I'd argue it's worse for consumers, by keeping them alive it staves off competition, and leeches cash by increasing subscription prices or locking once free feature behind paywalls.
I've also seen situations where a customer reports a bug, the fix breaks some regression, and the updated behavior to work around the fix breaking the regressions turns into an undocumented feature.
I just go on Wikiloc to find tracks, then export the GPX file into CoMaps. I know that Wikiloc is not OSS, but at least I can do navigation with custom routes that way.
But could you not set up a system where you need to go get (for free) a limited use token at a physical location, or have them mailed to your home, and they have a rough geographical lock? If a bunch of those tokens start appearing in random locations, it is a good indication that someone is reselling them to minors? I'm not saying this is idiot proof, but what could go wrong?
> just knowing everything all at once is enough to catapult AI dramatically beyond our grasp
But that would still be limited to "knowing everything all at once" _at the time_ this event happened, and as we've been shown time and time again by the fundamental sciences, the boundary between what is known and what we know we don't know is ever expanding. Plus there's everything we don't know we don't know, and an LLM can't know that either. Discussions like this can always end up with a fitting reference to some of Borges' novels and that how at least I tend to think we've hit a wall for now.
For AI to decide that they are alive and moral agents would require them to be able to take moral responsibility for their actions. As long as the labs that run them deny that responsibility, or an AI can´t convincingly demonstrate it can take moral responsibility on its own, they are not moral agents.
RustDesk has a similar business model and works fine for what it is, is there something particular about TailScale and Iroh that makes you think it will not work?
They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories, they pay above average for a European tech company (but with geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort, among other things.