joepie91_

and as we all know, a random off-hand internet comment will provide more credible analysis than a large-scale study

There may be some device on your network that's being abused as a residential proxy by "AI" companies, causing you to get caught in scraper block waves. A lot of sketchy mobile apps especially tend to bundle this kind of malware. Have a look at whether anything is using an inexplicable amount of bandwidth (doesn't have to be big, just bigger than expected).

> Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.

Close, but not quite. They are political questions. And crucially, political questions to which we already know the answer in the current sociopolitical environment: it displaces workers, because the balance of power is very heavily tilted towards the wealthy.

This is precisely why people oppose AI.

The people who would argue about how unfair it is that they got kicked out of somewhere because they flew too close to the sun, are also the same people who will rules-lawyer your "easy" list of rules and invent loopholes if they need to, just to be able to complain and stir up a crowd.

Codeberg is run by people. People who can make contextual judgments. They're even pretty explicit about it in their blogpost; that it's not going to be a search-and-destroy process, and that they're generally communicative.

In that situation, anyone who is complaining that the rules are "too vague" is probably just trying to figure out exactly how close they can get to violating the rules without getting kicked, and that's precisely the kind of people who would not be welcome on a community service like Codeberg. If you actually follow the spirit and intention of the rule, it would never even get to a point of ambiguity.

Given that they're a non-profit membership association with explicitly political goals where every new user represents a direct cost to the organization, and not a startup on a comfortable cushion of VC moneybags looking to pump the numbers for a quick acquisition, I very much doubt that a "growth strategy" is what they're going for here.

Just because the fundamental principles cannot trivially be summarized into a single sentence, doesn't mean they don't exist. It's a member association, and the fundamental principles form organically from its membership. That's... how social groups work.

You can literally take the exact same software that Codeberg uses, Forgejo, and stand up your own alternative with different policies, with the only real cost being operational in nature. It seems less the case that it's a "low-cardinality space", and more that people feel entitled to other people's labour under their own terms.

That's entirely a predicament of Microsoft's own making, though. Don't forget that they're the ones who launched "AI" programming into the hype cycle to begin with. So it's entirely reasonable to hold them as a company responsible for the resulting outages, which indeed shouldn't be happening. Dogs, fleas, and so on.

I'd be very wary about such specific surveys, because they're often very much not conducted in a scientifically responsible manner, and based on actual studies across the spectrum of political issues there's basically no alignment between public opinion/preferences and actual policymaking in the US.

Could this be the one exceptional case where people agree with the direction of policymaking? Sure. Is that likely? No, not really.

This is a defeatist argument. That it's technically possible to abuse things doesn't mean the responsibility needs to fall on the defending party, especially not when that is brought up in response to asking someone to reflect on possibilities for abuse - by that point it starts looking a lot more like a "well you'll just have to deal with it" argument that socially defends the abusers, and a lot less like genuine advice.

Have you actually tried blocking these scraper bots? The whole problem is that if you do, they start impersonating normal browsers from residential IPs instead. They actively evade countermeasures.

> The crawlers could just as well be search engine startups.

And yet they are not. So what does that tell you?

None of the AIs have any 'knowledge' to begin with, so that's an easy one to satisfy.

There are a few ways in which bots can fail to get past such challenges, but the most durable one (ie. the one that you cannot work around by changing the scraper code) is that it simply makes it much more expensive to make a request.

Like spam, this kind of mass-scraping only works because the cost of sending/requesting is virtually zero. Any cost is going to be a massive increase compared to 'virtually zero', at the kind of scale they operate at, even if it would be small to a normal user.

> I think uncontrolled price of cloud traffic - is a real fraud

Yes, it is.

> and way bigger problem then some AI companies that ignore robot.txt.

No, it absolutely is not. I think you underestimate just how hard these AI companies hammer services - it is bringing down systems that have weathered significant past traffic spikes with no issues, and the traffic volumes are at the level where literally any other kind of company would've been banned by their upstream for "carrying out DDoS attacks" months ago.

What likely happened here is that they were raising prices due to increased costs for energy and various other costs, and if they hadn't made this change then they would have had to increase the price more, so relative to that it keeps it cheaper for low-traffic customers - and they just communicated this poorly.

> Git, or any file-server based software, is not built to scale up well in today's world. Large Git hosters have to invest entire teams to manage their file servers and their Git front-end systems to create a web-scale service on top of a file-server based piece of software. I'm just skipping to the part where you don't need that anymore because Azure / GCP / AWS PaaS services already handle that.

This doesn't really make any sense. Most people are not "large Git hosters" (and so for them there is no functional difference between "outsourcing Git hosting" and "outsourcing to a Grace hoster that is outsourcing file handling", and even for those who are large Git hosters, they're still going to need a team of sysadm- sorry, "cloud experts" to manage the AWS/Azure/whatever infrastructure.

What actual material benefit is being provided here? It seems to me like it just trades "administrating a standard hosting environment" in for "administrating a vendor-locked hosting environment".

It does not. And not only is this particular letter signed by many active contributors, the issues far predate this one letter (with this one demand), and many well-known contributors have been involved in speaking out against the current situation.

You're not going to understand complex governance issues and their history from a read of a single article or letter. Consequently, you probably should refrain from drawing conclusions that way.

The license allowing for something does not mean you are okay with anyone being part of your community.

That is about licenses, not about community participation, let alone community policy or sponsorships. Those are all very different things with very different considerations.

(Signed, someone who absolutely does not want military contractors in their community, but feels that a license is the wrong place to enforce that.)

It's a bit more complex than that. They applied to be a sponsor twice; the community objected twice; the Foundation approved both. In one of those cases, the sponsorship was eventually rejected because the venue where the conference was held did not allow it.

I imagine that the people who are unhappy about things are well aware of that, given that they generally are the people who have built NixOS to the point where it is now...

It sure is remarkable how many people seem to be assuming that the people complaining must just be some outsiders with no involvement in the project. It's maybe worth asking yourself where that assumption comes from.

During the time that this became a frequently-repeated marketing talking point, 'regular' hosting providers with one-day turnaround or even instant provisioning were already widespread. It was never really the revolutionary feature it was pitched as, honestly.

That "default" is typically set by the language choice in the OS, which is exactly why it is reliable, because people understand language selectors just fine.

> It is your money so it is your responsibility to protect it.

This is victim blaming.

You can call someone an 'engineer' with the associated responsibilities when they are getting paid for what they are doing like an engineer, in a setting that provides them with the protections of an engineer.

Until that point, they are just an individual who got screwed by disguised billing practices.

I wouldn't say this about a lot of channels, but in the case of Tom Scott I think it applies: just pick a couple-minute video from his channel that seems interesting from the title, and give it a shot. The quality and enthusiasm are impressively consistent throughout all of it, if you ask me :)

I mean, there's plenty of UX innovation going on in the fediverse, for example. But for some reason bringing that up is consistently met with "that can't ever work! nobody can understand this! it's too difficult!" and complete bafflement from the peanut gallery.

I think tech companies' lack of interest in experimenting with UX might have something to do with that...

I don't think most of the criticisms towards Google literally assert that the top brass demanded specific technical decisions. Rather, "the top brass demanded it" or variations thereof is meant as shorthand for "the top brass set objectives and operational constraints that ultimately led to this choice being made, and this type of consequence was foreseen by said top brass but deemed an acceptable tradeoff".

The workings are much more indirect, the intentions slightly different, but the outcome is the same.

Honestly, the original post could have been a joke, or it could not have been. I regularly talk to people who seem to genuinely believe this sort of thing (on this topic and others).