Appreciate it! The last audiobook I picked up from Libro is Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book”. Not sure if it’s your thing, but was totally worth it for understanding more personal context around the big Tech CEOs from the last 25 years.

I highly recommend Kara Swisher’s recent book “Burn Book” for insights into the Tech lads like Brin, etc, as she’s known most of them since the 90s.

Really helps contextualize the crazy cocktail of engineering/commercial power with general naivety a lot of these guys have going.

For sure, thanks! https://libro.fm/referral?rf_code=lfm723891

If you’re into audiobooks, I strongly recommend libro.fm instead - it’s all DRM free downloads, so you never lose access.

Definitely switch to alternatives from Amazon. They treat their authors abhorrently too. I’ve personally been super happy with libro.fm for Audiobooks (essentially Audible, but you can download the audiobooks DRM-free)

At least (to my knowledge) the Signal messages are decrypted on the client end, so buying the company doesn’t give them automatic access to messages.

Having said that, I’m sure a hostile new owner could update the app to decrypt and then send the messages as plaintext to the servers if they wanted…

As someone who is outside the US, the best I can do is share important information with people inside the US.

I would be very surprised if any of our US-Allied governments call out Trump. I would be overjoyed, but surprised.

Use the online chat :)

"Europe’s leading AI companies and research institutions combine their forces and expertise to develop next-generation open-source language models in an unprecedented collaboration to advance European AI capabilities, the OpenEuroLLM project.

A consortium of 20 leading European research institutions, companies and EuroHPC centres coordinated by Jan Hajič (Charles University, Czechia) and co-led by Peter Sarlin (AMD Silo AI, Finland) will build a family of performant, multilingual, large language foundation models for commercial, industrial and public services. The transparent and compliant open-source models will democratize access to high-quality AI technologies and strengthen the ability of European companies to compete on a global market and public organizations to produce impactful public services.

The OpenEuroLLM project is aligned with the imperative to improve Europe’s competitiveness and digital sovereignty. The project is a prime example of the type of technology infrastructure needed to lower thresholds for European AI product development and refinement, demonstrating the strength of transparency, openness and community involvement, values largely recognized across the European tech ecosystem.

The models will be developed within Europe’s robust regulatory framework, ensuring alignment with European values while maintaining technological excellence. Cooperating with open-source and open science communities like LAION, open-sci and OpenML, and additional experts in the field assembled in the project’s Open Strategic Partnership Board, OpenEuroLLM will ensure that the models, software, data and evaluation will be fully open and can be fine-tuned and instruction-tuned for specific industry and public sector needs. These performant multilingual models preserve both linguistic and cultural diversity, enabling European companies to develop high-quality products and services in the era of AI.

The project, which has been awarded the STEP (Strategic Technologies for Europe Platform) seal, leverages support from previous European projects and the experience of the partners and their results, including large repositories of high-quality data and pilot LLMs developed previously. The consortium commences its work on February 1st, 2025, with funding from the European Commission under the Digital Europe Programme."

Is that website legit? I’ve only ever seen https://www.deepseek.com/

And I would personally recommend downloading from HuggingFace or Ollama

It’s only a proposed bill (thankfully), but definitely one to keep an eye on.

Good points. I do believe Bitwarden is open-source though, so it can probably be forked off into a version that doesn’t host data in the US.

Check out https://f-droid.org/en/

https://makertube.net/ is the PeerTube instance that I’ve been using, and it’s been great.

Okay thanks, will do that in the future

I was playing this whole thing out in my head, and trying to justify the confidence of Trump and pals with such seemingly stupid moves. The only thing I can think of is that they believe that the money they will save (steal) from the government cuts, etc, will make up for the huge losses from the tariffs. And then they would have to believe that their internal AI development is at a point where they can overpower every other nation on earth, and so they don’t need those international relations anymore. I mean, technically every single Tesla in the world is a camera for Elon, and a huge percentage of internet traffic goes through US servers.

But then I think, even if they do have all of these advantages, China seems to be catching up pretty quickly, is allied with over 50% of the planet through BRICS, has protected itself from their technological expansion. This is not even including that most other countries in the world will probably want to distance themselves from the US if this keeps up.

Either I’m in denial, or it really is just Trump and Elon are being blinded by their overinflated egos.

Yeah I was wondering about that. Is there another sub that you would recommend?

This is true. However, Proton’s big sell is that they can be trusted to be truthful about what is safe and what is not safe for your privacy.

I think given the context of the CEO’s personal bias towards current US Republicans, and given that those Republicans are aggressively anti-China, when Proton releases an article warning of a successful Chinese AI, and seemingly purposefully leaves out the part about how people are already running it securely, it starts raising some important questions about their alignment.

Given that you can download Deepseek, customize it, and run it offline in your own secure environment, it is actually almost irrelevant how people feel about China. None of that data goes back to them.

That’s why I find all the “it comes from China, therefore it is a trap” rhetoric to be so annoying, and frankly dangerous for international relations.

Compare this to OpenAI, where your only option is to use the US-hosted version, where it is under the jurisdiction of a president who has no care for privacy protection.

I’m not in the US (thinking of you guys everyday), but when I found myself feeling depressed by the direction of big tech, I realized that open-source and the Fediverse was the healthy and exciting way forwards. It was the one thing that felt like I remember the internet feeling like in the late 90s. I think you are spot on. It is the only way that democracy can survive in tech.