This sort of misrepresentation of your public behavior will only trash your reputation further. I encourage anyone who reads this to actually look up the mailing list threads. It’s very illuminating.
The answer is literally always “It will allow me to pay my bills. This won’t be a giddy, young-love crush of a hobby for me. Hire me and I’ll just do good work, not cheerlead.”
The question is a synecdoche for “How awesome do you think we are, and so how much will we be able to coast on our respect for you as a result?”
Not true. I can think of a bevy of reasons that I'd be excited for a role that have nothing to do with being a cheerleader. For example, working in the banking industry for many years, I was tied down with a very rigid, sometimes antiquated tech stack. I started applying to smaller companies because I was excited about the prospect of having more autonomy and being exposed to a more modern tech stack.
1190s is still pretty modern when the Turkish construction is believed to be from 700-2000 BCE, and the commenters words "almost nothing" are spot on for the U.S.
I grew up near a castle not much younger than Mesa Verde and a church that was mostly built in the 1400s and they were just regular buildings around town. I had a friend who lived in a 600 year old building with meter-thick stone walls. A cafe had glass floor under which you could see preserved medieval city streets, with coins etc left as found.
USA has gorgeous old nature with amazing stories to tell (I've found dinosaur footprints on a hike! I've watched clouds gather below me in the Grand Canyon! I've seen some of the largest trees in the world!), but human history just ain't one of its strong suites.
The chips were to determine the winner of the game. Then when the game was over we put all the chips back. The winner walked away with nothing more than what they arrived with. The losers walked away with exactly what they arrived with.
If you think getting to say “I won” is gambling, then we have nothing to discuss.
> I think most people would draw a distinction between the two, and would at least agree the latter is more acceptable than the former.
No. I should be able to control which automated retrieval tools can scrape my site, regardless of who commands it.
We can play cat and mouse all day, but I control the content and I will always win: I can just take it down when annoyed badly enough. Then nobody gets the content, and we can all thank upstanding companies like Perplexity for that collapse of trust.
Taking down the content because you're annoyed that people are asking questions about it via an LLM interface doesn't seem like you're winning.
It's also a gift to your competitors.
You're certainly free to do it. It's just a really faint example of you being "in control" much less winning over LLM agents: Ok, so the people who cared about your content can't access it anymore because you "got back" at Perplexity, a company who will never notice.
It could be my server keeps going down because of llms agents keep requesting pages from my lyric site. Removing that site allowed other sites to remain up. True story.
Who cares if perplexity will never notice. Or competitors get an advantage. It is a negative for users using perplexity or visiting directly because the content doesn't exist.
That's the world perplexity and others are creating. They will be able to pull anything from the web but nothing will be left.
> Then nobody gets the content, and we can all thank upstanding companies like Perplexity for that collapse of trust.
But they didn't take down the content, you did. When people running websites take down content because people use Firefox with ad-blockers, I don't blame Firefox either, I blame the website.
You don't win, because presumably you were providing the content for some reason, and forcing yourself to take it down is contrary to whatever reason that was in the first place.
You can limit access, sure: with ACLs, putting content behind login, certificate based mechanisms, and at the end of the day -a power cord-.
But really, controlling which automated retrieval tools are allowed has always been more of a code of honor than a technical control. And that trust you mention has always been broken. For as long as I can remember anyway. Remember LexiBot and AltaVista?
