joepie91_

The alternative isn't "doing nothing". It's raising the issue in the coordination group so that everyone can collectively decide on a new timeline if necessary, and you aren't leaving everyone else hanging out to dry.

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.