The SS's policy towards the interred was heavily inspired by the policies the United States was already famous for. We have a historically monstrous record of unethical medical testing against both interred and underprivileged populations.
Why is that true today, but wasn't true the many times some group in the US did medical experiments on some vulnerable population without a complete disclosure let alone consent?
If it was just released, then your claims about it are entirely hypothetical and best-case-scenario. Of course we have to "see how it goes" - there's no merit but hopefulness to your stance...
They are probably referring to the very real and unfortunate phenomenon wherein people use LLMs as sounding boards without consulting other humans, current frontier LLMs being heavily sycophantic in their responses.
This tends to create a feedback loop where unsound ideas are amplified.
This attitude, and by proxy this business are the epitome of selfish entitlement.
You state that you believe you deserve access to others’ resources, at their cost, despite their clear attempts to stop you from using them, simply because you want it.
I'd counter that your attitude is a techno-authoritarian one. Why should anyone have any say over how I access and use a publicly available resource? At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator.
> At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator.
That's the point of the criticism. The praise of their anti-anti-bot features reads like it is commonly used to cause technical problems to the service providers, be it intended or accepted for the cause.
> At least so long as my actions don't directly cause technical problems for the service operator.
But they do.
The reasoning you’re describing is not altruistic. It’s the same reasoning used by every AI scraper.
It’s the very reason I am paying a couple hundred dollars out of my own pocket every month to keep the websites of hundreds of small businesses and hobbyists online while I try to help them move to bigger cloud hosts, when I used to turn a small profit from it.
> The reasoning you’re describing is not altruistic. It’s the same reasoning used by every AI scraper.
I think that's bad faith on your part. Clearly AI scrapers are aware of what they are doing and simply don't care. The entire purpose of my including the bit you quoted there was to explicitly exclude that sort of behavior.
That’s a great theory, unfortunately it’s defeated by the fact that I didn’t need to use anti-bot solutions until I was charged for 38,000x my normal ingress traffic in a single month by bot traffic.
Look, it wasn't _my_ request that made the server fall over, it must have been one of the other several thousand thoughtless scrapers running on the website that caused it to die.
If you're claiming that the operators of high volume AI scrapers that wantonly disregard rate limits and all common sense are unethical then I'm right there with you. But that's not at all what was described upthread nor is it the only way in which bots get used by any stretch of the imagination.
As far as anti-bot countermeasures go I quite like proof of work solutions since those disproportionately impact high volume scrapers without noticeably impeding a small hobby project.
Unfortunately the operators of many major websites appear to want something akin to DRM with the excuse of bots used merely as window dressing.
There was a time when a person could walk through a few department stores every week (or even every day) just to take note of some prices along the way, and ultimately tabulate them to try to identify and snatch up the best deal once it happens.
And if everyone did this, it'd be a real problem. The stores would be clogged up by geeks writing notes in little books with Parker Jotters and just basically wasting space and taking up air conditioning while they sleuth out the best way to put the screws to the company for a few measly dollars.
That'd be awful.
But not many people ever did that in stores, and not many individual people are doing that today with the web. It's really not a problem.
(And if a website in 2026 can't stand the burn of several thousand personal scrapers that are operated by people who actually want to buy stuff from it, then maybe that system simply sucks and needs to be rethought.)
You can already access these resources. What does it matter if you do the clicking or you have headless chrome do the clicking while you make a cup of coffee?
I’d be surprised if this was useful for much. Claude is already almost too slow to do anything serious I’d consider using it for outside of grunt work without parallelizing.
The only reason it’s economical is because it’s massively discounted if you’re not paying API rates.
I use a separate physical machine and a scoped token with access to a single repository at a time, and even then I worry about what hole I may have left open.
The general carelessness of the average user is baffling.
China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money. The same strategy they did with solar panels. Sell them at a loss long enough until the manufacturers go out of business and you’re the only one surviving. Then flip to extract monopoly profits
Yes, and this used to be illegal anticompetitive behavior until Reagan eliminated a ton of antitrust laws. So I don’t think saying “but uber and google and Microsoft do it so it’s ok” is persuasive. Free markets require competition so regulation that ensures competition is essential for the free market to function. Free trade requires the same function. We lack both and are seeing the effects of monopolies and anticompetitive behavior.
> China is giving away AI for free so it’s harder to make money.
That might've crossed their minds but that wouldn't move their hand, not even a finger. Politics is the primary driver here, here's the deal:
AI is the new Internet
China foresaw a world where they'd be blocked from it and Anthropic's ongoing attempt to block their own country form it shows how right the Chinese were.
I don’t see the connection. If they want access they would prioritize building their own clones. They wouldn’t try to destroy the thing they are cloning. They would want to continue to ride the coat tails of innovation as long as possible. The move to undermine competition shows an attempt to win a race not preserve access.
Instead we got home solar system become very affordable over the past decade.
And driving out US manufacturers isn’t even the main goal for China. They know their huge risk on reliance on petroleum and was doing everything they can to mitigate that. Building out a huge solar manufacturing base is their answer. Now they are reducing petro imports YoY.
But the US was a leader in manufacturing solar panels and could have facilitated the same price decline trajectory. Selling a product in a market below manufacturing cost specifically to bankrupt domestic manufacturers is an illegal trade practice under the WTO called dumping.
Yes. Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition. Facebook was behind. Grok was behind.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad they are doing it, I personally use open source models. In part to not spend money on the other APIs. So it’s clear that some percentage of what would be paying uses choose to not pay. The other part of opensource is free community labor. How much development work did Facebook get for free around the core infrastructure of react by open sourcing it? A massive amount that they did pay for but benefit from.
The point is, it may benefit society, and yet that social benefit wasn’t the motive for them releasing it as open source.
> Releasing open weights seems to be an effort to slow down competition.
Why? I don’t get it. Open weight models enabled a lot more foundational model trainings. I believe R1 was benefited from llama.
The proliferation of alternative, open weight models in turn put heat on the leading labs and forced them to make better models, or squeeze more out of slowing improvements on model capabilities through innovation on harness.
And eventually we the common people benefit, exactly from these competitions
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