Shell with built-in, locally run AI?
hendrik @ hendrik @palaver.p3x.de Posts 11Comments 3,070Joined 4 yr. ago
hendrik @ hendrik @palaver.p3x.de
Posts
11
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3,070
Joined
4 yr. ago
Hehe. I had that picture in my head as well. Though the communication is kind of the other way around here.... And "communicate" is always easier said than done. I'm aware of that... I wish you the best. 😁 You do you, and try to have some fun yourself.
I think AVC1 is another word for H.264. That's the oldest one with lots of hardware acceleration available in old devices and by far the biggest one in file size. VP9 should roughly be on a similar level with H.265. The main difference is that VP9 is supposed to be royalty-free and H.265 isn't. The best one is of course AV1. But that also takes considerably more resources to encode and decode.
M4A and webm both aren't audio codecs. They're file container formats. I believe m4a takes AAC audio. And webm is a more general container format and it takes video as well. I think audio will be either Vorbis or Opus. And Opus is fairly good, especially at low bitrates. There probably isn't a big difference to AAC, though.
Probably alcohol. But that's just the first thing I can think of and not good advice at all. It's questionable how alcohol and sex mix.
Edit: To not just write a silly thing... I think such an act is generally appreciated by your partner. So you're automatically off in a positive way. And people like different things, so you'll need to learn that nonetheless and you maybe don't know everything in advance. Maybe just go with it? Sex isn't supposed to be a performance act and you can adapt and look at your partner while at it. Make sure everyone is comfortable with doing it and some form of communication is going to help. I mean most of the times you should be able to tell whether someone likes something, once you started.
Yes, thanks. I think I agree with you here. The copyright model is rent-seeking by nature. And we could likely do better.
Ultimately a book author wants to sell his product to me. How it's done isn't ideal at all, but that's kind of his motivation. So I don't think you want him to starve because books aren't a valid product to sell, but it's about the way it's done.
My single argument here is: Look at the AI industry and compare what you just said. They're doing exactly the same thing, just 20 times worse. And you should be opposed to that, too!
You're making the argument that OpenAI and others are trying to get paid. That's not rent-seeking. Ideally, our laws ensure that seeking money makes you work for the benefit of other people.
I've laid down how the big AI companies do nothing for the benefit of other people. I've asked you what you think they contribute (in case I'm wrong) and you also came up with zero things they do for other people. So it boils down pretty much to the same. A book author creates intellectual property to sell a product to people "trying to get paid". An AI company creates intellectual property to sell a product in order "to get paid". It's the same thing.
Let's tackle monopolies: Everyone can read a book in case they can get ahold of it. And with some intelligence and time, everyone can write a book. That's a monopoly in your eyes. And while we have weird concepts like Fixed book price, that's mainly meant to foster healthy competition and promote the sales of interesting books rather than just blockbusters. Though, I really have a wide selection of sci-fi books available and I've bought several of them for 50ct. And I have a public library card for 26€ a year and I can read 500 books a day if I like, and I get a selection of blue-rays on top. That's what the monopoly does to me. (With everything else I agree with you. It's bad that they pile that information up and that it's not freely available but a business model.)
Now AI: I wanted to try Sora because they pioneered video models on that scale. For a long time they said "no thanks" to me. We won't provide that service to you, it's just for testing and a select few people we like. You get none of it. You can't even pay, no matter how much. Then I waited for half a year and wanted to try Google's Veo 3 and seems the interesting stuff is in the $100 a month tier. And what the fuck, the output is supposed to come with copyright? And terms and conditions?
I can't get that service anywhere else and they just say tough luck, it's gonna be $100 to try 8s video snippets because the company is amongst the select few who offer that (...cough...monopoly...). Or use Sora, now that it's available, but they've changed the model to their likings and it became a bit worse than the initial trailers, and by the way: that is $200 a month.
