@fredds Had the exact same thought… welcome to our nightmare :)

@aral @fredds Can't one make the argument that this happens with every tech?

- Modern logistics is built around shipping containers which was developed by US Military for Korea and Vietnam wars (ICHH source)
- Teflon and Fertilizers (basically all of modern chemical companies) have their starts in 1st and 2nd WWs, base research is state sponsored
- Base exploration efforts in 1500s are state financed, leading to later corporate colonization efforts

Idk, it just feels like corps don't innovate

@Truck
you can use a Firefox addon to redirect to privacy friendly frontends like Nitter, so that when you copy paste , it wont give other people to the gafams.

(i am also using thread Reader App, waiting for mastodon to give a similar reading display of threads, and rss feeders)

@aral

@tykayn @aral Yes, but that means using Firefox, and I'm not using it (or Chrome.)

I'm doing this as a bit of a forewarning, because soon there will be no more Firefox, as Mozilla plunges deeper and deeper into obscurity due to their priorities. At that point, we'll only have Chrome, and the web will be lost.

So I'm testing the waters early, to be sure there is some way to still access what we can.

(Which is sort of in line with small web. Sort of.)

(Sorry, Aral, that also in many cases takes your favorite language, javascript, out of the picture. But I know you'll find a new favorite eventually. And many, many posts and talks about how that went wrong, so we don't repeat the same mistake 8 times. Only 7. Not 8.)

@icedquinn @aral Pretty sure it's a matter of resources. For example, it took quite a while for private offline ML voice recognition that was reasonably competitive with the big tech models to appear. Even then, at least the one I'm thinking of is a product from a small company that figures they have some other way to successfully monetize and lets small timers use their stuff for free more or less.

There's lots of academic research on neuroscience-meets-engineering but that doesn't produce working products only rough proof of concept stuff. And then the associated patents often get sold to the big players anyway.

@roboneko @aral numenta had all their code under GPL and allowed non-commercial use of their patents.

i'm not sure what happened to their compute platforms though. i think they're rewriting it or in heavy research mode right now.

we don't have google's ability to just throw infinite hardware at the problem and cryptoshit having GPUs jacked up doesn't do any favors (we need those for compute )

mozilla did wrangle that text to speech dataset though

@icedquinn @aral Yeah this is what I mean. The cutting edge is resource intensive in various ways. It's quite difficult for small fry. Such generous non-commercial licensing arrangements are far from guaranteed.

So FOSS will always be behind in such fields. When personal free time alone isn't enough I think it comes down to a large entity donating resources for some reason.