Is NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI?

I read recently that we were.
Are we?
Hmm. Not… exactly? A bit, I guess? But not. It’s complicated.
It’s certainly understandable why it might come across that way. We are, rather notoriously, anti-stupidity. And we’re anti-exploitation. And we’re not super fond of bullshit. LLMs, the specific type of generative AI most prominent in the public consciousness, do seem to be a fascinatingly complex mechanism powered by money and energy (and water, apparently?) that transforms stupidity and exploitation into previously-unimaginable quantities of bullshit. There’s a lot of overlap, is what I’m saying.
We are strongly against AI bots scraping our members’ sites. But that’s less because it’s got anything to do with AI and more because the bots are incredibly stupid and it’s exploitative. Two out of three ain’t… good. They’re also, regrettably, very difficult to stop. But we’re doing our best.
We’re also pretty concerned about the AI surveillance state represented by companies like Palantir and Flock Safety. LLMs get all the press, but (to shamelessly steal a wonderful idiom in their honor) these guys seem like the ones who have dedicated their lives to inventing the Torment Nexus from the sci-fi classic “Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus.” To them, Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City isn’t dystopian, it’s aspirational.
Deepfakes, of course, are pretty terrible. GenAI for the people who looked at the Internet and said, “You know what this needs? More nonconsensual pornography!”
Voice-cloning is also pretty scary. Or, at least, it’s scary that it’s trivially easy. How far are we from kids using their Fisher-Price Forge n’ Fraud play set to convince the school that their parents are keeping them home today?
These are all things that I’ve tried. I want to keep an open mind. And I want to understand what it’s capable of for myself. As hard as it would be to justify the wholesale theft of words, images, videos and likenesses that these models wouldn’t exist without, it’s like, OK, hit me. Show me why it’s all worth it. Show me what it can do!
So I set my home security system up to tell me when my dog is in the backyard, though sometimes it thinks she’s a cat. Or a squirrel. I’ve let coding agents write unit tests for me, which were actually mostly decent, except for that time an incorrect test failed so the agent quietly changed the code to also be wrong so the test would pass. I even vibe-coded a web frontend for a tool I use every day. I will never understand that code (partly because it’s terrible and partly because it’s all in Javascript), which seems like a problem, but it technically works. I’ve messed around with image generation, though I managed to do it without violating anyone. It seems like it only “works” if you give it vague instructions and aren’t invested in obtaining a specific result. I even cloned a voice, though I chose one that was already synthetic. (Ada from Satisfactory, if you must know.)
And, yes, I’ve tried chatbots, both local and the big names. I even found a case where they’re helpful! Say you’re writing a story or trying to plan something out. You get stuck, you give the AI some background and ask it what to do. And what it tells you is dumb and wrong. And then you tell it, “No, that’s dumb and wrong, because (reason).” Repeat a few times, and pay attention to the (reason)s. A lot of the time, you’ll wind up articulating important details about the situation that you didn’t know you knew. This only works with LLMs because, I find, human beings get peevish if you ask them for ideas and then repeatedly tell them why all of their suggestions are dumb and wrong.
I don’t know. The promise of AI seems great. But the current reality is an AI slop, revenge porn, security nightmare, technofascist horror show built by sacrificing every fixed representation of human creativity on the altar of “number go up.” All for what? The most expensive mediocrity the world has ever known?
I think if AI were in the hands of, say, our members, that maybe we’d get more of the promise and less of… that. It is really tempting to try it, because I trust our members and the world they would build vastly more than any of the billionaires who seem half a cackle from a volcano lair. But I went to a performance at a local university’s theater last week. At the beginning, they played a recording about how important it is to acknowledge that the university is built on stolen land. (Feel however you want to feel about that.) If we did try to take some of the more open tools and make them available, knowing how they were trained, damn, but that feels a whole lot like building on stolen land. And I’m not sure a recording would make me OK with it.
Also, as a more practical matter, I’m not thrilled that 1TB of ECC DDR5-6400 RAM costs over $30,000 right now. Guess we’re going to be in the group figuring out how to do more with less while our techno-overlords keep working on adding erotic mode to ChatGPT.
So, yeah. NearlyFreeSpeech.NET anti-AI? Honestly, I don’t know where people get these wild ideas! 🙄

Easily generating TLS certificates for the rest of your stuff

In May of 2024, we rolled out automatic TLS for all member sites. Reaction to this has been extremely positive.

However, that’s not the only place where Let’s Encrypt and automatic certificates are useful.

Do you have any web servers running at home (or work) on a private network running behind your NAT?? How about a home automation server, a self-hosted cloud server, or a home surveillance system? Anything that is using HTTP instead of HTTPS because they’re not (and shouldn’t be!) visible from the Internet and therefore can’t get a certificate from Let’s Encrypt the usual way. Or maybe you have something, Internet connected or otherwise, that could be secured with TLS but doesn’t use HTTPS at all.

