globie

There are plenty of commercial pirates, and those commercial uses were grouped in with noncommercial sharing in much the same way you are doing with scraping. Am I wrong in assuming most of this scraping comes from people utilizing AI agents for things like AI-assisted coding? If an AI agent scrapes a page at a users' request (say the 1 billionth git commit scraped today), do you consider that "loot[ing] a store"? What got looted? Is it the bandwidth? The CPU? Or does this require the assumption that the author of that commit wouldn't be excited that their work is being used?

I'd like to focus on your strongest point, which is the cost to the companies. I would love to know what that increase in cost looks like. You can install nginx on a tiny server and serve 10k rps of static content, or like 50 (not 50k) rps of a random web framework that generates the same content. So this increase in cost must be weighed against how efficient the software serving that content is.

If this Github post included a bunch of numbers and details demonstrating how they have reached the end of the line on optimizing their web frontend, they have ran out of things to cache, and the increase in costs is a real cause for concern to the company (not just a quick shave to the bottom line, not a bigger net/compute check written from Github to their owners), I'd throw my hands up with them and start rallying against the (unquestionably inefficient and on the line of hostile) AI agent scrapers causing the increase in traffic.

Because they did not provide that information, I have to assume that Github and Microsoft are doing this out of pure profit motivations and have abandoned any sense of commitment to open access of software. In fact, they have much to gain from building the walls of their garden up as high as they can get away with, and I'm skeptical their increase in costs is very material at all.

I would rather support services that don't camouflage as open and free software proponents one day and victims of a robbery on the next. I still think this question is important and valid: There is tons of software on Github written by users who wish for their work to remain open access. Is that the class of software and people you believe should be shuffled around into smaller and smaller services that haven't yet abandoned the commitments that allowed them to become popular?

This rings the same tune as the MPAA and RIAA utilizing lawfare to destroy freedom online when pirates were the ones "break[ing] the internet."

Could you help me understand what the difference is between your point and the arguments MPAA and RIAA used to ruin the torrent users' lives they concluded were "thieves"?

As a rule of thumb, do you think people who are happy with the services they contribute content to being open access and wish them to remain so should be the ones who are forced to constantly migrate to new services to keep their content free?

When AI can perfectly replicate the browsing behavior of a human being, should Github restrict viewing a git repository to those who have verified blood biometrics or had their eyes scanned by an Orb? If they make that change, will you still place blame on "jackasses"?

Very cool. It's too bad that Chroma noise is apparently quite visible on other planets too.

It took me a while to understand what looks like a legend in the article's image. I don't think it is a legend, those are color swatches showing that if you subtract the aurora color from the left image and add it to the right, the resulting color is very similar ("Observed sky" on left is similar to "Observed sky + aurora" on right), strongly suggesting the presence of green aurora.

Yes, let's put ransomware in CPUs. Let's put it in ARM SoCs too. I would love to one day buy a modern computer and get root access to its hardware again.

I remember the first time I saw AI alt text provide a detailed description of a missing photo. The description was so complete and captured every detail to the point where the original photo became redundant.

My first thought was how incredible it would be to be visually impaired and have access to this new way of "seeing" the world. Yes, there are dangerous effects too when AI astroturfers can read images to blend further into conversations. But what a time to be blind!

I find most efforts to regulate AI to be misplaced or futile.

But this resolution specifically safeguards AI "automated decision systems", which they define as:

> any computational process derived from machine learning, statistical modeling, data analytics, or artificial intelligence that issues a simplified output, including a score, classification, or recommendation, to materially influence or replace human decision making.

Recommendation algorithms [weaponize influence against people that] decide elections, change laws, and move markets. The US effectively mandated a minimum drinking age by tying it to interstate funding. Some 40 years later, you can (AFAIK) openly operate a recommendation algorithm aimed at getting masses of people to drink and drive, and still be eligible for federal grants and funding.

AI should be open and free of barriers. Our government should not give money to corporations that manipulate our emotions for control and profit. Sure, we can rabble to our tribe about "Republicans" and "the GOP", but federal funding and directing of the manipulation of Americans was enabled by the Smith–Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 under a split congress and democratic president.

Increasing corporate control over the public is currently a bipartisan issue, and words can't undo it.

It's a strange thing Discus does loading only a portion of discussion, as if it's prohibitively expensive to pull out a few extra kb to load the entire text of the thread at once.

I do enjoy seeing a Google page load about 30 scripts from AWS Cloudfront, though :)

The OP of the thread is pointing out that Google's "gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25" model was "suddenly and silently" redirecting to "gemini-2.5-pro-preview-05-06", confusing and frustrating "developers, benchmark maintainers, and researchers" who thought they were using one model but were actually being served another.

The current HN link is to page 3 of that discussion, of which I assume the highlighted comment is from this user who provides a possible reason for that redirection:

> It literally didn`t handhold and gave critical honest feedback, even under wrong assumptions. Where all other models were just parroting what they thought the user wants to hear.

What's being strip mined is the openness of the Internet, and AI isn't the one closing up shop. Github was created to collaborate on and share source code. The company in the best position to maximize access to free and open software is now just a dragon guarding other people's coins.

The future is a .txt file of John Carmack pointing out how efficient software used to be, locked behind a repeating WAF captcha, forever.

I don't understand how this post stacks up against the myriad of communications apps that not only require phone verification when creating a new profile (and maybe SMS2FA), but put great effort into blocking as many VoIP/burner/prepaid numbers as possible.

"Most"? maybe "a troubling few"?

Phone verification is absolutely a widely exploited data mining opportunity, I don't see how it's a red herring at all. It's one of the worst surveillance mechanisms we live with today, only partially waved away with the 2000's concept of burner numbers.