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I have no money and a very shitty laptop, and thanks to Google Colab's free, hosted Jupyter Notebooks I'm having a blast learning Keras.

I'm not saying they're saints, but they've given me something free that's improved my life. Maybe it's ultimately greedy in the sense that later if I need a cloud platform I'll definitely use GCP. But I think that kind of mutualism is actually better in practice than altruism.

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Also given the power and information that they have I think they've been fairly well behaved. I'm not sure what other commercial management I'd rather have have all my search and email info than the google guys. I guess a non profit might have advantages but then who'd pay for all the servers and the like?

> they've given me something free

No, they haven't. They're just making you pay with a different sort of currency.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, and I'm not saying that you aren't getting value for what you're paying. I'm just saying that the notion that these things are "free" is incorrect.

What is the currency?

Data about you and your use of your machines.

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