| ▲ | yoavm 11 hours ago |
| We probably wouldn't have had LLMs if it wasn't for Anna's Archive and similar projects. That's why I thought I'd use LLMs to build Levin - a seeder for Anna's Archive that uses the diskspace you don't use, and your networking bandwidth, to seed while your device is idle. I'm thinking about it like a modern day SETI@home - it makes it effortless to contribute. Still a WIP, but it should be working well on Linux, Android and macOS. Give it a go if you want to support Anna's Archive. https://github.com/bjesus/levin |
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| ▲ | flancian 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I'd like to buck the apparent trend of reacting to your project with shock and horror and instead say I believe it's a great idea, and I appreciate what you are doing! People have been trained to believe (very long) copyright terms are almost a natural law that can't be broken or challenged (if you are an individual; other rules might apply to corporations...) but I think we are better off continuing to challenge this assumption. I could imagine adding support for further rules that determine when Levin actively runs -- i.e. only run if the country or connection you are in makes this 'safe' according to some crowdsourced criteria? This would also serve to communicate the relative dangers of running this tool in different jurisdictions. |
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| ▲ | yoavm 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thank you! I think that's a great idea, and will definitely look into implementing this. | | |
| ▲ | mikkupikku 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Maybe also a config option to not seed when on battery power (laptop or UPS), although SystemD configuration is arguably a better way to achieve the same. | | |
| ▲ | spider-mario an hour ago | parent [-] | | https://brand.systemd.io/ > Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple. | | |
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| ▲ | mapkkk 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would just like to add some cautionary anec-data: there are widespread cases in certain jurisdictions where rightsholders are known to seed the same torrents themselves, just to turn around and send love letters to leechers that connect to them. A good example is Germany with movies and TV shows. Now, I don't know if, say, Wolters Kluver would/does the same thing, and what the realistic risk of an individual receiving such a letter is, but I think it makes it worthwhile to go over the actual law in your jurisdiction before diving head first on things like this. I'm not saying it's wrong to seed these things, I'm just saying it might be a good idea to weigh the risks if you don't have a cool 500€ in cash to part ways with. | | |
| ▲ | qingcharles 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I had a letter one time when I was with Comcast, so I just spend the $5/mo and use seedboxes these days. |
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| ▲ | flexagoon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Do you know Anna's Archive already has a feature that lets you automatically download a subset of the torrents that fit under your available storage space and contain the most important (least preserved) data? How is your project different from that? |
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| ▲ | sghitbyabazooka an hour ago | parent [-] | | that feature has a "max terabytes" field. phones typically do not have terabytes of storage, and even if they did, people may not want to seed that much |
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| ▲ | Myzel394 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Definitely a unique way to get a DMCA letter |
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| ▲ | ozim 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | DMCA letter sounds like small potatoes when we talk about letting random people write stuff to your disk space and using your bandwidth. | | |
| ▲ | nullsanity 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is also known as "Hosting" which, I found amusing. | | |
| ▲ | overfeed 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Hosting without section 230 protections is "Distributing" whatever content you've (un)wittingly downloaded that's deemed illegal. | | |
| ▲ | bandie91 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | we are talking about books. books. illegal. Saint Leibowitz ora pro nobis. | | |
| ▲ | overfeed an hour ago | parent [-] | | > we are talking about books I would love for the authors of in-print books to be paid - even when it's usually not a lot. Buy books - they are cheap, or borrow them from libraries - they buy books. If you need books for not-reading, and at scale, you should still be paying - especially if you can afford to pad Nvidia's fat margins. Even if you're self-interested, I would urge you to pick your crimes carefully, and to remember to commit one crime at a time. If distributing copyright material is your chosen hill - more power to you! Just don't sleep walk into it thinking it's harmless. |
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| ▲ | jandrese 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Allowing anonymous people to host files on your server is a great way to collect (and distribute!) illegal porn, stolen data, stolen software, police warrants, etc... | | |
