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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: January 26th, 2024

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  • When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

    Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

    “If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

    Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.







  • About the Ribbon: Apparently M$ has a patent (or multiple ones on) it, so they ultimately have the last say on what is and isn’t allowed. They did make a licence availiable royalty-free, but I assume that that licence didn’t cover enough of what LibreOffice needed, so they probably struck a deal with M$ about having the option, just not as the default.

    I haven’t researched this all that much, so mostly speculation. Although the M$ having a patent part of someting so true. And that patent (apparently) explicitly states that use in directly competing software with M$'s is forbidden, at least for-profit.

    Idk, maybe it’s a case of patent restrictions, or LibreOffice being LibreOffice.

    Honestly, a really interesting rabbit-hole.



  • The english word “free” actually carries two meanings: “free as in free food” (gratis) and “free as in free speech” (libre).

    Ollama is both gratis and libre.

    And about the money stuff: Ollama used to be Facebook’s proprietary model, an answer to ChatGPT and Bing Chat/Copilot. Facebook lagged behind the other players and they just said “fuck it, we’re going open-source”. That’s how and why it’s free.

    Due to it being open-source, even though models are by design binary blobs, the code that interacts with them and runs them is open-source. If they were connecting to the Internet and phoning home to Facebook, chances are this would’ve been found out by the community due to the open nature of the project.

    Even if it weren’t open-source, since it runs locally you could at least block (or view) Internet access.

    Basically, even though this is from Facebook, one of the big bads of privacy on the Internet, it’s all good in the end.