Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman
205 comments
·January 12, 2025rglover
timonofathens
He also wrote one often-quoted "explanation" of Infinite Jest: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
benatkin
I know I support what aaronsw did and I don’t think he shouldn’t have gotten in any trouble for it, let alone to the tragic level it went to. As for sama, I’m not sure, on one hand I like the innovation and on the other hand it’s very worrying for humanity. I appreciate the post and the fond memories of Aaron but I’m not in complete agreement with the author about sama.
idlewords
The right person to contrast with Aaron Swartz is Alexandra Elbakyan. She got it done without any of the drama, fuss, or prominent mentors.
divbzero
She absolutely got it done, but not surprisingly there was still significant legal backlash she had to deal with.
idlewords
Yeah, I'm not saying it was easy for her. Quite the opposite!
csomar
I guess it helped she lived in Russia? where she could throw the US governments laws into the garbage bin?
mastazi
In the photo there are some other faces that I think I might recognise, but I'm not 100% sure. Is there a list of everyone in the picture somewhere on the internet?
Edit I think the lady on the left is Jessica Livingston and a younger PG on the right
aimazon
https://i.imgur.com/e0GPhSE.jpeg
1. zak stone, memamp
2. steve huffman, reddit
3. alexis ohanian, reddit
4. emmet shear, twitch
5. ?
6. ?
7. ?
8. jesse tov, https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/simmery
9. pg
10. jessica
11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name)
12. phillip yuen, textpayme
13. ?
14. aaron swartz, infogami at the time
15. ?
16. sam altman, loopt at the time
17. justin kan, twitch
zurvanist
> 11. KeyserSosa, initially memamp but joined reddit not long after (I forget his real name)
Chris Slowe
Clickfacts had 3 founders so probably that's 3 of your ?s.
The photo has no 13 btw.
mastazi
Amazing, thank you!
tptacek
No, that's Jessica Livingston, the cofounder of YC.
mastazi
yes, you are right, I edited my comment.
idlewords
It would be pretty terrifying if it was an older PG.
ilrwbwrkhv
Oh man. Heavy stuff. Our industry will be looked at as good or bad? I hope we end up doing good for the world.
memonkey
Hard to say when there is a profit motive for all industries. Seems like every industry at the moment is not really looking for human advancement, or maybe it is looking at advancing but only if the results are expensive for end users and efficient/proprietary for the company.
ilrwbwrkhv
Yes but the thing is our industry has almost unparalleled leverage and marginal utility cost is zero.
zx10rse
Open source the models it is the only right decision.
remram
I don't understand. If something hurts your civilization but it was free, does that make it better? Like if everyone was able to build a nuclear bomb, would that make the ensuing nuclear winter more moral?
zx10rse
You contradict your own analogy. Do you live in nuclear winter? Because there are plenty of countries with nuclear weapon capabilities half of them are considered enemies. Why are they not bombing each other? Why do you even consider nuclear winter as a moral thing?
khazhoux
Thank you, Sam Altman and everyone at OpenAI, for creating ChatGPT and unleashing the modern era of generative AI, which I use every day to speed up my job and coding at home.
Signed,
Someone who doesn't care that you're making $$$$ from it
edgineer
The point is that regardless if you're negative, neutral, or positive of others using data for profit, you would hold those who use it altruistically higher.
xtracto
I hold both of them high enough. As Aaron, I did my good share of book/articles piracy, even before it was online (here in Mexico it was veery common to Xerox and share whole books with students in the 80s and 90s).
I understand, Aaron became a martyr; even though he died due to depression and not for "a cause". I applaud what he achieved as a person.
amelius
The usual caveat applies. I'm okay they make money from it until they start using that money against the rest of us.
angoragoats
If I’m an author and I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right?
What about if I’m an artist and I don’t want my work included in the training data for an image generation model?
627467
You may have that right as long as you agree that others have the right to not care about your right when deciding to use "your" stuff however they want.
kevingadd
The two halves of your statement contradict each other. What are you trying to say?
angoragoats
Congratulations on not answering the question I asked, and at the same time saying something that makes no logical sense.
worik
> I don’t want my work included in the corpus of text used for training ChatGPT, should I have that right?
No
You could choose not to publish, and be read
If you are read you can be used to learn from
angoragoats
Generative AI is not learning.
Copyrights don’t depend on whether I choose to publish a particular work or not.
Zuckerberg personally approved using pirated content to train a model. Is that OK too?
CaptainFever
No, you should not have that right. Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity. AI does not replicate your work directly. So you can still sell your artificial scarcity even if it is trained on.
At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!
angoragoats
> Copyright allows you to sell artificial scarcity.
Not always. That’s more the domain of patents, honestly.
> AI does not replicate your work directly.
This is false, at least in certain cases. And even if it were always true, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t infringe copyright.
> At least you're acknowledging that training rights are a proposed expansion of current IP laws!
Yes, they are, emphasis on the “proposed,” meaning that I believe that training AI on copyrighted material without permission can be a violation of current copyright law. I don’t actually know if that’s how it should be, honestly. But as of right now I think entities like the New York Times have a good legal case against OpenAI.
Earw0rm
I'll use it to find information , semi-reliably. Hallucinations are still a huge issue. But I can't help thinking that Stackoverflow and Google have self-enshittified to a point where it makes LLMs look better relative to the pinnacle of more conventional knowledge engines than they actually are.
