Previously used link: https://archive.ph/ICJZZ
Link to petition
Until now, the EU has allowed a majority of countries to rely on American big tech companies for communication and storage of sensitive data. For example, many universities across Europe rely on Google or Microsoft for email services, research data storage, and department communication. Similarly, many of them write their research using Microsoft Word, which could be used by these big companies to train their own AI models.
A majority of regular citizens rely on Meta for instant messaging apps (WhatsApp), Facebook, Instagram, but also on X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok. None of these apps are properly regulated even with EU's efforts, leaving people unshielded to other states' attempts at polarization. There is also the problem of mass profiling of users, which is used to supply targeted advertisements and sometimes influence public opinion on certain topics (cough Musk tweaking the Twitter algorithm to promote AfD cough).
The article that I supplied focuses mainly on the aspect of maintaining data privacy when our data is harvested by outside entities. However, this is, in my opinion, a horrible approach. We need to move everything ASAP to open source alternatives, and preferably EU based ones. Some attempts at this have been previously made in Germany, which should give hope to other countries in the EU.
The cost of moving away from Google/Microsoft tech stacks will be a drop in the bucket compared to the wealth that these companies extract from EU. Similarly, offering alternatives to social media like Friendica, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and perhaps PeerTube, would be a huge win against disinformation and propaganda from other countries. We should also push for instant messaging platforms like SimpleX that do not rely on Google's proprietary Push Notification services, and perhaps deGoogled Android devices.
If the recent events are not a catalyst to push everyone away from US software in the EU, I do not know what else will. Do you think that this would be possible at all?
Some chap invested a lot of time into making the Skyrim experience nicer. I recommend you check out CHIM :)
Quite a lovely project, but you will have to spend some time to set things up. For example, if you have a good GPU available, you can set up TTS for NPCs, STT for yourself, and then a decent LLM to handle the world interactions. The NPCs then can listen to you talk, follow you, do stuff you tell them (like attack someone, or pick something off the floor), etc. It's something quite revolutionary, if you can spend the time to get it to work. If you're looking for some LLM provider on the cheap, nano-gpt has an 8 dollar per month tier that gives you "fair-use unlimited" access to open source models. Worth a shot!
Note: You won't be able to run all the models and the game on the same computer. The CHIM wiki has some suggestions on the amount of compute needed, and alternatives for the services so that you don't have to run everything locally.