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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

Oh, that's true. I just remembered that I hate Gmail, Google Maps, YouTube, Android, Gemma, Google Docs and free CalDAV syncing.

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.

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Does Gemma belong to this list? Not that impactful

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.

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.

There's no free lunch. You're paying one way or another.

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.

> huge swathes of the world ride free

You really can't think of any way the rest of the world is paying for their dependence on US tech, besides monetarily?

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.

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