This is one of the things that is oft repeated by my vector disease colleagues -- your infection may not be caused by the tick you found, but by the tick you didn't.
While large social media sites have captured lots of traffic, etc. I've had small websites for a local wargaming club, a very modest blog, etc. for decades requiring little or no technical expertise.
The idea that people who want modest websites need active agentic systems to do that is a really odd take.
One reason I don't read HN as much as I used to is because I can't help translating numbers like that into the amount of research that could be accomplished with the same amount, and then I get angry.
Yeah - this scenario presupposes that if I need my car fixed I'm going to wait for you to give me a call back, rather than continue working down my list.
Given the last two years and what has been done to science funding, having a load bearing thing like ArXiv not housed with the U.S. government is, I think, pretty self-evidently a good idea.
Every university I've worked in has been dominated by this paradigm, has an office set up to support it, and a bunch of policies around what it means for your doctoral supervisor to also be your employer, etc.
AI so often doesn't actually increase productivity - it just shifts the burden of work from the person creating to the person who has to check and evaluate that creation.
In this case, offloading yet more work onto the maintainers of the package, because you can't be bothered, but still want credit.
From someone who has been part of the hobby for a long time, I think a couple of reasons:
1) Total Warhammer, Space Marine, and an otherwise highly successful video game licensing program.
2) Being well positioned to ride the overall rise of nerdier hobbies being acceptable
3) A marked shift in the company towards being more open and...friendly? It's hard to overstate how much the "old GW" sort of viewed its customers with a vibe that sometimes came close to hostility. There's much better engagement now, and a business built on something other than "A mom will buy this for their 12 year old, and will lose them when they discover girls."