I am boycotting all software authored by Kovid Goyal due to his long history of abusing users.
Grant Certiorari
Nice lawyer joke there.
Linux Mint does not adhere to the principles of software freedom
Why is distrowatch playing politics now? This is very sad news to me.
It looks like a vibe-coded version of some quite old tools:
I would guess the sudden influx of massive amounts of traffic would force them to charge for the service, and they don't want to do that. Requiring a phone number, while invasive to some, does cut down on a tremendous amount of automated/bot/spam traffic.
actively destroys our environment, makes every computiational device more expensive, literally makes it’s users dumber, and is built with very ethically questionable methods
you mean like the metals mined by children and forced labor that's in every electronic device and battery on the planet? so you're talking to us from a cup and string in the woods then, right?
Use of literally any electronic or battery-operated device on the planet uses metals sourced from child and/or forced labor somewhere in the world. Unless you're prepared to move off the grid and live in the woods, these type of arguments at higher levels are endlessly pointless IMO.
The main reason I stick to it is that I target platforms that normally don't have anything else. Also the rules are easier to understand.
combine whisper speech-to-text with any one of the numerous local text-to-speech solutions like picotts, piper, kitten, pocket-tts, outetts etc.
Just because the baseline has shifted doesn’t mean the change never happened
There can and will be change, sure, but my point was that OP's "smalls steps towards something much worse" typically never happens because of the shift.