So yeah, fantastic prices, also quite random, offered by less than a handful of mega corporations, based on their IP, they design "the food" so I need to eat what they devised for me. And I can't even eat the food the way I like, but have to follow their terms and procedures.
Same applies to text gen AI. It's a monopoly of billion dollar companies who get to shape it. Me or you, we can't do it. It's almost impossible to train a base model on that scale. And I can't even use them for what I like. I wanted to try story-writing and chose some dark sci-fi and a murder mystery story, and it's designed to refuse service to me. Instead it'll give long lectures about ethics to me about how murder is wrong. Yeah, no shit sherlock. Interestingly, AIstudio did help me write exploits for computer security vulnerabilities for some blue-teaming I did.
In you analogy with the food: I'm hungry. Now a company comes. Of course they don't offer me the food I like, but they say I have to eat what they designed for me. And it's going to be a random $100 or $200. And I can't touch the food or eat it myself, they're adamant in spoon-feeding it as a very specific service to me. I can never cook my own food, since the resources for that cost like $100 million. And they keep the recipe a closely guarded secret and they're so obsessed with it, they don't even tell me the nutritional value or anything about what went in to the designer food I need to lick off their spoon.
If you want in on the business. Also tough luck. You now need to start from scratch with everything, since the data is hoarded by the big players and they don't share. On the level of ChatGPT... Well, you can get in like Microsoft and pay some billion dollars. But with that kind of money, it's not super accessible, exactly like you'd expect from a monopoly. Other players can get in, like the Chinese. And how do they do it? It's sponsored/subsidised with billions of dollars by the government. And that's what it takes and they do it this way for more than a decade now.
[...] some guy who's searching through libraries and archives for stuff to digitize [...]
That's kind of a difficult example. I think archiving and digitizing is okay and in most cases he can do it. Copying for own use is always fine and that's phrased so it applies to companies as well. Archival is such an allowed use. Public libraries have a seperate paragraph. They can copy and can do necessary changes like digitizing. That applies to commercial libraries as well, as long as they're open to the public. So we have you covered here. And there is more. For some works it's mandatory to preserve them. They need to be sent to a library and the government specifically takes care to preserve (European) culture with these things. They're mandated for example to show up in the shelves of the national library.
I seriously doubt the AI companies are going to help with preserving culture, though. The incident with Meta torrenting books for example had them on the opposite side. They took care to "leech". That is, they took out information from the network and made sure not to balance that out. Resulting in a negative balance on the network and "free" information exchange.
If your worried "our guy can get more. If he destroys all remaining copies of these newspapers [...]" I believe you found him. It's not exactly that, since that kind of information is duplicated and can't be burnt that way. But Meta do the closest thing there is to it. There are resources to exchange information and culture, and they deliberately "burn" those resources for their own benefit and to the disadvantage of everyone else.
If the publisher has gone out of business [...]
And that has also already happened in the realm of AI. They change their service or cease operation. And since AI is just a service and the users don't own anything, they're then left with nothing. First big thing I'm aware of is how Replika AI dropped the main use-case of their service and millions of people were affected. And that is way worse than books. I have been banned from services. They just said "suspicious behaviour" and deactivated my account and I was stripped access. A book author cannot do that. I can still buy his book even if he doesn't like me. Cancelling service and doing whatever they like with the userbase is what big tech companies do.
So my argument is: You've really made a good argument in pointing out countless severe shortcomings of current copyright culture. And I've learned a lot. The AI industry is an even worse manifestation of that. They also pile up intellectual property for their product. And contrary to a book, I don't even own the darn physical thing, but they introduce all kinds of other shenanigans and make it something I rent, boarded-up, and then they often also apply copyright on top. They stepped up everything that is bad about copyright, several notches.
And then the successful players are all ruthless. They're not just selling me a book. Currently they're mainly interested in investment money and I'm not really 100% their customer. They happily weigh down on society. In my last comment I addressed how they deliberately evade law and some big players even pirate and do things that are currently illegal. Just for their own benefit. Enshittification of the internet is a side-effect they gladly accept. And they're expected to displace more things with their product (including culture) and neither do they contribute back, nor do they care about the consequences.
