Notices by Harry Wood (harry_wood@en.osm.town)

@aral It bugs me sometimes when people react to dumb politicians with "This is a deliberate strategy to... " *insert theory here* (something about making us question the nature of truth is a common one)

There's no mastermind strategy going on here. He is just as idiotic as he sounds.

@forteller That's an interesting idea. Focusing on the oldest first. Did you find these can often be closed on the basis that the thing is fixed already? (or just *probably* fixed already if it's badly described)

Blogged: Transcript of what I said, or intended to say, for my #sotmeu Dundee talk all about OpenStreetMap Notes.
https://harrywood.co.uk/blog/2025/11/29/openstreetmap-notes-sotmeu-dundee-talk

More on the LLM scraper problem https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-bots-are-destroying-open-access.html by @gluejar "Thousands of developer hours are being spent on defense against the dark bots and those hours are lost to us forever. We'll never see the wonderful projects and features they would have come up with in that time"

Vicious criticism of LLMs from this sysadmin who has to deal with their scrapers: https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html
The LLM scraper problem seems surprising to me. The makers of big new generative AI systems are mostly big-tech firms. Don't they value their reputation, or even the reputation of the AI concept overall, better than to commission these cowboys to do their scraping? But maybe they've already decided that, due to the copyrights risk, it's best done at arms length via shady intermediaries.

@russss Are you saying the data isn't even necessarily being used for training LLMs? The problem is just correlated to rise of LLMs because LLMs are making it a lot easier to write scrapers (and I guess chatGPT will also happily advise on how to bypass mitigations)