This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
This is such a bleak time for tech enthusiasts.
It really feels like every single major tech company is making either absolutely moronic or completely evil choices
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
You are just stuck choosing between different flavors of shit
Or self-hosting your shit. Or at least find a friend who does...
True, but getting more expensive to do so by the day because of these AI companies.
Fair point, no argument here! Can't wait for it all to implode, I've got a shopping list ready for when it does :)
It sucks even more to be a tech worker, your job is constantly threatened by automation, but you also hate working for an evil company that does not care about you, but good luck finding a non evil company that pays 6 figures
I guess we need to dip in retrotech
Don't stop at chatgpt. Cancel any subscription you have! Stop using any big corporation you can!
Internet subscription canceled! See you on the other side brother
Pirate the internet! Hack the planet! DDOS the universe!
I wish it was possible, Imagine mixing meshtastic with tcp/ip. it would be as slow as mid 90s, but forums/text based internet that doesn't rely on anything but communal decentralized infrastructure?
Meshcore might be a bit better suited for this, if you want to reach a forum further than 50-100km away reliably.
With the room servers it almost supports this use case already
Reticulum
You can mesh together WIFI, LoRA, HaLow, the lora devices can be the same stuff you run meshtastic on. End-to-end encrypted. sourceless transmissions. You can route over i2p and classic internet for some rather reasonable privacy.
I'd be all in on community driven networks if one existed around here. Perhaps I need to start....
"Oh ya here's the community Plex server. Heres our community forum."
Etc.
I'm imagining at some point a fediverse of small community owned networks.
I think it’s optimistic to think they would even care about a boycott now. By volunteering to cross the lines that Anthropic wouldn’t cross, they’ve achieved Military Industrial Complex status. It doesn’t matter if you don’t pay for a subscription, you’ll fund them with your tax dollars whether you want to or not. Their mass surveillance tools are too valuable to let them fail, so they’ll get propped up and bailed out no matter what.
Every additional customer using their product currently causes them to lose money, hand over fist.
You should still boycott them anyway though, they care about user numbers and user activity.
Not all GPT users are American/residing in America
That is assuming OpenAI‘s tools are actually that powerful and useful or that Altman can keep convincing the US government they are. I would say it‘s still a very fragile enterprise.
I still wouldn‘t bet against the AI market anymore. Because even though the bubble must burst eventually the US government would intervene. There is no free market, just oligarchs enriching themselves all the way to he top.
And keep in mind that Anthropic is just as pro-war and morally bankrupt as OpenAI; the only difference is they didn't donate as much to the Trump coffers.
and also not Musk's Grok and not Google's Gemini and of course not the Chinese DeepSeek so what do we use then?
Preferably just our brains, but if not that, then perhaps somebody running an open model. DuckDuckGo and Proton both have "their own" options, and people with good enough hardware can run something locally too.
Mistral.ai Le Chat has the appearance of being more responsible and is offering open source models. I'm making no claims on their behalf, though.
People actually pay for ChatGPT? I am completely out of the loop lol. Maybe thats a good thing.
I’m a software developer for a small company with the two owners being the engineers and they have a Copilot subscription. It saves you countless man hours.
Looking up documentation is very rare now as it’s consumed that much data. It’s not perfect but it’s not we are vibe coding either it’s more like intellisense n steroids. We have lots of practices for how we do things and it learns from that context.
I wouldn’t pay for it for personal use but business use it’s actually great for us.
This has been discussed on here many times. Barely anyone pays for LLMs. Only companies, corporations, and a few content creators do pay. Your common folk overwhelming majority does not.
And yet, threads have been flooded the past couple of days with users proudly declaring how they're canceling their subscriptions after funneling who knows how much money into Altman's pockets unironically and without an ounce of shame lmfao
Bregman is a treasure. Very based analysis of societal problems and actually doing shit instead of only observing.
Yes, and he's such a great communicator as well. In those few paragraphs he packs arguments to convince people ranging from idealist liberals to cynical leftists.
Cancelled 2 days ago. Feel terrible for not doing it sooner.
You'll be glad you quit when you did. ChatGPT is rotting people's brains.
Just out of curiosity: what value did you get from a subscription that made it worth it before?
Don’t pay for it. But use it. A lot.
GPUs are very expensive, so if you have them generating (for free) short stories of happy little kittens riding the subway in Manhattan or whatever, you are costing them a lot of money. Just don’t give them any data.
This is the way
I did my part this morning because fuck Sam Altman
Every penny given to a US company is bankrolling their government through taxes, and thus funding authoritarianism.
OpenAI has direct government contracts sure, but yeah.
I agree it sucks.
That’s why I’m telling myself that my unemployment is a heroic assault on fascism.
I recommend moving over to Mistral.
A European, non-fascist option.
Bankrolled by Andreessen-Horowitz three times (2023, 2024, 2025), might depend on your definition of fascism.
According to billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen, AI is good, fascists are saints, and anyone who stops rich people like him from funding, deploying, and doing whatever they want with tech is a literal murderer.
I made a similar comment on this thread but I'm back-tracking now I've read about Marc Andreessen.
I can't believe this actually has to be said. "Stop funding the death star!" Who the hell is actually paying for a tier subscription for that slop?
People just really don't give a shit at all do they lmao
I recently cancelled my Office 365 subscription because I'm no longer willing to financially support Microsuck's bullshit. It was hard too. There isn't another groupware solution that works as well as Exchange. It was important enough for me to make the move despite that. I'm not completely cured of my Windows dependency yet but I'm working on it.
Spoiler: All Americans that pay taxes are bankrolling authoritarianism. People who buy items from America are bankrolling authoritarianism.
Are all you Americans going to stop paying taxes?
You guys can afford subscriptions? I just make it toil for no reason because I’m a real capitalist
