They're openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.
They're a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO's own pocketbook. Don't fall for their use of the .org tld or promises to "never abuse customers".
I've writtenmanytimesabout what assholes FUTO is. I'm fully convinced they're way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they're not to be trusted.
They've soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as "Open Source" and I've gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven't followed Rossman at all. I've got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can't in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.
Edit: Oh. I honesty didn't even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I'm very interested to go read that article.
Edit 2: Shite. I've now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.
The only thing I dislike of heliboard is their swipe function requires Google binaries. Most FOSS keyboards either lack some feature I use or are immersed in wild controversies.
Same, I switched over yesterday and I found it actually does all the things I was hoping for!
Reducing keyboard size, removing suggestions bar, adjusting timing on holding for symbols or numbers, emoji key, theming, and swipe typing can be enabled (its just a file that they cannot or have chosen not to install with the app, as the rest is open source as far as I understood).
Well, ThumbKey adapts to the limitations of a phone screen, that's why it's unique. So, once you are familiar with it, you're less likely to fumble the wrong key. It takes quite some time though, at least it did for me.
Failed for thee perhaps, but mein hands are smol, vocab's colloquial, n' passwords often complex.. Autocorrect is the first feature that must die when I adopt devices.
Wolf also was spouting about how great Trump is and how "woke" shit is ruining society or whatever in January IIRC. I briefly trawled through their social media when I was investigating their keyboard, Grayjay, and Immich and promptly decided to never, ever give them money.
Note that their keyboard doesn't require network (at least as of now), so if you don't give them money or promote it to other people, they don't really benefit.
EDIT: Also, there are claims Rossman has a Kiwi Farms account and is at least somewhat active there. I haven't investigated those very thoroughly though.
Yeah, not sure how much he's distancing himself from FUTO related things though. He brought up grayjay recently, but only specifically to talk about the devs comments on recent Texas app store legislation. Kind of a wash.
Given he is playing politician now, I don't think he's going to make a public statement about it. Not only would it hurt his influence but it would probably stall out any ongoing negotiations regarding right to repair. Shit sucks in general.
I've always had a weird feeling about FUTO, but I thought them giving money to open source projects can't be that bad. Now I hope they don't fuck up Immich.
Luckily thanks to their licensing model they basically cannot. Immich has according to github as of now 1606 contributors. Changing the license so that there could even be a proprietary fork would require basically the ok by every contributor (that made a relevant code contribution)
And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn't only open, and not only GPL.. but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.
Son of a BITCH! I'm so fucking tired of this... Everywhere you look you gotta examine EVERYTHING about a company/group because they might be fascists now...I love Grayjay, it was working so great and I loved the proclaimed mission...I was even trying to get FCast to work since I lost casting ability when I moved to Linux...
I'm with you. It's so goddamn hard not to be black pilled these days. Everyone is either greedy and looking to take you for all you are worth, a misogynist, a rapist, a fascist, or some combination of all 4 and some other horrible 5th and 6th thing that I can't think of right now. Lies and disinformation are so prevalent and there are so few consequences that it feels like nothing is what it seems.
If you care about some random issue "A", there is an entire industry ready to take your money in exchange for the lie that your contribution or patronage is helping "A" when it's just lining someone's pockets.
Want to make sure you can buy a thing that isn't made with child slave labor? I hope you did your research because of the 8 companies "certified" as child-slave-labor free, 3 still use child-slave-labor and just paid for certification, 3 use a supplier that uses it, 1 only uses it part time, and one is legitimately what it claims to be... oh no, wait, they were just bought out by a pro-child-slave-labor corp... I hate everything.
EDIT: Apparently louis left futo some number of months ago, thank you to another user for letting me know in a reply below
This is informative, and unfortunate.
I will be honest, I don't really expect louis will wade into this issue at all, since he seems to be very uncomfortable with any of the "political" or partisan aspects of the issues he covers.
I can empathize with why one might be that way, but I hope I'm wrong, it would be rather disappointing.
Maybe it's time for me to open some feature requests on the helicopter repo for futo keyboard features I'd really miss if I left it behind... It'd be good for both projects to be feature rich and competitive anyway
I'm gonna be really honest, to me that feels like it strays really far into reading people's minds and headcannoning what's going on on them. But perhaps you've seen more from him than I have, and you're basing that assessment on greater familiarity.
I do think it's worth being mindful about how much we assume we know the inner workings of random people through a screen, though.
"FULU" is a consumer rights organization iirc. The name sounds like a spinoff or sister organization to FUTO, but I don't think there's an official relationship.
