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Keeping Costs Low
We have come to the point where avocados are sold as individual items and cost about £0.88 each (that's well more than a dollar or euro). The cost of food, like the cost of living in general, goes up.
Yesterday JWZ caught our attention because an admin of ours sent along this rant dated 2 days ago. To quote: "But why do I bring this up now? Because our web-hosting bill is normally between $600 and $800 per month. Except suddenly it's now $3,500 per month, entirely because of all of these piece-of-shit AI model-training robots incompetently scraping all of our text and images, repeatedly, as fast as they possibly can; ignoring our requests to stop; and lying about who they are. And I have no solution, other than "don't have a web site any more". [...] Fundamentally these AI companies are now charging me to train their models for them. I am now being billed $2,700 per month, $32,000 per year, so that their spicy-autocomplete plagiarism-machines can suck the blood out of everything I've ever created and shit it back out. And no matter how many ways I try to say "I would prefer not to," they just. Will. Not. Fucking. Stop."
I spoke to JWZ about this (over E-mail) some months ago. He was blocking all sorts of Web clients based on the false assumption they were slop bots in disguise.
For us, hosting costs are manageable because there are many of us, we went static in 2022, and the webhost is good (I've been their client for about 23 years). █
Image source: Out With Sister