Ask HN: Anyone want models snail-mailed to them?

[ravenhappy]

Like a station wagon barreling down the highway...

With the advent of enormous models such as R1, do any of you want me to download a model for you, and ship it to you on a storage device?

Having a gigabit connection at my home, I'm lucky enough to be able to download any model that piques interest. I know from experience that this is not the case for everyone.

I'm an established eBay seller since 2000(!), and I can send you the model of your choice, on the device of your choice, by snail mail. Like the car full of hard drives barreling down the highway, except in a well-packaged box, delivered to your doorstep by the courier of your choice.

The way I see this working is I share my ebay account, we establish trust..., you tell me which model, or probably which models you want, I git lfs them (from huggingface or wherever) onto a storage device that you send me, or that I purchase for you, and then I mail the model(s) to you via your preferred postal method, including to international addresses.

Can I help you get your hands on DeepSeek R1 or any other model, by snail mail?

[rboyd]

elaborate supply chain attack eventually generates backdoored code

[gopalv]

In the days of 56kbps internet days in India, there was a BBS (run by a cabal of sorts) who would download a linux distro CD and mail you a disk.

The email would have a link to the original .torrent and if a part of a disk was somehow corrupted, you could download just that chunk via BitTorrent instead of redownloading the whole thing or waiting for a new disk out.

Independently sourced checksums fixes most of the trust issues and a block-by-block checksum like what torrents had would allow for repair as well.

[FloatArtifact]

That's a really generous offer. However, I feel most people are compute before bandwidth-constrained. I hope over the next years we'll have significantly advanced models 70b without paying $3,000 for something like Nvidia's digit.

Perhaps some may be region locked out of downloading such resources which may be able to take you up on your offer though!

[ClassyJacket]

In Australia the government legally mandated that I (and most of the country) am not permitted to have a wired internet connection above 25mbit/s. I am very bandwidth constrained.

[sourcecodeplz]

Nice initiative, but I feel the ones who can afford to run R1 locally also have the resource to download it

[hartator]

Yeah, 404 of GPU ram is quite the gpu cluster.

[matt_heimer]

Why not make a snail mailer download service?

Mediawiki dumps, Linux distros, AI models, etc.

[tomcam]

Gigi Hadid, pls

Seriously, what a generous offer. You rock.

[fsckboy]

you say generous... I think it's great that he's offering the arbitrage, but through his ebay account implies there will be a charge, no? could still be a very reasonable price but...

[ge96]

That could be a movie plot, some drive lost in the mail that has to be recovered. Where is it?! I don't know! Don't give me excuses give me answers!

[tonymet]

no, but xbox prereleases.