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It seems suddenly relevant to repeat this: we should be building lots of little, independent, community-controlled and open alternatives to Big AI.

would prefer free and equitable universal education, which would cost less

These aren’t mutually exclusive things, and I fully support ending ICE (and criminalizing it), and redirecting all of its funding to education and healthcare, which it should more than fully cover.

AI is a con, that's my hill. [conext specific Machine Learning is *not* AI]

That’s fine. But it’s a bit like saying “the company that enabled the rohingya genocide is unacceptable for people to do business with”. It’s true, and then there are the few billion people on Instagram. Do you want to be right, or change things?

Nobody with any sense of personal ethics should be using any of the "meta" platforms.

This ignores the reality that there’s a coercive power to people wanting to connect with their family and friends. I make no excuses for Zuckerberg; I’m probably one of the few who’s called him out to his face enough that he was forced to reply. But forgoing WhatsApp means not speaking to my family.

Why? I'm sure if they can manage WApp, they can manage Signal.

I don’t think you’re going to get the hundreds of millions of people in rural India to switch to Signal, as much as I would want them to, especially given that they use WhatsApp for everything from cricket scores and updates on government announcements to

getting the prices of rice at the market (which transformed life in our family’s village, as that used to sometimes require a 3-day round trip journey, which was make-or-break for a season’s profit). They have no power to make others change tools; Dalit people have even less.

You'd think that a country with its own huge cadre of computer programmers like India could have knocked up a proper India-based app, and made it the standard, before Zuckerberg and his nasty little app got in there. It's not too late - many countries are now striving for digital sovereignty.

Everyone has their price, as one says. It is perhaps just the way things will be now, that one must always be prepared to up sticks and switch to a different platform. Meta's evil trick for roping in the elderly and non-technical, was to arrange for FB etc to come pre-installed on many phones.