Do words mean anything anymore? That is an argument for them being fascists. But how are they "openly" fascist? Where is their statement, where they openly state "we are fascists"?
Because they might be, but I don't think they ever openly said so.
But if your roommate says he isn't a thief, however he always hangs around with the local gang and continuously brings used stuff that he has no way of legally acquiring since he doesn't even have a job. I don't know man, you have to start asking questions.
Mike is not a nazi, he just goes to the nazi bar because he likes the beer.
Well that's the entire issue, isn't it? If he says he isn't a thief, then he's a thief who clearly isn't open about it. Just like Mike isn't openly a nazi, he's just a nazi who's lying about not being one.
Aw man I knew there was something wrong here. I gave them money for the keyboard and the voice talk and immich bcz I was a Rossman fan. They played him and me. Fuck these fascists.
I've always been an outspoken skeptic of FUTO (check post history) and their bizarre campaign against free software, but I didn't know they were this bad. Yikes
IIRC they all kind of suck. There's Transcribro or whatever, but I don't think it supports many languages (maybe only English?). I used to just use Google's and then revoked network access.
Yep, it was my daily driver until one day voice to text stopped working. Restored internet access to it and lo-and-behold, voice to text is back. Tried redownooading the model, etc and had no success in getting it working with internet disabled.
Shit I really liked them. Their keyboard is incredible and Grayjay is hard to replace on desktop. But I'll get started on replacing them. Any ideas on a good keyboard that's open-source? Not anysoftkeyboard or mantis. Tried them.
A few minor items stuck out as a bit disingenuous to me:
The donation page that FUTO used includes this explanation: “This offer is for individuals, and may be available to small organizations on request. Commercial entities wishing to be listed as sponsors should inquire by email.” It’s pretty clear that there are special instructions for institutional donors who wish to receive musl’s endorsement as thanks for their contribution.
It DOES say that, but literally only for the "monthly contribution > 150 section. For a one time grant of 1000 dollars, it doesn't appear to say anything.
FUTO appears to list efforts it has donated to (and use their name/logo), under the title, "Our sponsored grant programs". Which to me seems more of a semantic argument of whether they can say they've donated to something or not.
The inclusion of a logo without permission is a good critique, nonetheless. Likewise, if they are lying about donating to some of these projects, that is a problem.
The author makes a point of complaining about a video posted to odysee. There are not many great options for posting videos outside of Youtube. That FUTO would post videos to multiple other youtube alternatives, including odysee and peertube does not seem like a surprise to me. Not saying anything about the video though, until I've sat and watched.
So, I'll start by saying that I think FUTO may have changed their messaging on their website TODAY Regarding this. They now have three split sections,
what they develop/fund
"sponsored grants" (logos used)
"donations, ~60K" (logos not used)
That seems more sensible if they have small donations to OSS efforts or individuals who maintain them. It would be excellent for every group listed to review if they or any developer received donations from FUTO and publically decry falsity (as the 3 in the article mentioned)
Videos:
I don't know Yarvin, don't know shit about him. But wikipedia entry on him is not heartwarming. It does seem an odd choice to have the two videos posted by FUTO. The one is fairly mundane, but the interview with Rossman is just strange as hell in general, and disconcerting. rossman mostly just seems uncomfortable as heck. And Yarvin seems like an insufferable know it all who wants to explain everything and not give anybody the chance to complete their thought.
So I'd say endorsing this video is a dark side to FUTO. It should have been easy to stay mostly apolitical and focus on ownership and software. Not conversations about the efficacy of monarchy.
FUTO manifesto/open source:
I can at least palate that a group could think that open source is not working. There are successes and failures. Linux is a great success. Android is becoming less so as it is dominated more by vendors & Google. Talent, resources, time is continually sunk into would-be inferior software at companies. Those softwares that have closed source, harvest our data, and ultimately don't have our interests in mind - are often more polished, and attractive to the majority of users out there. One or two people primarily heading an open source repo can often make an awesome competitive software, but perhaps not as polished and with the threat of losing time to maintain it, archive the repo, etc. In that regard, offering optional licenses to pay base wages to attract talent while still letting you verify the code you execute - could still be appealing if successful.
I believe in FOSS, and will embrace & use it til I die, but I'm willing to entertain they have a difference in opinion on what will most advance our interests.
Sorry but this person is treating grapheneos' attacks on other groups as legitimate which throws the entire article into question. If they are happy to provide a platform for graphene's founder's paranoid conspiracies I can't trust the content.
