked and surprised by the way there Internet was maneuvered into the surveillance prison Flock made itself the poster child of at the hands of Mr Langley, take that trajectory and lay it over AI, but only at exponential rates. You don’t have to believe me, it won’t matter either way, it’s happening, short of the Soviet style implosion of the “American” empire.
Maybe once the planet has been made uninhabitable to biological life there will be an AI robot cybernetic splinter group trying to “reclaim humanity”.
You couldn’t snapshot all, but you could definitely get a taste :)
You can very much host websites on your machine (not the whole internet, but then again you can’t host the most powerful models either) and you can very much download a Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
But most people never will. This idea that everyone will soon be using local models while frolicking happily in the fields is a pipe dream. Besides, local or not, these models can already be harmful in ways the internet took decades to approach.
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
You do understand that was an example, right? Did you know there are other websites you can download? Anna has one that is pretty big and full of information. I’m pretty sure the AI labs know about it too.
> the Internet Archive is way too large to download on a consumer machine.
The Internet Archive isn’t a single zip download. You understand you can pick and choose what you want to download, right? And also, that it was just another example of many?
A local model works even if the Internet is perfectly firewalled or straight-up down. However, you still need electricity and eventually replacement parts, so in an apocalypse may not work either.
And your AI robot cybernetic splinter group thing sounds a lot like the biblical story of Noah than anything that's based on science or you know facts.
Overall I would say civil war is more likely (even given how unlikely it is) than just a robotic uprising that will root out all humanity and make the world unfit for biological beings as the original comment implied.
because the empire is too large to control all of its interests.
Could have been avoided - too much money to be made in the various stages of it not being avoided.
Here[0] is an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page which archives the original article about internet censorship of an archive site that might require an archive of an archive site to read (given that people of spain cant now view archive.is in the first place or might have some difficulties doing so)
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(If someone is perhaps interested and wants to see me talk more about what this is, then please read the blogpost that I had made for more info: https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...)
https://superuser.com/questions/1346634/modern-browser-with-...
Vs
https://archive.is/2YdN9
One has paywall, one doesn't...
Sorry man, people will keep DDoSing some random guy's blog. It's a service problem lol
Here you go, this should work: https://web.archive.org/web/20260920074416/https://serjaimel...
(an archive.org page which archives an archive.is page, might take some time to load though)
(this uses htmlpipe, something I have made :-D)
Edit: eeh, that's a different site than the one mentioned by the submission, why it wouldn't work?
Edit2: Also, the error is wrong and server-side. If your ISP is trying to block the website, you'll get either a tls error that the certificate isn't matching, or for non-https sites you get redirected to the scary "You're contributing to something illegal blah blah".
I know this isn’t the way the world works yet, but a Human can dream.
I also couldn’t help but notice you completely glossed over the much more important point of misinformation for manipulation.
1. Blocked Telegram with a court order, reinstituted after public backslash
2. Blocks Internet and Cloudflare during La Liga matches
3. Prime minister Pedro Sanchez from Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) has demanded the end of anonymity in Internet
They say it is to protect the kids, but likely it is to find out who watches La Liga without a premium subscription.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
[1] See also: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derecho_de_copia_privada
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
Thanks MPAA and RIAA as usual.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
I certainly would rather live places like Mallorca or Donostia than in many places that are ahead of Spain in the silly GDP game.
Speaking of low IQ, it's pretty amusing to read that someone thinks that Spain came out unscathed from the events of 1930s and 1940s.
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
It must really suck for all of you living outside of Spain, looking at us taking naps and being "inefficient" with all our communism, yet we have health care, and work/life balance and have time enough for family and hobbies.
Of course, best is to just see it like there is no prosperity in the country, because there are no startup unicorns or billionaires buying up our media.
You don’t need startup/billionaires to buy your media, but they are snatching up your land for sure.
I guess that's your view of Spain, you should read and view things from more modern years than the 1950's. Also talk or Morocco and his allies USA and Israel about the immigrants that the mafia sent into Spain and Spain has never been communist or socialist, unless you don't what socialism and communism is.
But then again, discussing politics hardly ever gets less divisive here or elsewhere.
Otherwise, there would be no divisiveness in fairly assessing measures in Economics.
Edit: why is it that Billionaires just fund fake news. Are there no "white hat" billionaires that could fund an opposition to that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/burned-out-and...
Error: Invalid InterceptionId.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
"Note: archive.org, or web.archive.org, run by the Internet Archive and the most-used web archive on Wikipedia, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today. Please keep using archive.org"
Well except paying $300 a month I guess.
https://www.cultura.gob.es/dam/jcr:919c6bd2-17b2-43d1-98f5-d...
https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/htmlpipe-and-how-we-ca...
This could perhaps be used for this purpose.
I have submitted it on hackernews once again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49773417
(Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47574562)