Came to the comments to post the "first time?" meme but yes exactly this. This isn't a bug of capitalism, it isn't even a feature; it's literally just capitalism itself. That's how it works

The guy is also standing right next to the computer terminal where you can search for books, and starts telling you everything they think they know about the book you're looking up, whether you asked or not.

This isn't just with projects either

I was looking at property records and property lines for my state yesterday to try to resolve a question that my mom had regarding land that she was getting.

The first two and a half pages of search results are all websites where you have to pay a subscription fee in order to get the land owner's information.

This is all information that is provided by my state free of charge via their website. I had to filter through two and a half pages before I found the original source of the information that all of those websites are leeching off.

It's ridiculous the amount of paid services that use free-to-use services, it's just they pay more of an advertising, so therefore they're the only thing the user sees.

If I hadn't already known that the state provided it free a charge to anyone who asked or went on their website anyway, I likely would have figured it just cost money to request the records.

They also fired most of the librarians (search engines) and set fire to parts of it causing everything to get shuffled around.

Sure you can get to books (sites) you know of, good luck finding obscure ones or special ones now that aren't junk or spam magazines however.

There's no humor involved.. it's just sad

Well it's just that the products worth billions cost trillions to make.

And anytime they try to rectify people balk at the price increase and drop.

It’s not the critical lynchpin of work that they were hoping they could charge stupid money for.

ever since one guy said 'this granary belongs to me now' and people believed him.

also stop working for them and claim your damn sovereignty. Sure it comes with responsibility, and if you don't want that it's fine, but no complaining for you when they treat you like a number in a system.

It's insane to me how intelligent software developers and people in general are, and how fucking stupid they can still be. STOP WORKING FOR CENTRALIZED CORPORATIONS, THEY DO NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

That 6 figure paycheck is well accounted for in their books and they're cashing in on it in multiples.

Open-source is hard, but look at all the hard challenges corporations are forcing you to spend relentless hours solving so they can multiply their bottom line. These are the challenges engineers are built for, why do we allow our motivations to be manipulated into something that doesn't even serve us? That's a serious question that deserves attention. Why do employees feel so committed to their companies? It's simple, but highly effective psychological manipulation, but at the end of the day only you have agency over your actions.

Let's put our collective minds to work at figuring how how to get off the tit of corporations. That milk is ultra-processed generic-branded shit.

I mean so are social networks mostly and most search engines and so on. Name of the game is to provide a service to gain people's attention to serve them ads and / or collect their data. Either that or you pay for it up front and they still serve ads and collect your data.

Absolutely true, but that doesn't change the fact that those AI companies stole the knowledge to train their models and they did this on a massive scale.

It's so ridiculous to see a guy torrenting a few movies getting jailtime while the AI companies make off with the biggest IP heist in history and get applauded for it.

Recall if you will, how much better Google search used to be, and what they present at the top now.