FWIW, Blender, like other open source projects has been dealing with large bandwidth bills due to AI companies repeatedly crawling them. They've been adding additional checks to try to figure out how to stop spending their limited donations on server infrastructure to support bots.

I believe they were also outright ddos'd last year, by someone who apparently has a beef with Blender.

This isn't reddit your opinion isn't necessary. Donate or don't but your pithy commentary isn't adding to the conversation.

Getting a lot of undeserved pushback, but I sympathise. I have severe CAPTCHA fatigue. Any time I encounter one, unless it's something I need to use and must access, I back out. Even the proof-of-work ones. Fuck 'em. 10 seconds wasted many times a day adds up, and since I use a "strange" OS (Debian or Gentoo Linux) and a "weird" browser (maxed out uBlock and Cookie-Autodelete), ClownFlare hates me and I hate them right back in return.

Counter-point: Stop subsidizing AI companies by giving them free training data.

Counter-counter-point: I like running free models on my computer that were trained on freely accessible data.

We all want free stuff, but somebody still has to pay for that stuff

Information is not "stuff".

Information is absolutely stuff.

How much does that thought cost? How much does it weigh?

Information absolutely has a cost, somebody had to create it.

Weight is just nonsense. Physical presence is not a hard requirement for value.

> Physical presence is not a hard requirement for value.

Physical presence is a requirement for stuff. Stuff has value because of the balance between supply and demand. Information that has been digitally encoded has literally infinite supply. Information only has any value in the context of imaginary property laws that impose artificial scarcity.

AI companies downloading information is not subsidizing AI companies. Imposing imaginary property law is stealing from the public domain. Everyone's public domain.