@W1CDN wow!

@W1CDN I had the table right next to these guys when they were flogging this book at the FDIM Vendor Night a couple years ago.

@tante
> Again, it twists the argument in the way that the AI corporations like to do it as well: Search engines scour the web so AI companies should be allowed the same. It’s the same technology!

Just to add to your argument, there is another key difference between scraping for searching and scraping for LLMs.
Scraping for searching does have the concept of consent (if imperfect): it's opt-out, you can always say that you don't consent to your website (wholly or in parts) be scraped (by specific search engines or all of them), in your `robots.txt` controlled by you, and your decision will be respected. And this works also for revoking previous implicitly (or even explicitly) given consent.
As far as I'm aware no LLM honors `robots.txt`, and even if they would, they still don't and cannot offer any mechanism for consent revocation.

@tante Is refusing buy a Tesla or use X because I disapprove of Musks racism and suport of Trump, "neoliberal purity culture" ? Maybe putting solar on my house is "neoliberal purity culture" too, as is refusing to cross a picket line. Seems like Doctorow uses "purity culture" to mean what I would call "moral responsibility". As for "neoliberal", insofar as it retains any meaning, it's much more applicable to the kind of free market libertarian argument that Doctorow is making than otherwise.

@kg5rhr Any hope of putting better antenna - e.g. a Yagi pointing in the direction of a repeater? You've effectively increased your transmit power in one direction.

This might get you started: https://hackaday.com/2025/12/31/bringing-a-yagi-antenna-to-915mhz-lora/ or having your own repeater on the roof & a companion node in the apartment which only has to get as far as your roof.

This thought has stuck while I was typing and it'd be easy to try: using two oven trays as a corner reflector: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRKbklgdInc :-)

#meshcore

@kg5rhr
Yeah, feel you, we've all been there.

Then again, it's the chance for pioneer work.

Making a little local noise, finding others, or even just register your repeater on the map so others have a goal to reach this one, and THEN at some point being connected -- that's a great feeling. Promise!

We don't have that opportunity very often in our saturated world.