Seems clear there's some questionable shit going on, but the only evidence presented is two YouTube videos which isn't actually a lot. I wouldn't be surprised based on this to hear there are deeper links, but this article is written by someone who thinks tweets and YouTube comments are evidence.
Where Attack? The worst Graphene ever did was say that they don't support certain Phones like FP because they are not updating their OS to their liking
Are you gonna go to Qubes OS next and complain that they are attacking laptop manufacturers (don't officially support Laptops because they don't have an open source UEFI)?
They also had a culture of accusing anyone who complained about issues or asked questions about why things were done a certain way of being a shill for Calyx, and of there being a coordinated effort by Calyx and others to discredit them. I'm a GOS user, but the lead developer is without a doubt pretty paranoid at least.
Regardless, these accusations against FUTO are pretty concerning.
I've been forced into graphene due to calyx' abandonment (and piss poor communication -- "oh we didn't realize people don't regularly check our website in case the entire organization collapses overnight") of it's users this year, sadly. There just isn't an alternative afaik.
On the graphene front I've personally been banned from their matrix chat on several accounts, none of which I actually used to post in their chat -- they did a blanket ban of anyone in the calyxos channel. Not posted there, not posted in graphene, not having actually done anything, they blanket banned (he now denies this ever happened). Which honestly given how many times I went on to see him uncontrollably ranting at people was probably for the best. He and his most ardent supporters are a brigade of trolls.
Fuch!!!!! Are they going to see my immich face detected photos to the government for the "final solution" march to the camps and the human powered ovens?
Thankfully Immich is protected against rugpulls (i.e. becoming proprietary) by virtue of it not requiring a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), so FUTO doesn't even own the copyrights to the code. Therefore, if anyone is suspicious of FUTO's influence over the project, they can simply fork it (and I imagine someone will)
But if you have something doing face detection I would hope it's stored locally and not sent to a "cloud" no matter who runs it.
Multiple people have said that, yeah. But they also said that he did not particularly distance himself from the project, which is definitely something I would do, if I found out about this kind of backing.
Note the date. This blog post is a few months old. I was expecting new drama on the latest episode of Who Hosted Whom (and does that make them fascist (and does that matter)) until new events but i guess it's just reruns this week.
No, he was just a talking head that they hired a while ago. According to some in this thread he's no longer with them today, but I don't have a source for that.
The first part says people with more melanin in their skin are inferior. This is false.
The second part says people with more melanin in their skin score lower on IQ tests. This is true (because IQ tests are terrible, and its creator said so too)
It doesn't. The test was designed for white people. It's the same reason that facial recognition has more false positives for people with more melanin in their skin.
The problem is the test, not the skin. That's my point.
It's more about cultural and socioeconomic bias. So you might have questions that have a bias towards middleclass suburban kids vs a poor innercity kid.
You can find examples online, but some can be quite subtle. "Banana is to yellow as Ruby is to ______" Someone who grew up with jewelry would be more likely to know this. This goes against the principle of an IQ test, and older tests were notorious for this.
It's the same reason that facial recognition has more false positives for people with more melanin in their skin.
This is not the real reason. It's because camera tech from more than 10 years ago was worse than today and had trouble with anything less than ideal lighting conditions. Darker textures reflect less light, so the darker someone's skin the less details a camera can see.
However we're still talking about a 0.001 FMR for white men to a 0.002 FMR for black men. That's "2x more false matches" but it's a 0.001 difference.
With modern cameras and recent facial recognition tech, the issue in differences of skin colour is virtually non-existent. Yes, I know of the news stories about false arrests in recent years, but no tech is perfect and you're talking about a few instances out of billions.
No, I'm not defending the use of the tech, just pointing out facts.
There's no third option between FOSS and proprietary (unless there are licenses that match the Free Software definition but not the Open Source definition or vice versa, I suppose, but I'm not aware of any). All software that is not FOSS is proprietary by definition, whether the source is available or not. It's not "disingenuous" to call FUTO software proprietary. It's simply factual.
From a communication viewpoint, that is fair, but to my knowledge (from being a professional software developer), effectively any license that is not 'open-source' or 'free' is by definition proprietary.
Because those two terms describe licensing standards (the only established ones that I know of). Whereas I believe, "proprietary license" uses this meaning of proprietary:
Nonstandard and controlled by one particular organization.
So, they wrote that license themselves is the point. What it says in there is secondary in meaning.
This is so highly relevant because in legal disputes, there is certain license compatibilities which are known to be possible.