I think Fair Use might be a nice concept. It definitely is a regulation mechanism. The government/society is taking away privileges of people (copyright holders) with that. To the benefit of society and progress. Now go ahead and apply the same thing to AI companies! Regulate them as well!
What do the few people here who stop using Matrix altogether, replace it with? XMPP? Or do you just use Signal or the commercial messengers eveeyone uses?
I believe that has been asked here before... There is a feature request open for that: https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues/949
I'm in the same boat. Keep me updated if you go forwards. I think I'm going to wait 2 more weeks or so and then make a decision. Community-driven sounds nice. I wasn't aware of cuntinuwuity yet. And yes, all the drama and burnt-out people isn't nice or healthy at all. It's a shame that this is the state of messengers these days.
Back that up or retract the statement.
Let me rephrase it a bit: OpenAI is one of the prime examples. They wrote one or two scientific papers early on. And then they stopped. Deliberately. They're not contributing anything to science. All they invent is strictly for-profit and happens behind closed doors. They take, they don't contribute back.
And the main asset in the digital age is information. It's necessary for AI training to pile that up in a dataset. So that's their supply and they want it cheap because they need a lot of it. That's where they generate their "rent" from. Do they contribute anything back with that? No. They "seek" it and pile it up and that becomes their trade secret. And that's why I call them "rent-seeking". (Thanks for the Wikipedia article, yours was way better than the convoluted definition I read yesterday...) And it even translates to the illegal activities mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Meta has admitted to pirating books to pile up datasets faster. OpenAI likely did the same(?) It's just that they keep everything a secret. No company tells you anymore whether your content went into a dataset, since you might be able to use the legal system against them.
We can see that also with some platforms like Github, which turned out to be a great resource for AI training for Microsoft. Harvesting data is one of the main business models these days. And having that data is what pays the rent. It's not all there is to it. There's a lot of work in compiling it, curating datasets, RLHF... And then of course the science behind AI itself. But the last one aside, that's also often done with negative effects on society. We all know about the precarious situation of the data labellers in Africa.
And then all of this, plus the experts they get from the public universities and all the GPUs in the datacenters and some electricity get turned into their (OpenAI's) intellectual property.
You demand that American companies should be giving more free stuff to Europe. But also, they should be following European laws in the US and pay rent-seekers for the privilege. It's ridiculous.
Maybe tell me what they contribute back? Is there anything they give? I don't think so. They mainly seem like parasites to me, freeloading on all the information they can gather in electronic form. And then? Is there anything we get in return?
And maybe we're having a small misunderstanding here. I'm not Anti-AI or anything. I just want people who take something from society, to contribute something back to society. And they really like to take, but they themselves painstakingly avoid disclosing the smallest little details.
I'd say there is two options. Either they do contribute back and we find a healthy relationship between society and big-tech AI companies. That'd make it completely fine if they also take things and it's give-and-take. Or they want to do a for-profit dubious service with no-one having a say in it or look inside or be able to use it aside from what they devised for society... But then the same rules apply to them. They then also have to contribute back in form of money to pay for their supplies and license the content that goes in to their product.
My own opinion: Allow AI and cater to scientific progress. In a healthy way, though. The companies do AI and they get resources. But they're obligated to transparency and contribute back. For example open-weight models are a good idea. I'd go further than that, because science and society also needs to address biases, what AI can be used for, and a bunch of issues that come with it. Like misinformation, spam... The companies aren't incentivised to address that. And it starts to show impact on the internet and society. And regulations are the way to make them do what's necessary or benefitial in the long run.
you are not against rent-seeking
I'm generally against hyper-capitalism and big corporations. They often don't do us any good. It's a bit complicated with AI since those companies are over-valued and there is a big investment bubble, which isn't necessarily about society. But the copyright-industry is part of the same picture. Spotify for example isn't healthy for society at all. And the Höffner video you linked had a lot of good points about that. I'm not sure whether you're aware of the other side of the coin... For example I've talked to some musicians (copyright holders) and I've written some few pages of technical documentation and I'm aware that it takes several weeks behind the desk to produce 40 pages. And like half a year or more to write a novel. And somehow you need to eat something during those months... So with capitalism it's not always easy. The current situation is sub par. And the copyright industry is mainly a business model to leech on people who create something. We'd be better off if we cut out the middle men.
