A basic cloud host that can take care of a whole family can be had for $5/mo. Perhaps that's still too much for your exemplar poor to spend on a hope. But the amount extracted by the surveillance industry is always increasing, and eventually that levee will break.
I'd say there are much bigger impediments - needing to invest time for setup, needing trust a given solution won't turn out to be a lemon or even backfire, and lack of straightforward packageable solutions to many of the technical problems.
I agree with you. Time poor is a definite problem, even (or especially) among people that aren't money poor, and it comes with its own Vimes's Boots analogy. For example, the many articles we read here about the centralized service of the week creating some kind of problem for their users, which could have been dodged with a little outlay of time to make better tech choices in the first place.
Given that, who's more likely to look into free alternatives to apparently free services online? The middle-class person with a spouse that works part time and takes care of many of the chores and that pays for a handyman or contractor or repair man to fix appliances and household problems or the poor person that works full time, their spouse works full time, and when they're done working they're busy doing the chores that life requires because paying someone else is not feasible for them?
Time is money, and the working poor have neither.
The point isn't to discount anyone's struggle, but rather to look at the actual mechanisms that hinder adoption of libre software. And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those. The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
It's not that they're paying for all of them, but that they have the option of paying for them and I would hazard that a good portion of middle class families with both parents fully employed opt for offloading at least some of that some of the time if they live in a portion of the country where middle class means you actually have disposable income. E.g. many people pay for larger landscaping projects, or hire a handyman to do cleanup around the outside of the house or even might have a maid come in once a month. This might be less common now that the middle class has eroded to some degree, but I think that's a problem of a shrinking middle class, not of those being things the middle class doesn't do.
> And apart from some relatively affordable table stakes, I don't think the financial cost is really one of those.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Having spare hardware to run something, a stable place to put it, and paying the power for it (a minor but increasing cost) all play a part.
> The attention cost of self-actualizing and the ambiguity of using a non-advertised solution are though.
I agree, and I think the working poor have less attention to spare because of less free time, but also that they generally have more and larger worries that make this problem seem insignificant by comparison. If your major worried are making rent, having enough money for food, repairing your car so you can effectively get to work and take kids to school, spend quality time with your family, and set up a solution so that your privacy is protected from companies that want to monetize you, which one will get the least attention? Middle class families probably have at least one less of those concerns, and every major concern that's more important than using free software to avoid a small but persistent exploitation is something that competes for attention.
Sure, all of those dynamics may be slightly harsher if you're financially poor. But it's not like once someone reaches "not poor", time for self-actualization abounds. And from the other perspective, it's not like libre software is not taking off merely because the lack of adoption by poorer people. So what is your actual point from tying the topics together?
Well, part of it was that a sibling reply[1] was already present, and the idea that "oh, we can all just run our own AI models at home" seemed ludicrously costly in both money, and time to me. It's not that I was trying to shoehorn it in as much as juxtapose it against what was already being stated.
> But it's not like once someone reaches "not poor", time for self-actualization abounds.
I have no idea why you you are interpreting the inverse of my statement that being poor makes this harder to mean that not being poor makes it easy or trivial, which is how it appears to me you're interpreting my statements.
Privacy is hard in the current climate. It takes time and effort or money to alleviate some of the privacy concerns, to different degrees depending on the specific concern. Those are all things the working poor have less of than other economic groups, so solutions that require them will likely be less used by them. That doesn't mean don't offer them, but we should keep that in mind when advocating for people switching to open source solutions, so we make sure the solutions actually solve the needs of the people intended to use them, and not just the needs of a subset of those people.
It would be a real shame if what I think is one of if not the best option for solving this problem in an egalitarian way failed to take into account the needs of that economic group and we actaully ended up with a solution that many are protected by, but disproportionally not the poor for multiple reasons. A world where 90% of people out of poverty are protected in some manner but only 50% of people in poverty are isn't necessarily better IMO, and may actually be much worse, since I'm not sure there will be much incentive to fix it at that point.
No, I wasn't very clear in my initial comment (and wasn't really going this deep), I just wanted people to consider that running your own LLM for your own needs isn't really feasible for most people and in a more general way than a reply to that person specifically, and I was slightly inebriated when I wrote it, so didn't think it warranted much explanation.
The web is “open”. But Google and to a lesser extent Apple control the browsers to access it and they can control the platforms.
Meet the new boss…
Ben Thompson talks about “Aggregation theory” all of the time. The companies that have the power have that power because that’s where the users are.
How do you compete with “free with advertising”?
We talk about how the web killed TV networks. But streaming services are making deals with cable companies to bundle their ad supported tier with regular TV and with their internet only packages. Oh and the largest cable company owns NBC.
When “cord cutters” get rid of pay TV and use YouTube TV where most of the money still goes back to the same providers - how is this any different?
TBH, nah, I don't believe the impossible burger has really done anything truly notable, as far as vegan causes go.
Now, if you were to end beef subsidies leading to something like 25% of beef farms changing over to a more vegan friendly or environmentally friendly alternative uses, or developed protein alternatives that reduced food costs for the average person, then yeah.
Impossible Burger isn't a bad product, but as far as the big picture goes, it's a slightly tastier virtue signal than black bean burgers.
But the Impossible Burger did more than talking ever did
Government tried antitrust for decades w telcos
But the costs of long distance calls dropped to practically zero when open VoIP protocols came out
The Web disrupted AOL, MSN, CompuServe, TV, Newspapers, Magazines etc.
Wikipedia disrupted Britannica and Encarta
The answer: open source must get good enough that people can switch from big tech corporation-controlled solutions and then they will be in control of their own software !! :)