Welcome to the capitalism 101. Everything has price. So far, I would say, humanity done quite well under this _oppressive_ regime when compared with others.
No, sometimes someone else is paying for it. A classic example would be GPS - paid for by US taxpayers but benefiting the world. Yes now there are, for national security reasons, several other GNSSes but still huge swathes of the world ride free.
I for one would prefer to pay for services, than be psychologically manipulated into paying (more, on average) to other companies who are paying to make those services worse.
Those were all centralised. I don't think handing most of the internet over to a handful of big tech giants is the same as democratisation.
For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.
bigyabai · · focus · HN ↗
I have a lot of bones to pick with Google's morality, but "democratizing the transformer and LLMs" is at the bottom of my list.
isodev · · focus · HN ↗
bigyabai · · focus · HN ↗
Woe is me, victim of the 21st century separated from my true calling of paying for software.
Edit (rate limited):
> Does Gemma belong to this list?
Yes, and Tensorflow too.
charamis · · focus · HN ↗
nvme0n1p1 · · focus · HN ↗
doh · · focus · HN ↗
brainwad · · focus · HN ↗
nvme0n1p1 · · focus · HN ↗
You really can't think of any way the rest of the world is paying for their dependence on US tech, besides monetarily?
speedstyle · · focus · HN ↗
mcv · · focus · HN ↗
For democratisation, I think of open source, open weight models you can run at home, the Fediverse, running your own stuff. I think those are all positive, at least compared to the centralisation.