And they're not wrong.
That's correct. My point was that they're following an agenda as well. But they're correct that that signature has consequences and doesn't translate into unlimited corporate growth.
where they lobby for "full rights" for themselves, whatever that means
OpenAI is very secretive and not transparent at all. They promised to release a model which they've delayed several times now. But other than that, they don't write papers for some time now, they don't share stuff. And they do other small little things for their own benefit and so the competition can't do the same. They even go ahead and keep simple numbers like the model size a big trade secret. They guard everything closely and they like it that way. It's the literal opposite of free exchange of information. And they do that with most of their business decisions.
And Meta's model come with a license plus an EULA. And I've lost track of the current situation, but as an Europen I've been prohibited from downloading and using Meta's LLMs for some time. Sometimes they also want my e-mail address, I have to abide by their terms and I don't like the terms... That's their rights. And they're making use of them. It is not I can just download it and do whatever because that were Fair Use as well... They retain rights, and many of them.
Trademark is definitely part of the conversation. Can models paint a mickey mouse? other trademarked stuff? Sure they do. And it's the same trademark that protects fictional characters and other concepts. So once AI ingests that, it needs addressing as well. And it's not just that. They (Meta/Instagram) also address copyright and they also have a lot of rules about that. With that specific thing I was more concerned with their logo, though, and that is mostly trademark law.
You're talking about Net Neutrality and not copyright [...]
No, I am talking about copyright. Net neutrality has nothing to do with any of this.
[...] and apparently Alibaba took advantage of you for that. That's just how it is, sometimes.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. They're taking advantage of people. And kind of in a mischevious way, because they've thought about how they can defeat the usual defenses. How do you think I'm supposed to deal with that? Let everyone take advantage of me? Take down my server and quit this place?
I am against rent-seeking. No more, no less
I'm with you on this. As long as it's fair. Make sure AI companies aren't rent-seeking either. Because currently that's big part of their business model.
I mean what do you think the big piles of information the gather for training are? That they don't share and do contracts and even buy up companies to get exclusive access... How they gobble up the resources? And how prices for graphics cards skyrocket first due to crypto and then due to AI? That's kinda rent-seeking on several different levels...
Scarlett Johansson [...] that turned out to be a false
It's definitely inspired by her performance on "Her". Sam Altman himself made a reference, connecting his product and that specific movie. It's likely not a coincidence. And they kind of followed up and removed that voice along with a few others. Clearly not because they were right and this is an uncontroversial topic.
Can you back this up?
- https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/meta_declines_eu_ai_guidelines/
- https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/microsoft-likely-sign-eu-ai-code-practice-meta-rebuffs-guidelines-2025-07-18/
- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/26/meta-wins-ai-copyright-lawsuit-as-us-judge-rules-against-authors
- https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit/
The current thing is Meta is very vocal about the EU AI act. Their opinion is everywhere in the tech news, this week. And they're a very influential company. Completely dominating some markets like messengers, parts of social media. Also well-known in the AI industry.
Other companies do the same. They test what they can get away with all the time. Like stealing Scarlett Johansson's voice, pirating books on bittorrent... And they definitely have enough influence and money to pay very good lawyers. Choose what to settle out of court and what to fight. We shouldn't underestimate the copyright industry. But Meta for example is a very influential company with a lot of impact on society and the world.
