• AbsolutelyNotAVelociraptor@piefed.socialEnglish
    8·
    60 minutes ago

    No, no. It’s dumber:

    The library is still open, you can freely enter. But now they’ve put “a guy” in the library to whom you can pay money and they will answer your question with the stuff they “more or less remember”.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      21 minutes ago

      This isn’t just with projects either

      I was looking at property records and property lines for my state yesterday to try to resolve a question that my mom had regarding land that she was getting.

      The first two and a half pages of search results are all websites where you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get the land owner’s information.

      This is all information that is provided by my state free of charge via their website. I had to filter through two and a half pages before I found the original source of the information that all of those websites are leeching off.

      It’s ridiculous the amount of paid services that use free-to-use services, it’s just they pay more of an advertising, so therefore they’re the only thing the user sees.

      If I hadn’t already known that the state provided it free a charge to anyone who asked or went on their website anyway, I likely would have figured it just cost money to request the records.

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
    51·
    2 hours ago

    We built the library. Someone else started charging admission.

    Capitalism working as intended.

    • ImgurRefugee114@reddthat.com
      12·
      1 hour ago

      Came to the comments to post the “first time?” meme but yes exactly this. This isn’t a bug of capitalism, it isn’t even a feature; it’s literally just capitalism itself. That’s how it works

  • verstra@programming.dev
    6·
    1 hour ago

    Well, yes, but also - you don’t have to pay them. There are open-weights models you can run locally that contain most of that common-wealth knowledge.

    • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      1 hour ago

      I mean so are social networks mostly and most search engines and so on. Name of the game is to provide a service to gain people’s attention to serve them ads and / or collect their data. Either that or you pay for it up front and they still serve ads and collect your data.

  • Zephyr@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    1 hour ago

    I mean there’s almost no secret sauce about these AI’s currently which is why open source models are nearly as good. We are totally free to set up a nonprofit kinda like Wikipedia where people donate to train and run AI models for the public based on open source datasets. We’re now seeing people like PewDiePie kinda getting the ball rolling.