I would encourage you to re-think your comments. You just labelled some people "lazy or incompetent" while having barely any knowledge of the situation, or what resources they have or don't have available. Libraries aren't start ups focusing on scalability, their focus is on preserving knowledge and helping academics and the public find it.

If you believe that they should focus on the scalability required to handle bot traffic perhaps you would be best donating money to them to help give them the resources to be able to do that, or volunteering to try to help understand their problem and fix it if you believe that it's a skill issue.

Reframing what you said in a more positive way could be: - I wonder what architecture they used for this and how it could be improved? - I wonder what resource limits they have that prevent them from handling this issue? - I wonder whats unique to a library that limits their ability to do what tech companies do?

Couldn’t possibly be that serving data to scrapers isn’t a core function for a university or that they can’t pay big tech salaries to draw sysadmins and engineers that know how to handle large scale deployments

But, per groups of queries, the worst they've seen is 11 thousand, and that's across many libraries. So, some tiny fraction of their users amplified their traffic by 11,000x by using a misconfigured LLM. I've done that a few times without LLMs (who hasn't passed --recursive to wget without remembering the -np?)

Also, if they just turned off all the user-hostile crap, they'd probably get at least 1000x back on their serving costs. How much does it cost to serve a login gate, captcha and rejection screen vs. a ~1MB static file?. What about the human cost where actual users cannot get access to the data they should have access to?

Just now, I ran a Kagi search. Its LLM summarized some page on the internet, but when I went to check the reference, I got a "sorry, humans only" access denied error message. I guess it's good that I could ask the LLM to quote the document verbatim for me in a follow up message, but what fresh hell is this? (Also, the error message screen was clearly longer than the document I'd requested.)

I was not aware of that (terrible) court decision. Wow.

I suppose this is one of those laws that doesn't apply if an individual is a victim? I have a email box that sometimes fills with spam and rejects legitimate email. Can I get the corporations that filled it up to be charged with felonies?