And AI is in half the products these days. Assisting you, or harvesting your data... Whether you want it or not. That's quite some reach, pervasive, and those are the biggest companies on earth. I'd be with you if AI were some niche thing. But it's not.
And Meta are super strict with trademark law and parts of copyright when it's the other way around. I lately spent some time reading how you can and cannot use or mention their trademark, embed it into your website. And they're very strict if it's me using their stuff. The other way around they want free reign.
subsidising big companies [...] What do you mean by that?
I mean manifacturing a supply chain for them where they get things practically for free. Netflix has to pay for licenses to distribute Hollywood content. OpenAI's product also has other people's content going into the product, but they don't need to do the same. It's subsidised and they get the content practically for free for their business model.
And what do you think I do with my server and the incident last week? If I now pay $30 more for a VPS that's able to withstand Alibaba's crawlers... Wouldn't that be a direct sunsidy from me towards them? I pay an extra $30 a month just so they can crawl my data?
AI models may not be copyrightable [...] // They are probably copyrightable [...]
We were talking about a specific lecture that questions the entire concept of copyright as we have it now. You can't argue to abolish copyright and then in the next sentence defend it for yourself or your friends. It's either copyright for book authors and machine learning models, or it's none of them. But you can't say information in the products from other people is not copyright, but the information in the products of AI companies is copyright. That doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, you're right. I think we can circle back to your original post, which stated the term is unspecific. However, I don't think that makes sense in computer science, or natural science in general. The way I learned is: you always start out with definitions. And mathematical, concise and waterproof ones, because they need to be internally consistent and you then base an entire building on top of it. And that just collapses if the foundation isn't there. And maths starts to show weird quirks. So the computer scientists need a proper definition anyway. But that doesn't stop us using the same word for a different, imperfect one in every day talk. I think they're not the same, though.
I'm not sure about the robotics. Some people say intelligence is inherently linked to interacting with the real world. And that it isn't a thing in isolation. So that would mean an AI would need to be able to manipulate the real world. You're certainly right that can be done without robotics and limited to text and pictures on a screen. But I think ultimately it's the same thing. And multimodal models can in fact use almost the same mechanisms they use to process and manipulate image and text, and apply it to movements and navigate 3D space. I'd argue robotics is the same side of the same coin.
And it's similar for humans. I use the same brain and roughly similar mechanics that enable me to do it, whether I learn a natural science, or when I learn dancing moves or become a good basketball player. I'd argue that's manifestations of the same thing. Also requires knowledge, decision making... And that'd make a professional dancer "intelligent" in a similar way. I'm not sure if that's an accepted way to think of it, though.
Yeah, I'd say some select tasks. And it's not really the entire distinction. I can do math equations with my cognitive capabilities. My pocket calculator can do the same, yet it's not AI. So the definition has to be something else. And AI can do tasks I cannot do. Like go through large amounts of data. Or find patterns a human can not find. So it's not really tied to specific things we do. But a generalized form of intelligence, and I don't think that's well defined or humans are the comparison. They're more a stand-in measurement scale. But I don't think that's what it's about.
Edit: And I'd question the entire usefulness of such a definition. ChatGPT can write very professional-looking text and things that pass as Wikipedia articles. A 5-year-old human can't do that. However the average 5yo can make a sandwich. Now try that with ChatGPT and tell me what that tells about their intelligence. It doesn't really fit as a definition because it's kind of too broad and ill-defined and humans can do a wide variety of tasks and slight differences in focus changes everything around into its opposite.
Yeah, generative AI is a good point.
I'm not sure with the computer scientists, though. It's certainly not any task, that'd be AGI. And it's not necessarily connected to humans either. Sure they're the prime example of intelligence (whatever it is). But I think a search engine is AI as well, depending how it's laid out. And text to speech, old-school expert systems. A thermostat that controls your heating with a machine learning model might count as well, I'm not sure about that. And that's not really like human cognitive tasks. Closer to curve fitting, than anything else. The thermostat includes problem-solving, learning, perception, knowledge, and planning and decision making. But on the human intelligence score it wouldn't even be a thing that compares.
