Conversation
liw@toot.liw.fi

Lars Wirzenius

A common situation in modern tech: a new feature is introduced and it does something nice, but does it in a way that is not nice.

Example: converting an image of text into actual text (a great accessibility improvement), but doing to so by uploading it to a cloud service, thus violating privacy.

Example: a chat bot that can answer even a vague question (a big help for finding out things), but makes bad mistakes and causes much extra work for those who actually know.

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liw@toot.liw.fi

Lars Wirzenius

Reply to @liw@toot.liw.fi

A strategy for avoiding these misfeatures is to favor local-first open source software.

That is always going to be a compromise, as the nice-and-not-nice things are one way that big corporations make big profits with, and that unfortunately means there's more resources put into that kind of long-term detrimental development than open source has.

It's not a big compromise, unless you like the nice parts, don't massively mind the not-nice parts, and don't mind making the world worse for others.

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jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Reply to @liw@toot.liw.fi
@liw what the heck is "local-first open source software"?
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liw@toot.liw.fi

Lars Wirzenius

Reply to @jarkko

@jarkko Its open source software that primarily operates locally, even if it can optionally do things elsewhere, "in the cloud".

For example, OCR that does all the processing locally rather than uploading an image to a cloud service to be converted to text.

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jarkko

Jarkko Sakkinen

Reply to @liw@toot.liw.fi
@liw OK this is what I guessed, just had to check unfamiliar terminology :-) And you are absolutely right, also privacy issues drive apps and platforms towards this direction. For instance local AI is a hot topic in the industry...
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