Heh, are you saying relations with Israel are worse than those with Hamas? And which of those two (note: that’s Israel and Hamas, not “Arab territories”) is at the receiving end of most European money?

The main thing about Israel/Palestine is that Europe (and especially the US) has significant leverage over one of the parties, which gives it more responsibility for its transgressions.

Wait, what word? Culture?

Note that I wasn’t talking about European culture specifically, or any specific culture, for that matter. Just that your environment shaped you, and thus you can feel some pride for what that environment also begat. Pride needn’t be reserved for the extreme right.

The culture that made that happen also played a role in making you who you are. It’s OK to be proud of that.

(And likewise, it’s good to correct for how your culture influenced you in ways that you aren’t proud of. For example, it took me a long time to realise what Black Peter must look like from the outside.)

Ads featuring the slogan also occasionally featured men who would accidentally get into risqué positions whilst trying to get a Gaytime.

Heh, I had to look one of those up. Classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKVdYZEfkNA

Well, good to know we weren’t the only ones with the racist names (feels like ages ago, but it wasn’t even that long ago). Schaumkuss makes sense though, they just changed them to the Dutch equivalent of “kuss” here.

You clearly haven’t seen people on the Fediverse talk about Firefox 😅

Ik hoor dat er een leuk festival is in Den Bosch, dus misschien daar maar eens heen.

Mozilla Public License, and there are a number of forks. A browser is a lot of work though.

Steelmanning the argument, I’d say: you could outcompete the companies doing those things, e.g. by giving people AI that runs on their device and is ethically trained.

It might seem hard to compete at the moment, but given that there’d be no costs to running them, I don’t think it’s necessarily impossible: even if the quality is lower, it’s very hard to beat free.

Hopefully, if the OpenAIs of this world go bankrupt, they’ll stop hammering, say, OpenStreetMap.

Heh true, but only if they’re rented for long enough to make the total rental costs outweigh the cost of buying them new. Given that that bubble’s going to pop some day, renting still seems like the less risky strategy 😅

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It doesn’t sound to me like any GPUs will be bough for this? The comments about having fewer resources and being at a financial disadvantage implies to me like they know there’s no winning by trying to be the next OpenAI - none of the mentioned allied companies appear to be doing anything like that either.

Reading the article, I think at least to oppose centralised players that DoS the internet, congest our electricity infrastructure and pollute the environment, and try to bypass democracy through regulatory capture. That captures quite a few of the dark sides of the current AI hype that I’m unhappy about, so let’s hope that works out.

The thread shows just regular pushes, which is even more on the nose.

En we noemen het: Logius.

Nou maar hopen dat de mensen die dat gaan runnen, vervolgens niet een deel van het werk gaan uitbesteden aan een partij die dan later opeens wordt overgenomen door een dochterbedrijf van een Amerikaans concern.

Zie ook: Facebook en Instagram die net in een rechtszaak zijn gedwongen om tenminste de optie te geven om een niet-algoritme-gestuurde tijdlijn te gebruiken. Maar liever dat dat de standaard is.

In general, it’s good to be aware that the defaults in Firefox are often chosen to find a balance between breakage and privacy protection, and projects like arkenfox consciously accept more breakage in exchange for more privacy. (Although sometimes not even that, e.g. when you enable most, but not all, fingerprinting protection, thereby creating a new fingerprint.)

My hot take is that at the same time, our “institutional dysfunction” has been what has protected us from going all the way down the path to fascism. Strong leaders that get things done quickly usually aren’t great for democracy.

Haha, don’t worry, I get that perspective. I was actually trying to do the opposite - I feel like the perspective you outline is the default one people will usually take, so I wanted to change that :P I think this article does a good job of that too: just because they’re not perfect, doesn’t mean someone actively doing some good deserves negative attention, when we don’t give that same treatment to others who do less good.

That said, I’m not arguing that we should “be treating FUTO as a beacon of OSS support”. I do actually agree with all of this:

What we should be doing is acknowledging that they did give a small one time donation to various projects, but also recognising that it was for self-serving reasons. I’m sure theres individuals who have given more than 1000 in single payments to these projects, or less but more consistently (monthly, every 6 months, every year, etc). What makes FUTO more of a supporter than those individuals?

If it wasn’t for this article, I wouldn’t actually be talking about FUTO. (Except in the context of Immich, where they actually are the main reason the project’s doing well.) So I don’t feel like we need to start negatively discussing them just because they’re not perfect.

And don’t worry about the downvotes, I don’t actually care about them.