Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion

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• Hacker News
• What on earth is going on with all the spam in this thread? Is this how you claim a username?
  by sandcat_
• This site could be useful also since there's been a recent trend of abliterated model providers demanding a hugging face account and email collection. I assume this is so the providers can spam people since there's not much other benefit. Hugging face had also been making it harder to sign up with disposable email addresses since they throw a weird error during sign up if they detect it. Anyway, I see a site like this being useful to sidestep all that data collection.
  by Scaled
• Why is the sign-up system so complicated? Why not just log into your HF account and be done? You're trying to force people to spam on X and HN so that their X and HN accounts get deleted?
  by mitxela
• Edit: Deleted. Been oversharing a bit re research I'm doing, and the payoff is replies from folks who haven't bothered to go and take a look themselves, which I then have to spend more cycles refuting, etc. So best to just go back to the first step and not overshare and recover the cycles I'd spend on the rest of it. Admittedly I'm tired and pissed off, but yeah. HN won't let me delete this so I guess it's just a deletion edit. Sorry.
  by mmaunder
• This is really important. I am already tired of hoarding rclone copies of huggingface torrents and periodically checking them for bitrot. Pirateface is not a very helpful name for it though and it doesn't seem to have scripted torrent creation either.

  Is hosting the same thing at 'academictorrents' actually a viable thing? In terms of peers from either send data to one another?

  edit: looks like it can treat huggingface as a backstop for torrents that are otherwise not shared which is interesting, whole load of checksum nonsense I hand rolled disappear if bittorrent handles that. Except it doesn't work?

      Magnet soon No seeders yet - a torrent mints once a seeder packages this model.
  

  So there's some per-torrent work to be done, but I don't know what that is, and I don't see how it can be based on files I have locally _and also_ be an exact match to files on huggingface. So I'm missing something here.

  edit2: Looks like an implementation error. I can create a torrent from local files and upload it, but it won't have the huggingface backstop, and I can't specify it, so that doesn't actually achieve the claimed result. Before creating community torrents in that fashion would actually be of use, the submission page needs to allow pointing at the upstream.

  Also, having everyone DIY a set of files -> torrent information is insane, this should not be a SKILLS.md, it should be a bash script that makes the thing.

  by JonChesterfield
• Steam & Blizzard (probably others) used to delivery games through torrent protocol in the past, before CDNs became cheaper.

  When StarCraft 2 was lauched, the installer (before Battle.net installer crapware) had a complete graphical visualization of seeders & leechers.

  Reference: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

  by mococa
• Torrents should really be the preferred method for distributing AI model weights. Why rely on a single point of failure like Hugging Face? BitTorrent was made for exactly this.
  by phoyd
• Speaking to the "uncensored model" angle: there's little reason to distribute abliterated weights anyway. Instead of orthogonalising the weights that write back to the residual stream, you can just orthogonalise the activations themselves. It's equivalent.

  Orthogonalising activations at runtime is computationally cheap. Just distribute the refusal vectors (few thousand floats per layer), then run against the stock weights. Antirez's DS4 already supports this: https://github.com/antirez/ds4/blob/8db1d1d155cb0400a86a86b9...

  Abliterated weights are just a bad habit we've gotten into. It's also deeply suboptimal from a precision point of view to take a model that's already been QATed and distributed in pre-quantised form (DeepSeek V4, Kimi K2.5 or K3...), modify its weights, and re-quantise it. Similarly, abliterated models regain some of their refusal behaviour when they're re-quantised after abliteration -- avoidable by keeping the two separate.

  by wren6991