| ▲ | Brian_K_White an hour ago | parent [-] | | Every useful tool is useful for bad things. Everything with the power to protect the innocent, also has exactly the same power to protect the guilty. The two facets are inseperable. Observing only the negative side, or only the positive side, is a null argument. The fact that a tool can be used for bad is exactly cancelled out by the fact that it can be used for good. Neither is a valid basis for any kind of policy. Except that on balance, it's better for everyone that we have tools and capabilities and knowledge than not. It's better that we have knowledge of say, poisons, than not, even though some people apply the knowledge to do harm. This manifests in at least a couple different dimensions. The simplest one: there are more good or neutral people using knowledge and tools for good things than not. A less direct way: It's better for you to have options to help yourself and others deal with problems and meet needs than not. Even if someone can use a tool against you, you are still better off having a lot of useful tools at your disposal in general than not, including to counter the one going against you, which zeros that out, and then also to deal with everything else, which becomes a net positive. The alternative is to be an animal. Either a wild animal totally at the whims of nature, or worse a voluntarily domesticated animal that knows that tools exist, but has abdicated all responsibility for their own welfare to some farmer claiming to take care of them. And you still have the exact same bad guy problem, only now without any ability to deal with it. Acting like the bad side of a useful thing is the only side, or even the most important side, is simple bad math. Aside from any other unflattering quality that results in fear of any obvious easily identified harm being one's highest priority that outweighs all other considerations. |
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| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Can you elaborate on what big potatoes you're seeing? Genuinely asking. The Android app, for example, writes everything to the app's storage, and runs only when your phone is plugged-in and is connected to wifi. To me that generally means "when I'm sleeping". What's the big potato in this scenario? | | |
| ▲ | nerdjon 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That is a hell of a lot of trust that people are putting in to download and upload unknown files. The risks that you download and start spreading malware or worse CSAM. You really don’t want that sitting on your disk. Admittedly the risks is lower if the list is coming from Annas Archive, but this is still putting a lot of trust in an external list. Much better off doing this manually, finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The torrents are coming directly from Anna's Archive torrents list generator, which suggests their torrents based on how rare their content is. There's currently 177TB of data that is only seeded by 4 computers around the world, which I personally find worrisome. People seem to be very concerned, but putting aside the legal risks (which I accept - don't use this if you're in one of the ~10 countries it could get you in troubles for), I don't really get it. The idea is to support Anna's Archive. If you do not trust the project, why support it? Levin is meant for people that want to support Anna's Archive, and my assumption was that this implies some kind of trust in their torrents. Edit: just adding that "finding the list of what you want to seed and vetting that list yourself" is extremely not practical and not won't really help anyone. Torrents work because we're all seeding the same torrents. If I'd seed a torrent of my 5 favorite books and you seed a torrent of your 5 books, our torrents will forever have 1 seeder each. And good luck manually vetting all the files in one AA torrent. I am planning to let people manually add/remove torrents from Levin, but I highly suspect it will be used by very, very few. | | |
| ▲ | nerdjon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are making a wild jump here, you can trust without blindly trusting. How dismissive you are being in multiple comments about people having legitimate security concerns is extremely concerning. This is such a fundamental security concept that we even have a commonly used phrase “trust but verify”. You don’t have to just go based on your favorite books, but instead yourself find the list of torrents that need extra seeders and commit to those. Do a sanity check of the torrent and move on. The risks of this blind trust is just way too high. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Please, go to https://annas-archive.li/torrents and check their torrent list generator. It will recommend you torrent files that need help seeding. Pick one, and see for yourself that it's practically impossible to audit its content. I just checked and the average torrent size is around 125GB. With a typical file in it being around 0.5mb, you're looking at auditing 250,000 files. And the filenames are all hashes. I would honestly love to know what you see as an alternative to trust here; an alternative that can still be helpful. | | |
| ▲ | nerdjon 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Again nowhere am I saying an alternative to trust, I can trust AA without blindingly trusting. Human error and malicious actors don’t immediately remove trust in a larger group, but it is also up to you to take some responsibility to protect yourself. Even the simple act of manually choosing the torrent you are going to seed is already more of a sanity check than what your tool is doing. You could decide that your personal safety guidelines are that you will seed older torrents but not new ones just to make sure that some time passes and nothing was snuck in. Is that perfect, no. But you know a lot more about what is happening on your device than a piece of software that just chooses what it is going to download and seed automatically. And you know before anything happens, not after. Personally my biggest problem there is not choosing to use a tool like this or even how you wrote it. My problem is that you don’t make any mention of this on GitHub and that you’re incredibly dismissive of any concerns about running this way. If this is how you want it to work fine, but simply acknowledge that there are risks involved that go beyond just simply trusting AA and you are asking for blind trust. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm sorry if it sounded like I was being dismissive. FWIW, people suggested that I'll add some information to the README and even implement some kind of a "country-check" to warn the user, and I think these are all great ideas. I still don't think that auditing AA torrent files make much sense however. As my first comment mentioned, the project is WIP. I posted it here because it seemed relevant, but if you're looking for bugs, I'm sure you'll find them both in the code and in the README. I assumed that people realise that a combination of torrenting + AA requires some precautions, but if your point is that I can make it clearer - I don't disagree. | |
