Blazkowicz [none/use name]

I was vaguely a social democrat growing up, very nordic model inclined. I had a fairly unfortunate upbringing and got to experience first hand a lot of scum landlords and classist peers. Became a baby Marxist by around 16-18 by reading a bit of introductory theory but was mainly just surviving for most of my teens. Due to the politics of where I live and the history surrounding a lot of ML groups I fell in with Trotskists at university. I will not be elaborating. From there I did become quite grounded in a lot of Marxist theory (from an obviously skewed lens) but the rampant left sectarianism, useless attempts at organising and hate for AES became too much for me as I read more ML theory and watched the events of this last decade unfold. I would say I am a Marxist Leninist these days.

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.