Continue reading Easily generating TLS certificates for the rest of your stuff…

A quick note to our queer members

We saw the recent news about Steam and Itch.io being forced to restrict legal adult content by Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal. As usual, plenty of creators guilty of existing while queer are getting caught in the crossfire.* We’ve also seen a bunch of recent signups from affected folks looking for a safe online place.

This is, to the best of our ability to create and maintain it, that place.

However, we highly value transparency. We’ve had our own issues with that type of pressure in the past. In addition to payment processing, our refusal to prohibit legal adult content makes it incredibly difficult for us to get certain types of insurance. (Like, more than one carrier has literally told us “we can’t write insurance for somebody falling and hurting themselves in your office because you won’t prohibit adult content on your servers.” Oh, fuck off!) We’ve been able to navigate that successfully thus far, but it’s a fine line. Steam and Itch also navigated it successfully, likely with the best of intentions, right up until they didn’t!

We cannot promise that we (and by extension, our members) won’t ever run into similar problems in the future. But we can promise that we will always fight. We can’t promise that we will win. But we can promise that if we fail, we died trying. (And even if we did somehow get forced into banning adult content, adult content != queer content!)

You. Are. Worth. Protecting.

Given this and all the other recent bullshit, we just wanted to make that clear to all of our queer and LGBT+ members… the brand new and the very, very old.

Also, the Fair Access to Banking Act (FABA) is currently in the US Senate and would prohibit banks and payment processors from putting this type of pressure on businesses engaged in legal activity. It was introduced and co-sponsored by 43 Republican Senators big mad about alleged bias against conservative businesses. If you’re in the US, please encourage your elected representatives to support it, if not because it would really help this sort of thing then because irony is an important part of a good, nutritious breakfast.

*I’m not sure that “crossfire” is the right term, given that the fanatics behind pushes like this are absolutely fine with it. Getting rid of adult content isn’t their goal, it’s their starting point.

Terms & Conditions Update: Forced Assistance For Obstinance

Over the years, we have developed several policies that cover the rare situations when one of our members engages in problematic behavior. Rather than trying to maintain an exhaustive list of those situations and different ways of handling them, we have updated our Terms and Conditions of Service to merge those ad-hoc policies into a single new “Forced Assistance For Obstinance” policy.
Continue reading Terms & Conditions Update: Forced Assistance For Obstinance…

Automatic TLS is now a thing

We are rolling out new automatic TLS infrastructure that does not require members to set up or maintain anything. This means that, for new sites, aliases will get TLS automatically within a few minutes after they are set up and working. This works transparently with all site types, including custom processes and proxies. It doesn’t cost anything, you don’t have to do anything to set it up, and you don’t have to do anything to renew it.
Continue reading Automatic TLS is now a thing…

Small Christmas upgrades

We’ve got a couple of small updates to announce today:

• One server type to rule them all?
• A forum facelift.

Continue reading Small Christmas upgrades…

Bigger, better, faster, more

I debated whether to write a humorous intro, but I’ve ultimately decided it’s more important to get succinct information out to everyone, so here’s the TLDR:
Over the next few weeks, we will migrate NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to all-new equipment and greatly upgraded network infrastructure.

• We’re replacing our Intel Xeon servers with brand-new AMD Epyc servers.
• All our existing file storage will be migrated from SATA SSDs to NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSDs.
• Most of our content will be served from New York City rather than Phoenix after the upgrade.
• Various things may be intermittently weird or slow for the next couple of weeks as we shift them around, but we’re working hard to minimize and avoid disruptions to hosted services.

Continue reading Bigger, better, faster, more…

Hey! What happened to 2023Q2?

You may have noticed that production sites with normal updates are being upgraded from 2022Q4 to 2023Q1, and non-production sites are being upgraded from 2023Q1 to 2023Q3. So what happened to 2023Q2?
Continue reading Hey! What happened to 2023Q2?…

NearlyFreeSpeech.NET turns 20 today

The NearlyFreeSpeech.NET domain was registered on January 18, 2002. We’re 20 years old today. Wow! So much has changed between then and now. And so much hasn’t.

Looking forward to the next 20!

Free Speech in 2021

So, a bunch of people suddenly discovered they care deeply about free speech immediately after a handful of racists faced even mild consequences for plotting a literal insurrection.

That does not reflect well on those people.

We’ve received quite a few emails (and signups) from them in the past week or so. They appear to believe that “free speech” means they can say whatever they want without repercussions. (It does not.) They expect us to agree with them about that. (We do not.) And they believe they’re entitled to our reassurance and, in some cases, assistance. (They are not.)
Continue reading Free Speech in 2021…