You can take a library licensed under the MIT license and use it in a project that uses the Apache-2.0 license and you're perfectly fine. This is the foundation of why the open-source ecosystem exists at all.
But you cannot take the source code from FUTO and use it in a differently licensed project, because no legal precedents exist to support this. (I believe, the FUTO license also actively prohibits this in some way, but that's beside the point.)
This has massive implications. Like, yeah, you can look at the code, but it is useless. If FUTO closes shop or enshittifies, you cannot fork their projects.
And because you cannot legally re-use their source code in other projects, likely no one looks at it in depth either.
We (Hyphanet) are fully volunteer-driven now. #Hyphanet has been working pretty well for the past two decades and is continuing to move forward. Features:
There is nothing there about FUTO forcing them to stop focusing on anonymization. I'd be careful to draw such conjecture. Besides, this is one reductive take from one party of a contentious split.
Yeah I don't understand why everyone is gate keeping open source all the sudden, there is a line to be drawn between openly changeable and open to being understood, the understanding part is all I want from things because then I can tell if its actually bad or not and that is the part we mostly care about.
Its ok to not like futo because you don't agree with some of their peoples politics but that's an entirely different thing.
They're openly disdainful of all things Open Source and OSI, and their software is not Open Source.
They're a fully for-profit company using consumer rights kind of rhetoric to manipulate people in service to FUTO's own pocketbook. Don't fall for their use of the
.orgtld or promises to "never abuse customers".I've written many times about what assholes FUTO is. I'm fully convinced they're way more part of the problem than part of the solution and they're not to be trusted.
They've soured me on Rossman. Back when he was doing coverage of things like the court cases around right to repair and tractors and stuff, I watched a few videos of his and thought he was awesome. And then he got involved with FUTO and started billing Grayjay as "Open Source" and I've gotten sufficiently disillusioned with FUTO that I haven't followed Rossman at all. I've got coworkers changing their avatars to Clippy and shit, and I believe their hearts are in the right place, but I can't in good conscience really get behind anything or anyone associated with FUTO.
Edit: Oh. I honesty didn't even see this OP was a link to an article. Lol. Now I'm very interested to go read that article.
Edit 2: Shite. I've now read the article. I knew FUTO was assholes in a lot of different ways, but now I know how deeply, completely irredeemable they really are.
Why does every mobile keyboard developer have some controversial shit? I just want to text in peace.
Anything on HeliBoard too?
The only thing I dislike of heliboard is their swipe function requires Google binaries. Most FOSS keyboards either lack some feature I use or are immersed in wild controversies.
And the implementation is nowhere as good as gboard.
Futo's keyboard isn't much better for slide to type. I find myself switching keyboards back to gboard when I'm not using voice to text or two thumbs.
I mean, I can't complain about HeliBoard's swiping feature, especially considering the alternatives.
Same, I switched over yesterday and I found it actually does all the things I was hoping for!
Reducing keyboard size, removing suggestions bar, adjusting timing on holding for symbols or numbers, emoji key, theming, and swipe typing can be enabled (its just a file that they cannot or have chosen not to install with the app, as the rest is open source as far as I understood).
Does FlorisBoard have controversial shit too?
No, but they are forever beta. They still lack a ton of features I use.
True
fossify keyboard? extremely basic, but works
May I recommend Thumbkey its awesome and a bit different from other keyboards. Its concept is interesting ✨
It looks neat but what an absolutely stupid take from a keyboard author
Butch if I didn't let it correct me I'd have to actually mook st the keyboard and who the fuck wants to do thatm.
Phones are tiny and humans are clumsy. I absolutely never mean what I type, as you can see above.
Well, ThumbKey adapts to the limitations of a phone screen, that's why it's unique. So, once you are familiar with it, you're less likely to fumble the wrong key. It takes quite some time though, at least it did for me.
I understand what they were trying to go for, but they failed..not least because they explain that below the fold.
Failed for thee perhaps, but mein hands are smol, vocab's colloquial, n' passwords often complex.. Autocorrect is the first feature that must die when I adopt devices.
For the sadist in you there's always https://f-droid.org/packages/se.nullable.flickboard
unexpected keyboard is great and i don't know shit about the dev and i hope it stays that way
Wolf also was spouting about how great Trump is and how "woke" shit is ruining society or whatever in January IIRC. I briefly trawled through their social media when I was investigating their keyboard, Grayjay, and Immich and promptly decided to never, ever give them money.
Note that their keyboard doesn't require network (at least as of now), so if you don't give them money or promote it to other people, they don't really benefit.