| ▲ | s3p 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you are seriously this upset about such a tool, why don't you just avoid using it? Instead of commending the author for their work you're trying to tear them down and prove them wrong in every reply. Why not just move on with your day and avoid using it? |
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| ▲ | u8080 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They hated him because he told the truth moment. Any iOS or Android app could in fact, download arbitrary content without you noticing, but corporations conditioned people to only raise alarms on torrents and other community efforts. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes. As far as I know, with WebRTC I can make your device share certain files with peers simply by you visiting my website. |
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| ▲ | sp332 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not only downloading, but also uploading. Your ISP (in America) has a policy about how many DMCA strikes you get before they disable your internet permanently. | |
| ▲ | pavel_lishin 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Would you be willing to let me mail a package to your house, to hold for me? It would be placed in your house at night, while you're sleeping. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | These are beautiful analogies, but I'd appreciate an answer my original question. Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware). If you want to send me a CD to store at my house, feel free to email me. | | |
| ▲ | filoleg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Your package can explode, these torrents cannot (as far as I am aware). Sure, but what if the scenario was slightly modified, with explicit 100% guarantees regarding rhe package you would receive in the maile: 1. It could only contain either an SSD/hard drive or a usb drive. The storage device has not been tampered with. It was only ever used as a regular storage device out of the box. 2. There is no malware or any malicious executables on the storage device. The only types of data that it could contain would be text/html, structured data/document files (json, csv, office suite files, pdf, etc.), and media files (audio, video, images, etc.). None of those files will exploit any vulnerabilities in the software that opens them (neither through the parser nor anything else) This makes it nearly a perfect 1:1 analogy to the torrenting scenario, both involving the exact same set of imo the most important dangers. Which, for me personally, is the fear of ending up with illegal content (CSAM, stolen credit card dumps, etc.) on a storage device in my possession through no fault of my own. Even if it could be a winnable battle in the end, it would be pretty much over reputationally way before it gets to the legal resolution. Just being accused of having any illegal content of that nature is not something I would want to ever deal with at all. You gotta realize how it would sound and how you would appear to most uninvolved average people in real life, when your legal defense isn’t even something like statement #1 below, and is way closer to the statement #2: > “I am not guilty, the accusarions are false, those files were never present on any of my storage devices.” > “I am not guilty, despite those files being actually present on a storage device in my possession. That’s all due to how torrents inherently work, so, let’s start from the basics…” [and now we gotta explain simplified basics of torrent technology and how it works to the DA, the judge, as well as anyone else observing the trial, and pray they will try to actually understand] | |
| ▲ | SecretDreams 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | If you end up torrenting very illegal or malicious content, who is responsible? Will it be you, the app creator? | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Assuming you are referring to non-books kind of content: I assume that if this happens to anyone, we'd learn about it and all stop seeding AA's content until they explain what happened and how they're making sure it doesn't happen again. The poor person this happened to will have to explain that this wasn't at all what they thought the software was doing. As I said in other comments - yes, this requires some kind of trust in the AA project. Personally, I tend to have more trust in this kind of projects than in big corporations, of which people are happily running their binaries without blinking. However, I'm not trying to convince people to trust AA - this project is simply meant for those who want support them. | | |
| ▲ | SecretDreams 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | AA has plenty of illegal and gray content. It's not something laypeople should help to seed. You need to go in eyes wide open and protect yourself if you're participating, which I do not feel you are sufficiently emphasizing in this pitch. | | |
| ▲ | margalabargala 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah it has a lot of content that violates copyright! That's illegal! | |
| ▲ | acessoproibido 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What is an example of illegal content that is distributed by AA? | | |
| ▲ | throwaway2037 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | To clarify your question, are you asking if "AA actually distributes stolen content" (one could argue no, since it is only available by Torrent) or "the stolen contents of AA" (essentially every published book in existance)? Honestly, in these HN discussions, I am disappointed that people seem very casual about mass piracy of copyrighted works. | | |
