Blazkowicz [none/use name]

You might find your local state authority provides a lot of free/libre datasets for many things under some form of open data initiative. For currency conversion I’m not even sure you could claim proprietary rights to the underlying data. The APIs could be licensed but the underlying information is not really licensable. Currency conversion is so volatile that you will struggle to find user-sourced datasets in the same way as mapping is.

Have you tried ‘microg 4 lineageos’? I’ve been using most of my bank apps without any issue through it even with strong integrity failing. Not ideal but it works best for me while minimising google’s existence in my life better than stock android. It even has OTA updates much longer term than my oem. A major caveat for almost all phones is the firmware can basically never be free, and sim networks are designed for spying anyway.

None of them are a grift. They get used by financial traders for performing grifts, but the grift was and always has been stock market manipulation. AI is incredibly useful and many competent engineers now use it effectively. I expect the bubble of anthropic/openai will pop once local or on-prem models get better.

An excellent deep dive on this is done in the “This podcast will kill you” podcast (episode 120). There are a few main theories on why but generally we don’t really know much at all about its mode (or modes) of action.

Yep. We also don’t really understand how paracetamol works beyond knowing it does work and has very few side effects.

In my day to day job as an engineer I use LLMs to help me do my work. They are tools just like anything else and enable me to work faster. I’ve even piloted an agent flow that takes our existing site (a huge behemoth of legacy and new services) and automatically performs accessibility testing across a variety of tools then gives us reports. We have actioned these to actively improve the experience of people using our product with screenreaders for instance (and have confirmed this from these very same people giving us feedback on the changes). The view that they are useless runs counter to reality and in my experience is usually from people who have deep emotional hate of technology. LLMs have incredible potential but as with anything under Capitalism they are used for horrors and their rollout is done with complete distain for human life and the environment. That is not special to AI.