EDIT: Also, there are claims Rossman has a Kiwi Farms account and is at least somewhat active there. I haven't investigated those very thoroughly though.
Yep https://kiwifarms.st/members/larossmann.132201/
Interestingly, according to one of his recent-ish comments, he left FUTO in February.
Yeah, not sure how much he's distancing himself from FUTO related things though. He brought up grayjay recently, but only specifically to talk about the devs comments on recent Texas app store legislation. Kind of a wash.
Given he is playing politician now, I don't think he's going to make a public statement about it. Not only would it hurt his influence but it would probably stall out any ongoing negotiations regarding right to repair. Shit sucks in general.
JFC can there be nothing pure in this world?
In the last thread he posted in they're already talking about the author/article in the OP.
Internet drama truly is a flat circle.
Holy shit wow
what's kiwifarms and why is it relevant?
I've always had a weird feeling about FUTO, but I thought them giving money to open source projects can't be that bad. Now I hope they don't fuck up Immich.
Luckily thanks to their licensing model they basically cannot. Immich has according to github as of now 1606 contributors. Changing the license so that there could even be a proprietary fork would require basically the ok by every contributor (that made a relevant code contribution)
And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn't only open, and not only GPL.. but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.
Thank God! That's a relief. I thought I was going to have to redo my entire photo library hosting stuff.
FUTO has always been sus, but privacy redditors gave them a pass because of Rossmann's involvement.
FUTO is also involved with Immich 🫤
They just bragged with v2 release how they "survived the controversial move to join FUTO" ...
I love Immich & use it a lot :(.
Try Ente Photos, I like it more.
I'm still disappointed that you can't interact with tags at all on the mobile app.
I trust Immich and the AGPL more than this blogger.
Son of a BITCH! I'm so fucking tired of this... Everywhere you look you gotta examine EVERYTHING about a company/group because they might be fascists now...I love Grayjay, it was working so great and I loved the proclaimed mission...I was even trying to get FCast to work since I lost casting ability when I moved to Linux...
I'm just gonna take a break over here for a bit.
I'm with you. It's so goddamn hard not to be black pilled these days. Everyone is either greedy and looking to take you for all you are worth, a misogynist, a rapist, a fascist, or some combination of all 4 and some other horrible 5th and 6th thing that I can't think of right now. Lies and disinformation are so prevalent and there are so few consequences that it feels like nothing is what it seems.
If you care about some random issue "A", there is an entire industry ready to take your money in exchange for the lie that your contribution or patronage is helping "A" when it's just lining someone's pockets.
Want to make sure you can buy a thing that isn't made with child slave labor? I hope you did your research because of the 8 companies "certified" as child-slave-labor free, 3 still use child-slave-labor and just paid for certification, 3 use a supplier that uses it, 1 only uses it part time, and one is legitimately what it claims to be... oh no, wait, they were just bought out by a pro-child-slave-labor corp... I hate everything.
EDIT: Apparently louis left futo some number of months ago, thank you to another user for letting me know in a reply below
This is informative, and unfortunate.
I will be honest, I don't really expect louis will wade into this issue at all, since he seems to be very uncomfortable with any of the "political" or partisan aspects of the issues he covers.
I can empathize with why one might be that way, but I hope I'm wrong, it would be rather disappointing.
Maybe it's time for me to open some feature requests on the helicopter repo for futo keyboard features I'd really miss if I left it behind... It'd be good for both projects to be feature rich and competitive anyway
He's not uncomfortable with it - He hates the cognitive dissonance of being a capitalist and hating the results of it
I'm gonna be really honest, to me that feels like it strays really far into reading people's minds and headcannoning what's going on on them. But perhaps you've seen more from him than I have, and you're basing that assessment on greater familiarity.
I do think it's worth being mindful about how much we assume we know the inner workings of random people through a screen, though.
On the upside, Louis left FUTO last February
Wait, he did? I had no idea
Is that what "fulu" has been about?
I wish my comment included that context for all the people who saw it but I was completely unaware
"FULU" is a consumer rights organization iirc. The name sounds like a spinoff or sister organization to FUTO, but I don't think there's an official relationship.
Maybe Louis Rossman will see this and beat FUTO back into shape? Maybe? Please? I just want one good outcome here!!
Doubtful, unfortunately. FUTO seems like the sort of narcissistic assholes who won't be swayed in any way, shape, or form
He’s literally in it.
He's literally not.
FUTO is more or less openly fascists
I had no idea. Now I have to find a new keyboard...