If you take the evolution of those platforms from saying 2005-2015, and project forward ten years, we should be in a much better place than we are. Instead they've gone backwards as a result of enshittification and toxic management.
owebmaster
[dead]
elp
Aaron Swartz was targeted by some pretty overly zealous prosecution no objection, but lets not forget that what he really did.
He put a laptop in a wiring closet that was DOSing JSTOR and kept changing IPs to avoid being blocked. The admins had to put a camera on the closet to eventually catch him.
He might have had good intentions but the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism.
For all the noise the real punishment he was facing was 6 months in low security [1]. I'm pretty sure OpenAI would have also been slapped hard for the same crime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Arrest_and_prosec...
Edit: added link
omnimus
“charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
I didnt think people on “hacker news” would be defending what happened to Aaron Swartz.
cowsandmilk
> charges carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines plus 35 years in prison
Any lawyer knows that is stupid math. The DOJ has sentencing guidelines that never add up the years in prison for charges to be served consecutively. The media likes to do that to get big numbers, but it isn’t an honest representation of the charges.
I don’t think charges against Schwartz should have been filed, but I also can’t stand bad legal math.
omnimus
Sure but… he could technically get that or not? If somebody wanted to really punish him they could push it to what? 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?
Because some people really wanted to punish him.
I am just reacting to the downplaying that he would get 6 months in jail. Like he was some weak person for commiting suicide because of that.
tptacek
Swartz own lawyer, writing after his death, said he didn't believe Swartz would have received a custodial sentence even if he had gone to trial and lost. The prosecutors were offering him months in custody, against a 6-7 year sentence they believed they could get (implausibly, if you run the guidelines calculation). Nobody has to take the "35 years" thing seriously; nobody involved directly in this case did. Swartz was exactly the kind of nerd who would have memorized the sentencing guidelines just to win arguments on a message board (that's a compliment) and he had extremely good lawyers.
(I'm ambivalent about everything in this case and certainly don't support the prosecutors, but much of what gets written about Swartz's case is misinformation.)
izabera
Just for context, there is a new post about OpenAI DDoS'ing half the internet every other day on hn
alphan0n
Just for context, the author of the second link in your comment verifiably lied about blocking crawlers via robots.txt
CommonCrawl archives robots.txt
For convenience, you can view the extracted data here:
You are welcome to verify for yourself by searching for “wiki.diasporafoundation.org/robots.txt” in the CommonCrawl index here:
https://index.commoncrawl.org/
The index contains a file name that you can append to the CommonCrawl url to download the archive and view. More detailed information on downloading archives here:
https://commoncrawl.org/get-started
From September to December, the robots.txt at wiki.diasporafoundation.org contained this, and only this:
>User-agent: * >Disallow: /w/
elp
If you ask OpenAI to stop, using robots.txt, they actually will.
What Aaron was trying to achieve was great, how he want about it is what ruined his life.
LunaSea
It is a well known fact that OpenAI stole content by scraping sites with illegally uploaded content on it.
omnimus
Nobody really asked Aaron about anything they collected more evidence and wanted to put him to jail.
School should have unplugged his machine bring him for questioning and tell him not to do that.
breck
[dead]
nathancahill
Which individual suffered harm from Aaron's laptop in the closet?
tptacek
As I recall, the whole campus lost their automatic access to JSTOR for a time.
lofaszvanitt
Aaron had an unstable personality and they took advantage of that. A nudge here and there, and here comes the suicide. Look around people who Aaron frequented with to find the culprits...
Earw0rm
No paintings were harmed in the throwing of soup, and now we all know it happened and why.
Would that I were that kind of dumb.
cassianoleal
> the way he went about getting the data was throwing soup at paintings levels of dumb activism.
Throwing soup at paintings doesn’t make the paintings available to the public.
What he did had a direct and practical effect.
cowsandmilk
> What he did had a direct and practical effect
The main impact of Aaron Swartz’s actions were that it became much more difficult to walk onto MIT’s campus and access journal articles from a laptop without being a member of the MIT community. I did this for a decade beforehand and this became much more locked down in the years after his actions due to restrictions the publishers pushed at MIT. Aaron intentionally went to the more open academic community in Cambridge (Harvard, his employer, was much more restrictive) and in the process ruined that openness for everyone.
breck
[dead]
tptacek
I don't understand the singling out of Altman here. If there's shade to throw at Altman, it's that his company occupies a position similar to that of Tesla: an early mover to a technology that appears to be on a path to universal adoption, including by large incumbents. It's hard to see what would be different about things were Altman not in the position he occupies now.
bookaway
They were in the same YC batch standing next to each in a photo, so someone looked at the photo and chose to juxtapose their work and fates on the day Aaron Swartz died. If this is what you mean by "singling out", I don't see what's hard to understand.
ycombinatrix
They both did mass copyright infringement...
begueradj
Aaron was a developer himself but Sam ... ?
null
Sid950
Idk but I find Aaron actually cool and intelligent.
3000
One was a hero, the other one works for (or is!) cyberdyne systems and doesnt even seem to realize it.
Aaron was the OG. If you've never dug through his blog, do yourself a favor [1]. Also make some time to watch The Internet's Own Boy doc about him [2] and look up some of his talks during the SOPA shenanigans. RIP.
[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ&rco=1