As a historian, I’ve studied the major consumer boycotts of history. We can take down ChatGPT and send a powerful signal to Silicon Valley, says author and historian Rutger Bregman
Bregman is a treasure. Very based analysis of societal problems and actually doing shit instead of only observing.
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?
I did
They haven’t used their 2nd amendment yet, so I doubt it.
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.
Well, shit.
People actually pay for ChatGPT? I am completely out of the loop lol. Maybe thats a good thing.
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
would be cool to make a browser and server that work with mesh[core/static]. and given the need for very basic and extremely lightweight websites and services, or even APIs, making a website/api shouldn’t be too complicated.
One can have a weather station and I can have a weather app that makes API calls through mesh[].
decentralized cache would also help, (if you are routing a call for a website, but you recently opened it and have it in your cache, you an send that, decreasing load on the network, and automatically making popular sites more accessible).
Also it could used as a backbone for more robust chat apps/forums/blogs/services.
I agree, that would be amazing. I also hope it will help with some truly local community building (no troll farms from halfway across the planet spamming shit). Weather stations are already possible with sensor nodes, and most big repeaters have weather data. Though not like weather forecasts or anything.
The main issue would probably just be congestion, not even bandwidth. Once it’s used a lot, some packets will just be dropped due to congestion and you don’t get a reply at all.
A bit less of a problem with meshcore, with meshtastic in densely populated areas most users still don’t set their devices to client_mute, causing unnecessary rebroadcasts and even more congestion. Though with enough adoptions maybe governments might lower their restrictions on duty cycle, allowing for more traffic.
idk much at all about networking (beyond a home network) but if someone wants to begin building an alt-net I’d be willing to contribute a rasberry pi to the cause and leave it running 24/7.
Imagine local libraries and post offices pushing this technology to get around ISP’s grips on local infrastructure. Helps during emergency events, local organization, and could even put e-books available from the library. Post office’s make sense because of their rural locations extending the nodes and brings them into the 21st century delivering physical and digital mail.
edit: would also love to get notifications from local government this way instead of having to check facebook or whatever mainstream site that I need to register with just to view.
wouldn’t the more users also mean more nodes? making the system scalable? as with more users, the network gets more robust?
Reject Reality and substitute it with your own!
There is nothing on the other side. Only blackness.
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.
Cancel ALL your -tions! Benedictions, Predelictions, Prescriptions, Conniptions, Convictions!
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
Its a major opportunity for the FOSS community. We need to step up.
Proprietary tech does completely suck though. Its all driven by capital.
Hardware is going to move to streaming. They want your hardware in a server farm and they eventually won’t let people buy hardware. That’s the future.
It’s coming…
The time for people to be going all out with anger was probably 2001. They basically already won and are in complete control of America in an evil way. Including the FBI and military.
I don’t understand why people (myself included) are still participating in their games and culture. We are cogs in their evil machine.
It’s blatantly obvious it’s over already.
I dropped out and plan on dropping out further, not rich but I did at least make some money out of this shit system but I am done done, I’ll work but not for these pedophiles
I should have been angrier about tech when I was 5.
Never too late. the idea that it’s past time only benefits the big tech
We can stop using their services, move to open source, stay with older hardware (so that they don’t get money from us) and promote the few open hardware projects
Exactly what I was thinking. If I were to be angry enough about this when it actually mattered and I could have steered the boat, I was way too young too even see that it was happening.
Not to say I don’t actively pursue and promote OSS all the time, but I feel like the impact is so much more minimal than it could have been.
Their only interest is profit, it was only a matter of time for that interest to consolidate into corruption and greed. In a world where making choices that benefit all do not generate as much short term gains as making choices that benefit a select few, it is easy to see exactly why these companies operate the way they do. Their interests are not ours.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We should have regulated tech (and hard) decades ago. Were Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg not example enough for tech enthusiasts, or now that it’s too late is it the right time to shed our naive fairy tales about the Billionaire Supermen who want nothing more than to save us all?
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 :)
Or both
Often both
I guess we need to dip in retrotech
LOL like I pay for any of this stuff?
LOL, oh cuz that went so well for Twitter? Fuck ai
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.
I know duckduckgo rely on Microsoft bing for search results so I was assuming the AI is from ChatGPT?
I just looked now at their chatbot and they offer dififerent options most are based on OpenAI’s GPT (which even if self hosted, still relying on OpenAI). one other option based on Meta’s Llama and Calude.
Only reasonable option seems to be Mistral Small 3 which /u/horseloaf seem to suggest as well.
I’ll give it a try
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.
Thanks, I’ll give it a try
I second this Mistral is great. I made the switch, not going back.
I don’t have any experience with them yet, but I was looking at a kagi search subscription and that comes with AI usage from different models. Could be an option?
I did my part this morning because fuck Sam Altman
Already done. Both because they are a corrupt company run by legendary grifter SCAM ALTMAN. But also because GPT is inferior to Claude in almost every way. Even Gemini is leaps ahead of GPT at this point.
All US big tech feudal lords are helping the Fascist US regime. Even Antrophic. Boycott them all…
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.
I recommend moving over to Mistral.
A European, non-fascist option.I made a similar comment on this thread but I’m back-tracking now I’ve read about Marc Andreessen.
Back tracking or side stepping?
What are you moving to?
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 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.