Heliboard
I read that as "Hellboard" which sounds like an awesome mashup between Tony Hawk Pro Skater, and Brutal Legend
How so? I'm not doubting, I just didn't see any of that evidence in the article.
Have you read the same article?
The founder hosted a debate with an open fascist then gave him a platform on the FUTO YouTube channel.
Do words mean anything anymore? That is an argument for them being fascists. But how are they "openly" fascist? Where is their statement, where they openly state "we are fascists"?
Because they might be, but I don't think they ever openly said so.
Yeah, because thieves go around making public statements of "we are thieves!"
In 2025 they do
Exactly my point, and yet the commenter claims FUTO do that, even though they obviously aren't, because who would.
But if your roommate says he isn't a thief, however he always hangs around with the local gang and continuously brings used stuff that he has no way of legally acquiring since he doesn't even have a job. I don't know man, you have to start asking questions.
Mike is not a nazi, he just goes to the nazi bar because he likes the beer.
Well that's the entire issue, isn't it? If he says he isn't a thief, then he's a thief who clearly isn't open about it. Just like Mike isn't openly a nazi, he's just a nazi who's lying about not being one.
I think that's a pretty extreme bar, but I agree 2 YouTube discussions doesn't make a fascist. At worst it makes a Gavin newsom or Joe Rogan.
WHY. GODDAMN WHY is it lately that any organization behind products i like turn out to be extreme assholes? we're on a streak atm i feel like
Libertarians like privacy too and are right wingers.
Aw man I knew there was something wrong here. I gave them money for the keyboard and the voice talk and immich bcz I was a Rossman fan. They played him and me. Fuck these fascists.
Gross. Fuck FUTO.
FFS, so what's a keyboard that isn't shitty and invasive?
Heliboard seems decent, though I don't know anything about the developers.
I've always been an outspoken skeptic of FUTO (check post history) and their bizarre campaign against free software, but I didn't know they were this bad. Yikes
God fucking damnit. I just like the on device speech-to-text functionality. Anyone have any recs for another service that does the same thing.
There is Whisper IME.
IIRC they all kind of suck. There's Transcribro or whatever, but I don't think it supports many languages (maybe only English?). I used to just use Google's and then revoked network access.
I found that Gboard refuses to work when internet access is not available, even though I previously had offline only voice to text.
With the voice model already downloaded? That sucks, but honestly kind of expected with everything Google's been doing lately.
Yep, it was my daily driver until one day voice to text stopped working. Restored internet access to it and lo-and-behold, voice to text is back. Tried redownooading the model, etc and had no success in getting it working with internet disabled.
I've used Whisper and Sayboard, and they're both good. Sayboard is faster, but Whisper can handle punctuation.
I assume you'll be looking for awhile and once you find the right one, it'll get bought by other fascists
Oh god dammit man.
Great article.
Shit I really liked them. Their keyboard is incredible and Grayjay is hard to replace on desktop. But I'll get started on replacing them. Any ideas on a good keyboard that's open-source? Not anysoftkeyboard or mantis. Tried them.
Replaced their keyboard with heliboard and went back to newpipe. Sucks. Fucking fascist.
Freetube is also good on desktop
Yeah, HeliBoard or FlorisBoard would've been my recommendation. They're very similar, though (and presumably share most code between themselves).
There we go, farawell grayjay then!
I'll take a look at the interviews later tonight.
A few minor items stuck out as a bit disingenuous to me:
It DOES say that, but literally only for the "monthly contribution > 150 section. For a one time grant of 1000 dollars, it doesn't appear to say anything.
FUTO appears to list efforts it has donated to (and use their name/logo), under the title, "Our sponsored grant programs". Which to me seems more of a semantic argument of whether they can say they've donated to something or not.
The inclusion of a logo without permission is a good critique, nonetheless. Likewise, if they are lying about donating to some of these projects, that is a problem.
So, I'll start by saying that I think FUTO may have changed their messaging on their website TODAY Regarding this. They now have three split sections,
That seems more sensible if they have small donations to OSS efforts or individuals who maintain them. It would be excellent for every group listed to review if they or any developer received donations from FUTO and publically decry falsity (as the 3 in the article mentioned)
I don't know Yarvin, don't know shit about him. But wikipedia entry on him is not heartwarming. It does seem an odd choice to have the two videos posted by FUTO. The one is fairly mundane, but the interview with Rossman is just strange as hell in general, and disconcerting. rossman mostly just seems uncomfortable as heck. And Yarvin seems like an insufferable know it all who wants to explain everything and not give anybody the chance to complete their thought.
