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.
I think you didn't actually read what I wrote. Or you chose to ignore the point.
Saying one "opposes AI" itself is already broad stroke categorical thinking. Starting from purported essences rather than on the ground situations.
It's just moralistic thinking that hides details and accomplishes nothing. And pointless. Mechanization happens whether you like it or not. It's not mechanization or the machine one should be purposefully organizing against. It's the way it's used. Or you'll just lose.
I personally can't think of a better use of an AI "agentic tool" than to write copyleft free software. I'll rightfully "steal" back what they unethically stole, thank you very much.
"You touched the tool and are therefore contaminated and all you touched is contaminated" is what I see in the threads, and it's not just wrong it's tactically stupid.
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.
To be clear, nobody has been "kicked out." Not yet.
We left. Because of people talking like you, people starting from categorical purist blanket judgements and implying that anybody who used these tools is immoral and their legitimate questions about what the policy would actually be were attempted rule breaking. Before there was even a rule.
"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."
The blog post came after the vote, FFS. People asking just what was going to happen got the kind of response you gave above -- complete with analogies of being "creepy guys" trying to "violate constent."
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.
No side is getting defeated any time soon. I've been involved in skirmishes on both sides of scraping, and as I said, it's an arms race with no clear winner. To be clear, not all scraping is abuse.
The number of people who'll start scraping because a new tool exists is a negligible (i.e. <0.001 of scraping). Scraping itself is not hard at all, a noob who can copy-paste code from the web or vibe-code a client that can scrape 80-90% of the web. A motivated junior can raise that to maybe 98/99% of the Internet using nothing but libraries that existed before this tool.
> especially not when that is brought up in response to asking someone to reflect on possibilities for abuse
Sir/ma'am - this is hacker news, granted, it's aspirational, but still, hiding information is not the way. As someone who's familiar with the arts, there is nothing new or groundbreaking in this engine. Further, is no inherent moral high ground for the "defenders" either: many anti-scraping methods rely on client fingerprinting and other privacy-destroying techniques, so it's not the existence of the tool or technique, but how one uses it.
>... "well you'll just have to deal with it" argument that socially defends the abusers
The abuse predate the tool, so wishing the tool away is unlikely to help. Scraping is a numbers game on both sides, the best one vam hope for is to defeat the vast majority of the average adversaries, but a few fall through the cracks, the point is to outrun your fellow hiker, not the bear. However, should you encounter an adversery who has specifically chosen you as a target, then victory is far from assured. The usual result is a drawn-out stalemate. Most well-behaved scrapers are left alone.
