alt Hacker News"One Reddit theory even suggested it was a deliberate rug pull designed to cripple the free site to push people towards paid products."
I know this isn't really the point of the article, but I've been thinking about this a lot. I wonder if we're going to see more resources go this way.
I used to publish little doo-dads as opensource software. Not because it was something that was legitimately ground breaking or anything (it absolutely wasn't) but because I had a problem, and I thought "heh wouldn't it be cool if someone else had a similar problem and could use my resource for it."
But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.
And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.
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> But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web.
I feel the same way too. But guess what, all the code you did not publish gets into the training corpus anyway (when you gave Codex or whatever full read access to your filesystem).
I open source as much software as I can because I want the models to train on it and get better at it!
This attitude makes zero sense to me. You benefit from the "training data" just like everyone else does. If you don't, that's a problem with you, not a problem with AI models.
AI solves exactly the meta-problem you describe: "I had a problem and needed to write a one-off doo-dad utility program to solve it." Now you can do something with your time besides writing pointless one-off doo-dads.
As for monetizing the training data, (a) it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to generate the weights, so why begrudge the companies that made the investment and did the research necessary to make it happen?; and (b) rest assured, whatever your doo-dad does, an open-weight model like GLM 5.2 can generate it for free using your own hardware.
So you don't have to pay anyone in that case. Well, except nVidia, I guess. Point granted there.
> But now I'm really reluctant to give more stuff to the free web. Because the fact that it gets scraped and added to a pile of training data to later be monetized really rubs me the wrong way.
The thing is, people were scraping and monetizing other people's websites long before the current LLM fad. The difference is the magnitude of the problem.
> And I can see why maintainers of sites like this, or other free but incredibly useful resources might start to get irate at that.
Those who object to the scraping fall into several camps, but the biggest complaint I am hearing is that it increases both maintenance costs and time. In other words: it sucks when people are using your work in a manner that you find offensive, but it goes beyond that by doing actual harm.