| ▲ | idiotsecant 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | copyright (in the capital D Disney sense) is an abomination that should not exist. Information wants to be free. |
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| ▲ | 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | rolymath 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why do none of you understand that this is for Anna's archives official torrents only? | | |
| ▲ | throwaway150 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Why do none of you understand that this is for Anna's archives official torrents only? Because you are on the site where people who have no understanding of the domain or the problem still feel it necessary to share their opinion on things they don't understand. | |
| ▲ | ozim 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is first time I see name of that project. I don't know anyone who is involved in that project. On Wikipedia I see it "shadow library launched by pseudonymous Anna". "Anna's archives official torrents only" - doesn't put me at ease and it is far far from SETI@Home that was ran by highly regarded university and it wasn't storing any torrents on people hard drive. Random people should not "just try it out because it is as easy as SETI@Home" - it should be, people who already know the project and would like to contribute but it was a hassle for them to set it up. | | |
| ▲ | acessoproibido 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Only people who already know and trust AA are going to use it - that is the point of this project |
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| ▲ | satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | By that logic no app should allow you to store any data whatsoever on their servers. Because your data might explode. | |
| ▲ | vachina 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, if I know who you are and you have a list of what you might send. Anna’s Archive’s (who) content is well defined (what). |
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| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | dahrkael 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | japanese people have been doing this with their darknets for decades and they are fine | | |
| ▲ | mmooss 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | There are Japanese-specific darknet networks (using different technology?) that have existed for decades, or are you referring to Japanese language content on Tor, etc.? | | |
| ▲ | dahrkael 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | im referring to WinNY, Share, Perfect Dark and the likes which work kind of like FreeNet with their own twists |
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| ▲ | Maakuth 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How is the anti-P2P enforcement these days? I think there are companies gathering bittorrent swarm data and selling it to lawyers interested in this sort of bullying. In Finland at least you can expect a mail from one of them if your IP address turns up in this data. However I think it is mostly focused on video and music piracy. |
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| ▲ | reddalo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm in Italy. Most people I know have been pirating movies, series and games [1] for 20+ years, via torrents and eMule (yes, eMule is still big in Italy), and nobody ever received any letters. But there's a big exception: as soon as you start pirating soccer, they're going to come after you. [1] I've personally stopped pirating games a long time ago, because it's just easier and safer to buy them on Steam or GOG. Gaben was 100% right when he said "Piracy is almost always a service problem". | |
| ▲ | sva_ 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In Germany you can expect to get a letter from some law firm, confirmed by some judge that orders you to pay 100s or 1000s of euros if you don't use a vpn They will attempt to download DMCA files from you as often as possible and then calculate the amount of times times price of the product to come up with a fictional damages amount | | | |
| ▲ | hamdingers 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | US colocated seedbox with ~10k film and tv torrents seeding at any given time, the last letter I got was ~2014 IIRC, before that it was several a year. I never responded to any of them. I don't think I'm especially good at covering my tracks, so either they've abandoned individual enforcement in favor of going after distributors or they no longer bother with non-residential IPs. | | |
| ▲ | ghostly_s 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | edit: curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you? Anecdotally it seems the only enforcement in the US these days is via ISPs who have made some agreement to "self-enforce" against their residential customers, sending emails threatening to cancel service after three strikes. They seem to only monitor for select "blockbuster" level movies. A friend got one of these as recently as two years ago from CenturyLink iirc. Meanwhile I lived in an apartment building that had a shared (commercial) connection for all the tenants and eventually stopped using a VPN at all, never heard anything. | | |
| ▲ | hamdingers 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you? Yup, they would send their spam to `abuse@provider.tld` regarding an IP address, my provider would look up the IP address and forward it to me. Presumably if they ever cared to escalate they could file a lawsuit and subpoena the provider for my identity, but they never did. They're looking for easy settlements and that would cost time and money. | |
| ▲ | sp332 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, they did sue Cox Communications for a billion dollars because they weren't self-policing. ISPs can lose their safe harbor status and effectively become accomplices in all the piracy of their customers. |
