> Still, though, privacy-wise: why should I trust this guy? I like what he says on the website, but I've never heard of him, and don't really know anything about him.
Do you prefer to use tech presented by opaque committees with institutional funding, but only if they also consist of people you're acquainted with?
Try the HN guidelines on for size: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
The idea is great, but like most (FOSS) ideas, it needs money, and money needs to come from somewhere. Existing commercial software doesn't track people for funsies, but as a way to make money. Granted, paid software didn't start out this way, but free software and services got in this realm pretty quickly as it's one of the very few viable ways we get mass market usable products (where usable doesn't mean it's any good, just that the mass market can actually do things with it).
Even if everything is above board and ethical and perfect, at best it will just last a few decades and then the money is gone, the owner is dead, or the amount of projects has grown to a point where the money pool is too diluted to make the difference it set out to do. As-is, it is not sustainable. But it's great while it lasts.
I've been using it for a few weeks and it works well. It seems to require some learning period because it started out making unhelpful suggestions for the predictive typing but is now pretty good.
Consider this: AAPL is valued at 3.4 trillion USD. Both the polish and breadth of their software took a nose dive compared to early 2000s. There’s no more Aperture, Logic, Final Cut, Shake…
That aside, valuation doesn't seem like a meaningful metric in this context. It doesn't tell you how many resources are being spent on a given thing and it's not necessarily obvious whether that given thing is connected to the value either.
This sort of thing concerns me. So if Wolf has a change of heart, suffers some sort of financial catastrophe, etc., then... the project just dies, and any project depending on them for a significant portion of their funding has a crisis?
> a few talented engineers can produce delightful software that rivals anything big, established firms can produce.
Sort of, but... not really? In my experience, more resources means more polish and more scale. It's the usual 80/20 problem: with a small team you can get to 80%, but the last 20% bogs you down forever. Certainly large teams come with their own problems, but that last 20% is hard.
In general, though, I love the idea of this. One thing I really want to try out is the FUTO keyboard: I currently use the stock GBoard on my Pixel, but would prefer something that just doesn't connect to the internet at all. I'm curious to know how well their swipe-based keyboard works (GBoard has become so hit-or-miss lately with that), as well as their voice recognition (Google's is of course famously good, but I don't love the privacy implications of sending all the things I might say to my phone to Google's servers).
Still, though, privacy-wise: why should I trust this guy? I like what he says on the website, but I've never heard of him, and don't really know anything about him.