Servers are expensive, bandwidth is expensive, and Wikipedia draws massive amounts of human and bot traffic. They are a non-profit organization and provide their services for free. AI companies and their bots are hammering down their servers all the time, increase cost. Why should they not charge?

I donated and keep donating here and there, and I don't mind their new policy. Unless they allow AI bots to pollute Wikipedia with slop, I am fine.

It's easy to say so when isn't your company that will "burn down" and close forever...

Imagine an accountant's office that lost every single file from hundreds of clients, and the ransom is 30% of their yearly revenue... If they don't pay, they are out of the market. It's not easy to rebuild from scratch, and sometimes isn't even possible, it's pay or close doors.

Some say "you should have backups!" and they are right, but not every company does backup right, and a lot don't even have backups at all. Some have cloud backups but the credentials are on the attacked systems and wiped clean as well. Some have a RW share in a server somewhere and it got hit too.

I worked on a large IT product provider some time ago, and what we are seeing is dev teams having to do something to justify their employment by "doing something, anything."

Performance monitoring meetings take into account new things you created, functions you changed and things like that. Notepad was basically the same since Windows 95, with added long filenames, UTF8 and something else behind the covers, but the UI was basically set 25 years ago. Great for us users, not so great for the dev future...

So then management asks: "What innovative things have you done lately?", devs have to do something. AI is the new thing? "We added AI in Notepad." Cloud is the cash cow? "We dumped a free product (Wordpad) that could somehow compete with our Office365 offerings."

Devs hate it, us users hate it, but it's just a nice looking line on the manager's spreadsheet: "Number of AI features added to legacy products" or "modernized legacy software" or another BS lingo like that...

Or ask the time in an analog clock.

No, it's pure market manipulation... Find who sold INTC 3 days ago and bought back today and you find the ones that will give him a cut of the profits.

It's erratic only to us, not to him and his allies. Tell allies to short the stock, call Intel CEO resignation, shares fall, tell allies to long the stock, say CEO is a success, shares rise.

Rinse, repeat.

If trash will end on the oceans anyway, it's better to dissolve into microplastics than not dissolve and trap marine life.

It makes more sense than you think. Most of Reddit content is stupidity, but human stupidity. LLMs need human intelligence (even lack of) to be trained, because training on LLM content quickly degrades the training. And Reddit have one of the largest human-generated repositories out there.

They saved $2 million without increasing staff. And the issue is not the current price they pay, but that the price keeps increasing too much. So in 10 years they will still be paying around the same for the engineers, but would pay 2 or 3 times more than that to Amazon.

It's a paradox, but this helps bringing in more clients. If they don't charge for egress, anyone can try Amazon just to see how it works, and leave if things aren't good. Amazon then gives them a lot of "free for an year" resources, they end up entangling themselves to the neck on Amazon infrastructure, and cannot leave.

If Amazon charges outrageously high fees for egress, clients won't even try because "if we don't like Amazon we have to pay too much to leave."

I saw elsewhere that a large cylinder produced a few microvolts.

The jump from the 486 to the Pentium is greater than any jump from the last decade. My daily driver is a Xeon E5-2667 from 2014, and paired with a RTX 3060 I can run Cyberpunk in 1080p on Ultra at 70-90fps, and it's a processor from a decade ago. It's like running Windows NT in a 386 with great performance, not "to show it runs."

The company already folded, the owner got 3 months on prison IIRC. There's no point on keeping the company under supervision, the market closed all doors for them, nobody trusted them anymore.

I understand that the company should have worked better to protect their data, but they are more a victim here than a culprit. Calling both the company and the scumbag that hacked them the same is an injustice, it's like calling a ransomware victim a culprit because they didn't secured their systems. They were negligent, their database got hacked, their customers got harmed, they got put out of business. It was not on purpose. The scumbag piece of trash did all this on purpose.

And six years for him is too little. But at least he got some prison term...

I think this is as far from OK. In Brazil a guy got charged and thrown in jail for stealing cell phones based on dark, pixelated surveillance camera images, and even proving that he was more than 50 miles away minutes after the alleged crime, he still got jailed because AI Face Recognition said it was him.

If AI cannot be used as evidence, it must be thrown away from the proceedings. Anything done by AI can and will influence anyone involved, and if the judge already have a bias against the person in front of him, those biases will be reinforced when AI commits a mistake against the defendant. And if the AI commits a mistake in favor of him, it's easy to dismiss as "AI error."

I've seem and read about enough misjudge cases that I doubt this ends well.

Ever heard of GPS Spoofing? The camera uses GPS for location data, and probably for timestamping (GPS is basically a very precise date-time broadcast anyway). Spoof the GPS and the camera will put the intended location AND timestamp as legit.