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| ▲ | autoexec 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Happens every day in the US. Mostly video and music (MPA/RIAA). There's also been some effort put into extorting ISPs for the activities of their customers, but the effectiveness of that is still being determined as cases work their way through the court system. We should have a better idea this summer after the supreme court decides on the $1 billion in damages one ISP was ordered to pay to a bunch of RIAA labels. It will be a lot more profitable to sue ISPs than it is to try to sue poor parents and grandparents for what children do online. | |
| ▲ | LelouBil 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | In France, for movies/music you get 2 warning letters, then a scary one that says you can now get to court possibly. Didn't really hear about people getting fines for this, but the law exists. | |
| ▲ | joquarky 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I find it absurd that with all of the dhit going on in the world right now that any legal resources are being spent on copyright enforcement. | |
| ▲ | birdsongs 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've heard Finland sends out letters, same with Japan. Are there actual consequences, or can they just be ignored? Norway I haven't heard of anyone getting anything in the past decade. The ISPs supposedly get letters from lawyers but just toss them, since the intersection of the burden of proof and our privacy laws make it such that nothing can really be done. I think there was some ISP that gave out names and IP addresses to one of the firms years ago, but nothing happened and the police said "we have better things to do". | | |
| ▲ | outime 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | AFAIK you can completely ignore the letters, because taking you to court would be very costly and might not end well for them. However, they keep doing it because some people get scared and pay up right away. | | | |
| ▲ | Maakuth 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, I think it's the same in here, you have been able to ignore the letters without any consequence. Also from what I hear, the letters have been very inaccurate. I doubt the IP based proof would hold in the court of law. | |
| ▲ | yoavm 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Living in Sweden and in the Netherlands, I have never heard about any such case. Not sure I'm just lucky or if it's really non-existent. |
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| ▲ | cedws 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Nice project. I think it would be worth mentioning the legal implications, it’s illegally sharing content right? Best to run behind a VPN or on a VPS in a country that won’t come after you. |
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| ▲ | yoavm 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | I haven't heard about someone ever getting a letter for seeding books, but maybe I'm lucky. In any case, I'll add a notice to the README, thank you for the suggestion. | | |
| ▲ | nicbou 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It would likely happen in Germany, unless you have a VPN. This has been a problem for years when torrenting films. Chasing people with fines has been a lucrative, automated business for years. | | | |
| ▲ | PurpleRamen 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A decade ago, it happened regularly, but not sure if they are still doing this now. But the laws haven't changed much since then. | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, there's a very famous story of one of the cofounders of reddit facing a million dollar fine and 35 years in prison for just downloading, not seeding, scientific articles. Not entirely the same, but quite related as his motivations were similar to those of Anna's Archive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz | | |
| ▲ | cedws 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The Aaron Swartz case is a tragedy, but I think this is kind of understating it. He broke into a private network and tried to cover his tracks which is hard to argue isn’t a cyber crime. I don’t think he deserved anywhere near 35 years though. I think hacker types easily get carried away and forget the optics of what they’re doing. I consider myself lucky the computer mischief I got up to when I was younger never landed me in big trouble. All Swartz needed was a stern reminder, and light sentence to redirect his skills. | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Did you see what Anna's Archive did with Spotify? Seeding their torrents isn't exactly "breaking into a private network", but it is definitely at least showing support for the same kind of large scale data theft / DRM breaking. Which might put a target on your back, should the US govt want to make an example out of you. | | |
| ▲ | joquarky an hour ago | parent [-] | | > data theft Did they delete the data that they copied without permission? | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 an hour ago | parent [-] | | No need to be snarky, I know there's a difference of opinions about ownership when it comes to data. That's why I also wrote "DRM breaking" as an alternative term. Would you say "hackers broke into the NHS and copied patient data without permission" or would you simply say they "stole" it? |
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| ▲ | duskdozer 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There's a lot of interest in this - he had access to all the papers through his own JSTOR account, though he didn't use it; he possibly only got caught by effectively ddosing the site with downloads; his own wiki page suggests he would have faced 50 years in prison but was offered a plea bargain of just six months | |
| ▲ | reddalo 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | RIP Aaron Swartz |