So I'd say endorsing this video is a dark side to FUTO. It should have been easy to stay mostly apolitical and focus on ownership and software. Not conversations about the efficacy of monarchy.
I can at least palate that a group could think that open source is not working. There are successes and failures. Linux is a great success. Android is becoming less so as it is dominated more by vendors & Google. Talent, resources, time is continually sunk into would-be inferior software at companies. Those softwares that have closed source, harvest our data, and ultimately don't have our interests in mind - are often more polished, and attractive to the majority of users out there. One or two people primarily heading an open source repo can often make an awesome competitive software, but perhaps not as polished and with the threat of losing time to maintain it, archive the repo, etc. In that regard, offering optional licenses to pay base wages to attract talent while still letting you verify the code you execute - could still be appealing if successful.
I believe in FOSS, and will embrace & use it til I die, but I'm willing to entertain they have a difference in opinion on what will most advance our interests.
Sorry but this person is treating grapheneos' attacks on other groups as legitimate which throws the entire article into question. If they are happy to provide a platform for graphene's founder's paranoid conspiracies I can't trust the content.
Seems clear there's some questionable shit going on, but the only evidence presented is two YouTube videos which isn't actually a lot. I wouldn't be surprised based on this to hear there are deeper links, but this article is written by someone who thinks tweets and YouTube comments are evidence.
Where Attack? The worst Graphene ever did was say that they don't support certain Phones like FP because they are not updating their OS to their liking
Are you gonna go to Qubes OS next and complain that they are attacking laptop manufacturers (don't officially support Laptops because they don't have an open source UEFI)?
They also had a culture of accusing anyone who complained about issues or asked questions about why things were done a certain way of being a shill for Calyx, and of there being a coordinated effort by Calyx and others to discredit them. I'm a GOS user, but the lead developer is without a doubt pretty paranoid at least.
Regardless, these accusations against FUTO are pretty concerning.
I've been forced into graphene due to calyx' abandonment (and piss poor communication -- "oh we didn't realize people don't regularly check our website in case the entire organization collapses overnight") of it's users this year, sadly. There just isn't an alternative afaik.
On the graphene front I've personally been banned from their matrix chat on several accounts, none of which I actually used to post in their chat -- they did a blanket ban of anyone in the calyxos channel. Not posted there, not posted in graphene, not having actually done anything, they blanket banned (he now denies this ever happened). Which honestly given how many times I went on to see him uncontrollably ranting at people was probably for the best. He and his most ardent supporters are a brigade of trolls.
Wow you're very uninformed. May want to read up first.
Fuch!!!!! Are they going to see my immich face detected photos to the government for the "final solution" march to the camps and the human powered ovens?
Thankfully Immich is protected against rugpulls (i.e. becoming proprietary) by virtue of it not requiring a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), so FUTO doesn't even own the copyrights to the code. Therefore, if anyone is suspicious of FUTO's influence over the project, they can simply fork it (and I imagine someone will)
But if you have something doing face detection I would hope it's stored locally and not sent to a "cloud" no matter who runs it.
Wait is Louis still attached to the project? I thought he left to focus on a new company.
Multiple people have said that, yeah. But they also said that he did not particularly distance himself from the project, which is definitely something I would do, if I found out about this kind of backing.
I'm guessing Rossmann has problematic political beliefs that he, fortunately, doesn't talk much about publicly. It looks like he was a Destiny fan.
Note the date. This blog post is a few months old. I was expecting new drama on the latest episode of Who Hosted Whom (and does that make them fascist (and does that matter)) until new events but i guess it's just reruns this week.
Wait so FUTO is authored by the guy who started all this clippy movement (Louis Rossmann)?
No, he was just a talking head that they hired a while ago. According to some in this thread he's no longer with them today, but I don't have a source for that.
I believe he published a video about why he left FUTO (it always appear when I open grayjay, yet never clicked it lol)
Ohh good to know
The second part of that is true, because the IQ test is unreliable. That's why its banned in California schools for POC
That statement only has one part. Could you clarify what you mean here? I'm not sure I understand.
I think it's that the statement in question was proclaimed is the "first part". Or maybe the genetic predisposition is. Unclear.
The first part says people with more melanin in their skin are inferior. This is false.
The second part says people with more melanin in their skin score lower on IQ tests. This is true (because IQ tests are terrible, and its creator said so too)
I think it would help to define the causal relationship you're referring to. What exactly about skin color changes the outcome of the test?
It doesn't. The test was designed for white people. It's the same reason that facial recognition has more false positives for people with more melanin in their skin.
