There’s a difference between making information accessible to humans for the purposes of advancing our shared knowledge vs saying that public institutions should subsidize the needs of private for-profit organizations.
It’s like, you can say, “Oh yeah, people should have access to freshwater for free,” and also say, “Companies shouldn’t be allowed to pump infinite freshwater from those sources to bottle it for profit.”
Those aren’t contradictory if your actual goal is the benefit of humankind and not, like, pendantic genie logic.
Bandwidth is incredibly cheap. The problem these sites are having is not running into bandwidth limits, it’s that providing the pages requires processing to generate them. That’s why Wikipedia’s solution works - they offer all the “raw” data in a single big archive, which takes just as much bandwidth to download but way fewer server resources to process (because there’s literally no processing - it’s just a big blob of data).
Is it okay to hire a bunch of people to check out half a library’s books, then rent them to people for money?
This analogy fails because, as I said, data can be duplicated easily. Making a copy of the data doesn’t obstruct other people from also viewing the data provided you avoid the sorts of resource bottlenecks I described above.
Is your problem really about the accessibility of this data? Or is it that you just don’t want those awful for-profit companies you hate to have access to it? I really get the impression that that’s the real problem here - people hate AI companies, and so a solution that gives everyone what they want is unacceptable because the AI companies are included in “everyone.”
Dude, my problem is that capitalism is going to ruin everything. It is a rotting sickness that cuts through every layer of society and creates systemic, ugly problems.
Do you know how excited I was when LLM tech was announced? Do you know how much it sucked to realize, so soon, that companies were going to do their best to use it to optimize profits?
The free access of information problem is just a manifestation of this dark specter on society.
You are acting as if we can approach this problem in the abstract, where you have to abide by simplistic, binary philosophical rules and not that we live in a world of constant moral compromise and complexity.
It’s not as simple as, “Oh, you say that you believe in freedom of information, but curious how you don’t want private companies to use it to make money at your expense! Guess you’re a hypocrite.”
Tell me what you actually believe, or stop cycling back to this like it’s a damning rebuttal.
It’s ironic that you’re railing against capitalism while espousing exactly the sort of scarcity mindset that capitalism is rooted in, whereas I’m the one taking the “information wants to be free” attitude that would normally be associated with anti-capitalist mindsets.
Do you know how excited I was when LLM tech was announced? Do you know how much it sucked to realize, so soon, that companies were going to do their best to use it to optimize profits?
They do that with everything. Does that mean that everything must therefore become some kind of all-or-nothing battleground wherein companies must be thwarted?
It’s not as simple as, “Oh, you say that you believe in freedom of information, but curious how you don’t want private companies to use it to make money at your expense! Guess you’re a hypocrite.”
Emphasis added. That part is where you’re in error about my view, it’s not at my expense. It doesn’t harm me any.
Tell me what you actually believe, or stop cycling back to this like it’s a damning rebuttal.
I’m not “taking their side.” I’m just not actively trying to harm them. The world is not a zero-sum game, it’s often possible for everyone to get what they want without harming each other in the process.
There’s a difference between making information accessible to humans for the purposes of advancing our shared knowledge vs saying that public institutions should subsidize the needs of private for-profit organizations.
It’s like, you can say, “Oh yeah, people should have access to freshwater for free,” and also say, “Companies shouldn’t be allowed to pump infinite freshwater from those sources to bottle it for profit.”
Those aren’t contradictory if your actual goal is the benefit of humankind and not, like, pendantic genie logic.
Unlike water, though, data can be duplicated easily.
Bandwidth can’t, though.
Is it okay to hire a bunch of people to check out half a library’s books, then rent them to people for money? Is that fine, or an obvious abuse?
Rendering this service inaccessible to actual human people in order to feed your for-profit software is only different in medium from that.
Bandwidth is incredibly cheap. The problem these sites are having is not running into bandwidth limits, it’s that providing the pages requires processing to generate them. That’s why Wikipedia’s solution works - they offer all the “raw” data in a single big archive, which takes just as much bandwidth to download but way fewer server resources to process (because there’s literally no processing - it’s just a big blob of data).
This analogy fails because, as I said, data can be duplicated easily. Making a copy of the data doesn’t obstruct other people from also viewing the data provided you avoid the sorts of resource bottlenecks I described above.
Is your problem really about the accessibility of this data? Or is it that you just don’t want those awful for-profit companies you hate to have access to it? I really get the impression that that’s the real problem here - people hate AI companies, and so a solution that gives everyone what they want is unacceptable because the AI companies are included in “everyone.”
Dude, my problem is that capitalism is going to ruin everything. It is a rotting sickness that cuts through every layer of society and creates systemic, ugly problems.
Do you know how excited I was when LLM tech was announced? Do you know how much it sucked to realize, so soon, that companies were going to do their best to use it to optimize profits?
The free access of information problem is just a manifestation of this dark specter on society.
You are acting as if we can approach this problem in the abstract, where you have to abide by simplistic, binary philosophical rules and not that we live in a world of constant moral compromise and complexity.
It’s not as simple as, “Oh, you say that you believe in freedom of information, but curious how you don’t want private companies to use it to make money at your expense! Guess you’re a hypocrite.”
Tell me what you actually believe, or stop cycling back to this like it’s a damning rebuttal.
It’s ironic that you’re railing against capitalism while espousing exactly the sort of scarcity mindset that capitalism is rooted in, whereas I’m the one taking the “information wants to be free” attitude that would normally be associated with anti-capitalist mindsets.
They do that with everything. Does that mean that everything must therefore become some kind of all-or-nothing battleground wherein companies must be thwarted?
Emphasis added. That part is where you’re in error about my view, it’s not at my expense. It doesn’t harm me any.
I have been.
Wow, you’re beginning to understand the actual arguments and debates going on. :3
Why are you taking their side buddy?
I’m not “taking their side.” I’m just not actively trying to harm them. The world is not a zero-sum game, it’s often possible for everyone to get what they want without harming each other in the process.
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