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| ▲ | barbazoo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > resources you already have and aren't using The electricity used here isn't something you already have and just aren't using, a lot of people will pull that electricity from a coal power plant. Negligible considering the big picture of course. |
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| ▲ | creaturemachine 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Did you just create Pied Piper IRL? |
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| ▲ | throw10920 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How does Levin "use the diskspace you don't use"? That sounds like a neat feature but I'm not aware of any APIs for that on desktop platforms. |
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| ▲ | yoavm 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | You configure Levin to "always leave 2GB available". Levin checks the available diskspace using a simple statvfs call, deducts 2GB, and sees that as its budget. It then checks your diskspace every minute (more or less, depending on the device) to see if anything changes. If more free space is suddenly available, it will download more content. If there's less than 2GB available, it will immediately start deleting its own files until 2GB are free. | | |
| ▲ | filleduchaos 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Out of curiosity, how much RAM do you have and have you tested this on a computer that does not have as much? Asking because this sounds like a mini-disaster in the making with e.g. macOS' swap and a device with 16GB or even 8GB of RAM. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not sure why you're concerned about RAM; the numbers I mentioned are all relating to diskspace. It doesn't take much RAM at all to run a torrent client daemon. FWIW it runs without any noticeable effects on my OnePlus 6 from 2018. | | |
| ▲ | kortilla 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | swap consumes disk. Commenter was talking about a scenario where swap dynamically filling and emptying space on the disk would make your software thrash |
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| ▲ | throw10920 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That's a neat hack, thank you for sharing. |
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| ▲ | shablulman 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| very cool project! |
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| ▲ | streetfighter64 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Hmm, seeding torrents with the added excitement that you don't know what torrent's you're seeding, and the client is written using LLMs. What could possibly go wrong? |
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| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can check the content of the torrents, just like any torrent. The client isn't a "one shot" LLM produce, I've been spending quite some time on it. What actual concerns do you have? | | |
| ▲ | yoz-y 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not parent but: The first thing that pops to mind is inadvertently downloading and hosting CSAM. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you suspect AA for spreading CSAM, please don't support the project. And please do share your reasons for suspicion. | |
| ▲ | RankingMember 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This isn't TOR, though it's not completely unfounded that the definition of CSAM could be broadened in the future by legislators to include things that are, by current definitions, not CSAM, e.g. works of fiction that include scenes of abuse. | | | |
| ▲ | Tepix 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, your copy of your operating system could also contain CSAM, I hope you checked every single byte just to make sure. | | |
| ▲ | xpe 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Please, let's be sensible and think about probabilities in the real world. | | |
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| ▲ | streetfighter64 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | duozerk 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | So you did use LLMs to write at least part of the software. I imagine you feel no shame, but it would be nice to at least mention it on the github page. It's a security risk. As for your question, I don't know about the person you're replying to, but for me any software where part of the source was provided by a LLM is a no-go. They're credible text generators, without any understanding of, well, anything really. Using them to generate source code, and then using it, is sheer insanity. One might suggest it means I soon won't be able to use any software; fortunately the entire fever dream that is the ongoing "AI" bubble will soon stop, so I'm hoping that won't be the case. | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They literally state that they used LLMs to build it in the second sentence of their initial comment so not sure why you frame it as something they weren't upfront about. As for it being a bubble that will stop completely, that ship has long since sailed and I assume you're inadvertently using LLM generated code somewhere in your software stack already, due to news reports saying certain companies are already using LLMs in their codebase. | |
| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I wish I could speed up time just to see how this comment would age. While I personally prefer living in a world without LLMs, I do suspect you're going to end up without any software. | | |
| ▲ | duozerk 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | A more reasonable response than my admittedly slightly aggressive comment deserved. Indeed, we'll see. | |
| ▲ | dylan604 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm imagining some apocalyptic world Mad Max style where there are underground groups hand writing code to avoid the detection of the AI. Unfortunately, so few people are able to do it any more and the code is so bug ridden that their attempts at regaining control over the AI often ends in embarrassing results. Those left in the fight often find themselves wondering why everyone just rolled over for the machines, what, because it made their lives easier?? Maybe it's a scene from a show I've seen already?? | |