These claims often come with limited significance. ChatGPT also supposedly passed the bar exam in early 2023 and all kinds of benchmarks. Yet it still messed up my fairly simple emails, couldn't do other tasks back then and to this day it often even fails summarizing random news articles and doesn't get the gist of it. These claims make good headlines, but that's pretty much it. And it's really hard to come up with meaningful benchmarks.
And "intelligence" itself isn't very well defined either. So the only word that remains is "artificial", and we can agree on that.
I usually try to avoid the word "AI". I'll say "LLM" if I talk about chatbots, ChatGPT etc. Or I use the term "machine learning" when broadly speaking about the concept of computers learning and doing such things. It's not exactly the same thing, though. But when reading other people's texts I always think of LLMs when they say AI, because that's currently what they mean almost every time. And AGI is more sci-fi as of now, so it needs some disclaimers and context anyway.
I'd be surprised if current-day LLMs reach AGI. I mean it's more a welcome side-effect that they do things like factual answers more often than not. They don't have a proper state of mind, they can't learn from interacting with the world while running, and they generally substitute a thought process, reasoning etc with a weird variant and it all needs to happen within the context window. I believe once it comes to a household robot learning to operate the toaster and microwave, that won't scale any more. It'd be a bit complicated to do that out-of-band in a datacenter, or fetch the required movements and information from a database. I guess we can cheat a bit with that to achieve similar things, but I'd question whether that's really AGI and suitable for any arbitrary task in the world. So I'd expect several major breaktroughs to happen before we can think of AGI.
Yes, I mainly wanted to rule out the opposite. Because the multi billion dollar companies currently do some lobbying as well. Including the same manipulation and narratives, just the other way around. They want everyone else to lose rights, while they themselves retain full rights, little to no oversight... And that's just inherently unfair.
As I said. Copyright might not be something good or defendable. It clearly comes with many obvious flaws and issues. The video you linked is nice. I'd be alright with abolishing copyright. Preferrably after finding a suitable replacement/alternative. But I'm completely against subsidising big companies just so they can grow and manifest their own Black Mirror episode. Social scoring, making my insurance 3x more expensive on a whim and a total surveillence state should be prohibited. And the same rules need to apply to everyone. Once a book author doesn't get copyright any longer, so does OpenAI and the big tech companies. They can invest some $100 million in training models, but it's then not copyrighted either. I get to access the model however I like and I can sell a competing service with their model weights. That's fair and same rules for everyone. And Höffner talks to some degree about prior work and what things are based upon. So the big companies have to let go of their closely guarded trade secrets and give me the training datasets as well. I believe that'd be roughly in the spirit of what he said in the talk. And maybe that'd be acceptable. But it really has to be same rules for everyone, including big corporations.
I believe my WebOS version is so old, they stopped any update or data collection servers. I had developer mode running before. That's perfectly alright. Just a bit annoying to constantly refresh, and somehow my attempts to automate it failed. So one day I rooted it and now I have full ssh access, a homebrew channel... And I would have liked to use that to run an Ambilight, and that requires root. Sadly it requires a newer operating system version so I still don't have any LEDs in the background.
Or maybe AGI turns out to be harder than some people thought. That might be simultaneously the prospect, and the reason for the bubble to burst. That hypothetical future is similar to today, minus some burnt money, plus a slightly more "intelligent" version of ChatGPT which can do some tasks and fails at other tasks. So it'd continue to affect some jobs like call center agents, artists and web designers, but we still need a lot of human labor.
I think there's a bunch of AI enhanced shells and shell assistants... Shell-AI, Vity, Warp Terminal, Shell Genie, Butterfish, yai, aichat, aider, tgpt... You can get plugins for zsh or fish and other shells, we have agents with tool access, it's in some IDEs...