The “tech worker” of today is nothing like the SF based hackers and early product designers of Web 2.0, twitter era.

Artists in their own right and yet fundamentally pirates who opened the browser ecosystem, pioneered open APIs, invented ad blocking, embraced open source, engineered browser based telephony and streaming, gave us modern services like PopcornTime carrying the torch from torrents/piratebay into the modern era.

Give me Photoshop and JavaScript and I care not who makes the laws.

Today we have charlatans, hackademics, and heavily moderated sites like HN. The tech industry is nothing like it used to be - if anything it’s inverted with all the corporate replicas in every role and the creatives kicked out. There is no rebellion even slightly, no originality - they sound like hens, predictable and unprofound in every way.

The real creative hacker type needs a new vertical, this one has been taken over like ants on a sandwich.

I think this comment is quite disingenous -- it's like if there's a rule that says "nobody can walk on the grass" that you object to because you'd like to have a picnic with some friends; your claim is that if someone gets out a bulldozer and drives it across the lawn to make a parking lot followed by an army of lawyers that anyone who wanted to picnic is objecting purely because it's a convenient way to criticise the bulldozers.

Which is why OpenAI and Anthropic think it’s fair play for other companies to distill their models, right?

Well, the problem is, they are not held accountable, but heaven forbid you as a simple citizen engage in that much IP infringement, holy moly are they gonna be at your doorstep quickly.

It's rules for thee but not for me. On an enormous scale. If it was fair, then we would have a global announcement, that the US are abandonning IP laws and copyright, and no one needs to worry about infringing on any such a thing any longer.

Didn't Anthropic pay like $3 billion dollars or something for their IP theft? And yes, I'm going to keep calling it theft. Comparing a kid stealing a song off limewire to a company stealing the entire internet is not the same thing.

I’m not sure if “theft” is the right word or not but selling copied dvds on the street is completely different from “sharing is caring” piracy. These companies took the entirety of human knowledge for free and now want to sell it back to you, and even openly tout that it will put most of us out of our jobs.

It’s not the same thing as downloading a car or a purse for private individual use.

Because the AI companies also stole from things society values extremely high: artists, workers, children, and humans.

I don't really care about IP for the exact same reasons you say, but what I hate even more are rich elites thinking they can continue stealing massively from the commoners unabated.

We just spent the last 15 years seeing big tech literally making society worse, and I think people are finally fed up with the results.

I think significantly fewer people would have an issue with this if the profit was socialized. The fact that a company took all of humanity’s data and is profiting from _is_ the issue.

And we can also ignore model law; we should require OpenAI/Anthropic to provide unrestricted access (at standard API rates) to their competitors so they can use this to train new models.

Written by gpt-5.6-sol