| ▲ | bigfishrunning 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I suspect we'll all end up without any software, once we've successfully gotten rid of anyone who can evaluate the output of an LLM | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There will always be a niche of people writing software, just as today while most work in web dev or backend, there are some who work in embedded or have retro computing as a hobby. |
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| ▲ | tcdent 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Just like you can read source code written by humans (and should if you take this stance) you can also read source code generated by LLMs. Then, when you find something unsavory and feel that your sentiment is warranted, make a contribution. | | |
| ▲ | streetfighter64 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well obviously, but a dirty kitchen is evidence that the meal might give you food poisoning, and there's no reason to visit every restaurant. Would you go see a movie that was advertised as AI-generated? (I do appreciate the author being upfront about it however.) | | |
| ▲ | theragra 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Some genAI video or image content can be made with creativity and be enjoyable. It gets boring with time, but our current AI boom allows some people to unleash an inner director. | |
| ▲ | yreg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm looking forward to those films, especially if they are adaptations made by the fan community instead of corporate studios. |
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| ▲ | potatoman22 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Great name haha. Is Anna a reference to who I think it is? |
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| ▲ | motbus3 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They are eliminating competition as they are doing elsewhere |
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| ▲ | arnavpraneet 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| great project, was thinking of something like this a while ago - will definitely be seeding using this! |
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| ▲ | toomuchtodo 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Are you accepting feature requests? |
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| ▲ | yoavm 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | What do you have in mind? | | |
| ▲ | toomuchtodo 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Threads with context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45491679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46637992 Elephant system design - https://gist.github.com/skorokithakis/68984ef699437c5129660d... (A distributed, voluntary backup system (high-level design document)) You're most of the way there with the distributed storage workers scheme u/stavros proposed ("Elephant") to increase Internet Archive item durability through a distributed volunteer seeder network. Feature request would be the ability to specify RSS feeds serving torrent files or magnet links to consume for seeding operations. This would also enable providing this data over ATProto for consumption, although I'm unsure at the moment if a lexicon would be needed. If there is a tip jar, happy to tip, please consider adding to your repo or GitHub profile somewhere. | | |
| ▲ | yoavm 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | I thought about offering alternative "torrents list", but didn't find any. Internet Archive would be a great one. I'm not sure about how ATProto works, but I made sure to enable WebTorrents so that it would be quite easy to download from Levin seeders using a browser only. As for tipping - I really appreciate it, but there are really many people/projects that would need it much more than me. |
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| ▲ | squigz 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > We probably wouldn't have had LLMs if it wasn't for Anna's Archive and similar projects AA and similar projects might make it easier for them, but I'm quite certain the LLM companies could have figured out how to assemble such datasets if they had to. |
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| ▲ | zlandx 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 1999: Napster was created so regular people could download a couple of movies. Napster was shut down. 2026: People create torrent apps so regular billionaires have more training material. Hint: These billionaires do not care about you. They laugh at you, use you and will discard you once your utility is gone. |
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| ▲ | twgafd100 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > I'm thinking about it like a modern day SETI@home Of course. Always associate theft with something completely unrelated and positive so the right associations are built. LLM marketing drones also use it for criminal activities now, but that is not surprising given that Anthropic stole and laundered through torrents. |
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| ▲ | yoavm 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's related in the sense that it works in the background, using the spare resources you have. Whether you see the thing it does as a good thing or theft is really up to you. I guess some people had their own reasons for not supporting the SETI@home objectives either. In any case, I'm perfectly happy with an analogy like "it's like going to the library, making a copy of all the books and making the copies available for everyone for free". | |
| ▲ | joquarky an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | What did they steal? |
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