The problem is the test, not the skin. That's my point.
How does the test tell the difference? Does it come with a color chart?
It's more about cultural and socioeconomic bias. So you might have questions that have a bias towards middleclass suburban kids vs a poor innercity kid.
You can find examples online, but some can be quite subtle. "Banana is to yellow as Ruby is to ______" Someone who grew up with jewelry would be more likely to know this. This goes against the principle of an IQ test, and older tests were notorious for this.
This is not the real reason. It's because camera tech from more than 10 years ago was worse than today and had trouble with anything less than ideal lighting conditions. Darker textures reflect less light, so the darker someone's skin the less details a camera can see.
However we're still talking about a 0.001 FMR for white men to a 0.002 FMR for black men. That's "2x more false matches" but it's a 0.001 difference.
With modern cameras and recent facial recognition tech, the issue in differences of skin colour is virtually non-existent. Yes, I know of the news stories about false arrests in recent years, but no tech is perfect and you're talking about a few instances out of billions.
No, I'm not defending the use of the tech, just pointing out facts.
I'm going to stop using good free software because I read a blog post by a sketchy guy saying the guys that wrote the software are sketchy. 🙄
No material harm is described in the post. This is a drama blog.
"good" is subjective but FUTO's software is non-free. Their attempts to openwash their proprietary license is enough of a red flag.
That's fair. Only "free as in beer "
It's not a FOSS liscence, but saying it's proprietary is also disingenuous, it's source available.
There's no third option between FOSS and proprietary (unless there are licenses that match the Free Software definition but not the Open Source definition or vice versa, I suppose, but I'm not aware of any). All software that is not FOSS is proprietary by definition, whether the source is available or not. It's not "disingenuous" to call FUTO software proprietary. It's simply factual.
Source availability is necessary but not sufficient for 2 of the 4 freedoms.
From a communication viewpoint, that is fair, but to my knowledge (from being a professional software developer), effectively any license that is not 'open-source' or 'free' is by definition proprietary.
Because those two terms describe licensing standards (the only established ones that I know of). Whereas I believe, "proprietary license" uses this meaning of proprietary:
So, they wrote that license themselves is the point. What it says in there is secondary in meaning.
This is so highly relevant because in legal disputes, there is certain license compatibilities which are known to be possible.
You can take a library licensed under the MIT license and use it in a project that uses the Apache-2.0 license and you're perfectly fine. This is the foundation of why the open-source ecosystem exists at all.
But you cannot take the source code from FUTO and use it in a differently licensed project, because no legal precedents exist to support this. (I believe, the FUTO license also actively prohibits this in some way, but that's beside the point.)
This has massive implications. Like, yeah, you can look at the code, but it is useless. If FUTO closes shop or enshittifies, you cannot fork their projects.
And because you cannot legally re-use their source code in other projects, likely no one looks at it in depth either.
Believe what you want, but Drew DeVault has more of a reputation than FUTO.
I always thought they seemed shady
Giving tens of thousands of dollars to great orgs that have real free software licenses and ask for nothing in return? I'm glad we have futo.
I've heard it said they forced Freenet to stop focusing on anonymization, which caused a fork and name change of the original Freenet to Hyphanet.
Link or didn't happen
https://floss.social/@Freenet/114439179072545405
Site doesn't load. Here's a link to the article
https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html
But it doesn't say anything about futo
Here's the toot:
@light The funding by FUTO sadly led to the forced renaming: https://www.hyphanet.org/freenet-renamed-to-hyphanet.html
That new project does not have privacy as a goal.
We (Hyphanet) are fully volunteer-driven now. #Hyphanet has been working pretty well for the past two decades and is continuing to move forward. Features:
⇒ https://www.hyphanet.org/ @caten
There is nothing there about FUTO forcing them to stop focusing on anonymization. I'd be careful to draw such conjecture. Besides, this is one reductive take from one party of a contentious split.
Yeah I don't understand why everyone is gate keeping open source all the sudden, there is a line to be drawn between openly changeable and open to being understood, the understanding part is all I want from things because then I can tell if its actually bad or not and that is the part we mostly care about.
Its ok to not like futo because you don't agree with some of their peoples politics but that's an entirely different thing.
Somehow all Video recommandations in GrayJay are from (extreme) right wing channels.
In fairness, this is an issue with YouTube itself. It seems to take any opportunity it can to push you down a right-wing pipeline.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/01/29/276000/a-study-of-youtube-comments-shows-how-its-turning-people-onto-the-alt-right/