> The problem is when it costs MONEY to develop

It usually does, but we've somehow made free software for most tasks, and we maintain it. In some ways we do it better as free software.

Sometimes. And sometimes, development is faster with restricted sharing and per-copy fees. If faster development was the only issue, then maybe restrictions on sharing could be ok.

But there are other things like how much everyone should be able to know about the software that increasingly runs our lives, like whether people should be able to verify the security of some software, or audit the response to a security incident. Free software makes society better in those ways.

Also, you mention maintenance. We should keep in mind that the cost of maintenance is increased when only one person is allowed do the maintenance. So high costs is an argument for wanting money, but it can also be an argument for using a lower cost path, such as allowing everyone to do the maintenance, either for free or in a competitive market.

He advocates sharing, and the GPL allows sharing.

He says to ignore laws that block sharing. That means ignoring some parts of copyright law. Some other parts of copyright law are fine. There's no contradiction.

(And if someone has a follow up question about sharing everything, no, he doesn't advocate for sharing everything. Some stuff is personal, for example. He's in favour of sharing generally useful technical information, such as the source code of software that has been given to you.)

When is the US Army going to liberate these neighbourhoods until only the people that take good decisions are left?

Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..

23% of that debt is owned by the Bank of England ("Gilt and Treasury Bill Holding"), which in turn is owned by... the British government.

Some more background information: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk...

In short, it is a choice to be beholden to the bond markets in this way. It is a political choice to outsource the fiscal margins of government spending to the financial sector, and paying them lavishly for that privilege. And no, I'm not saying this means you can spend endlessly on anything without very bad consequences. It's just that it's a very expensive way to provide the money supply and private savings, while giving enormous budgetary power to a sector that has proven time and again that it's unable to properly manage the economy's funding (if it's even interested in that at all, rather than just in enriching itself).

Even though it whitelists the IA crawlers by default?

Anubis has worked well for us to get rid of most of the scrapers from our wiki, including the ones faking regular user agents.

It's not just data centres, many of the requests from regular broadband IP addresses. I think they're using "services" of bottom feeders like Scraper API, or buying from the authors of malicious web browser extensions.

AI scrapers use these residential proxies. It's not (just) VPNs and Tor routing. Several bottom-feeding companies openly advertise such scraping services, for pretty much any country you may want. I administer a wiki that's been on the receiving end of such scraping, and the majority of these scraping requests are in fact coming from residential IP-addresses rather than data centers.

I don't know whether these are hacked accounts, people getting tricked or paid to run these scraping apps on their devices, but it's impossible to block them all. Even if you let fail2ban block entire /24s for every detected hit (even disregarding the collateral damage and the fact that these blocks don't solve the issue, the fail2ban and iptables overhead starts to outweigh the apache load at some point).

Anubis seems to be taking care of it for now, but it's obviously only a matter of time before they can deal with that one too. Although its delay does enable fail2ban rules to block the IP-addresses before they get to stress the mediawiki php scripts, attempting to diff 2 revisions of a random page from 10 years ago.

For the Irish language course the recordings of native speakers were taken offline in 2023. The AI replacements are nonsensical.

This story is about AI generated courses, not voices, but my post was still (accidentally) on-topic: when they previously used AI to increase volume of content, they were ok with quality being thrown out the window.

The AI generated courses might be low quality, and the original (English) courses might also go downhill because the type of exercises they produce may now be restricted to the type of things that their AI is able to reorganise for other languages. E.g. it might go further in the direction of vocabulary memorisation.

Isn't it that they call it "español" in Latin America, and "castellano" in Spain?

Unfortunately, the voices are really bad.

It's a pity they don't also make available the old courses, with audio from native speakers.

Maybe from NOAA? (at least until they get defunded)

Nope. That's why I changed all my players to BlueOS.