Blazkowicz [none/use name]

They started out as a great option for kids from poor backgrounds to learn to code. Schools usually have really locked down PCs and a raspberry pi let them sidestep a lot of that.

I managed to (just about) run a home media server off one for a few years until I could afford a better setup. Now I have it running as a replacement for my ‘smart’ TV’s spyware riddled OS which even has HDMI passthrough for the remote control input.

They are useful, versatile, and still fairly cheap considering the cost of components now.

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.