this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
81 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
40171 readers
126 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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."
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.