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.
In my experience public torrents often die as they grow older. It doesn't help that BitTorrent V1 makes long term seeding annoying, and BitTorrent V2 is almost never used.
I never understood this, is there anything that makes it difficult for the original uploader, the one that supposedly offers the file directly, to offer a torrent instead for the same amount of time?
As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.
Well, for a torrent to stay healthy, users have to seed after download, so it can't possibly have the same UX as a standard browser file download unless you want to either kill the ecosystem or hide from the user what is consuming upload bandwidth.
That said, for large files, I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
> I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
Brave browser had BitTorrent client built in for a while. I tried it a couple of times as I already use Brave for web browsing on my laptop. It was a very confusing BitTorrent client. I struggled to use it, and wasted time waiting for a download to complete only to not be able to find where the files were and then they disappeared. Using a decent BitTorrent client like you say is much preferable to the one that they had in Brave browser.
phoyd · · focus · HN ↗
CodesInChaos · · focus · HN ↗
monsieurbanana · · focus · HN ↗
As far as perennity is concerned it seems strictly better.
cube00 · · focus · HN ↗
csomar · · focus · HN ↗
Torrent/P2P can only add redundancy, so it’s impossible to have worse availability than a download link?
_blk · · focus · HN ↗
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pell · · focus · HN ↗
Opera did back in the day.
Wowfunhappy · · focus · HN ↗
That said, for large files, I much prefer the UX of a well-designed torrent client like Transmission to my web browser. If nothing else, the downloads are reliably resumable.
QuantumNomad_ · · focus · HN ↗
Brave browser had BitTorrent client built in for a while. I tried it a couple of times as I already use Brave for web browsing on my laptop. It was a very confusing BitTorrent client. I struggled to use it, and wasted time waiting for a download to complete only to not be able to find where the files were and then they disappeared. Using a decent BitTorrent client like you say is much preferable to the one that they had in Brave browser.