I’m a big proponent of self-hosting, right to repair, and rolling your own whatever when you can. That probably started as teenage rebellion that got baked in - I was lucky enough to read both Walden and The Hobbit during a week-long cyclone lockdown several decades ago - but I suspect there’s a non-trivial overlap between that space and privacy-minded people in general.
My endgame is a self-sufficient intranet for myself and family: if the net goes down tomorrow, we’d barely notice.
I also use LLMs as a tool. True self-hosted equivalence to state-of-the-art models is still an expensive proposition, so like many, I use cloud-based tools like Claude or Codex for domain-specific heavy lifting - mostly coding. Not apologising for it; I think it’s a reasonable trade-off while local hardware catches up.
That context is just to establish where I’m coming from when I say this caught my attention today:
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14328960-identity-verification-on-claude
To be accurate about what it actually says: this isn’t a blanket “show us your passport to use Claude.” Not yet.
The policy as written is narrower than it might first appear.
My concern isn’t what it says - it’s that the precedent now exists. OAI will do doubt follow suite.
Scope creep is a documented pattern with this kind of thing, and “we only use it for X” describes current intent, not a structural constraint.
Given the nature of this community, figured it was worth flagging.
I hope people in the us wake the fuck up and these companies start losing users to foreign ones by the millions
I’m not sure that solves the issue or just changes the actors. Still, I’m all for “fight the power”.
I’m just a silly man with a box of scraps. But I hope enough silly men with boxes can come together to form some sort of co-op. Maybe. I don’t know. But…I hope, people smarter and better resourced than I can find a way forward.
The writing is on the wall here.
Probably a shallow response …
But I always figured AI/LLMs are basically apocalyptic for all sorts of individualistic values in computing (including privacy but also independence and diversity).
Whether they’re good or useful etc, I just struggle to see how they will ever be justifiable against these sorts of values.
Sure, local models and our hardware will get better … but better than the state of the art from the big labs and providers? Given that data and training are the big bottlenecks on quality … I struggle to see how AI isn’t a complete feudal capturing of information computing and processing. Not to mention what happens to the pipeline that produces information content if everyone is only consuming it through the models that train on it.
So for me the big question is, what’s our call on a possible (likely even?) future where we are forever stuck using cloud provided AI along with all of its negatives, in the same way that basically all of us has been and still is stuck using MS windows, Google and the big-social-media hellscape?
For me, I baulk at this.
these people are losing a lot of money on every prompt with the state of the art models.
on this specific front it’s only a matter of time.
I’m right there with you…but may I offer an alternative narrative in two parts and then address the pipeline issue you raise.
The first part:
There’s a small (but real) subset of people turning their back on big corpo. Retro-tech, dumb-phones, self hosting, linux, right-to-repair advocates, OSS and FOSS, privacy groups … everyone can smell the enshittification and are (in their own ways) pushing back. That’s not nothing.
I think the way forward is not to play the game. Big corpo will do what big corpo always does. But we can use the tools we have to make the things we want.
Will it compete with SOTA? No. But…does it need to? At an individual level, I’d argue “probably not”. It just needs to work for the individual.
More to the point, there’s something to be said about doing more with less. Constraints can bring about real innovation. If the answer cannot be “Throw more X at it” (where X is $$$, compute, whatever)…then how can you leverage the tools and intelligence you have to build what you want? I think that’s the real question.
Now for the second part:
So for me the big question is, what’s our call on a possible (likely even?) future where we are forever stuck using cloud provided AI along with all of its negatives, in the same way > that basically all of us has been and still is stuck using MS windows, Google and the big-social-media hellscape?
I’m more sanguine about it because I think this is down to the individual. Look at where you are now - it’s not Reddit or Facebook :). You and I choose to be here because…reasons. We can choose to run Linux, LibreOffice, Mullivad, llama.cpp, SearXNG, Syncthing, Immich etc for the same reasons.
I think the trick will be figuring out how to navigate from your home ecosystem into the wider world, without getting f’d in the a.
The one thing I don’t have a clean answer for is your pipeline point. If the content web collapses into AI slop - and it’s already going that way - then the human-generated signal that makes these models worth using starts to degrade. You may need to hold onto your “Good Old LLMs” for a while yet (or start training your own from scratch. There are ways and means but that’s beyond the scope of this conversation I think).
In any case, individual sovereignty doesn’t fix that. You can opt out personally and still live in a world where the epistemic commons has been strip-mined.
That…probably what WILL happen, come to think of it. Ok, fine. But partial answers already exist - cryptographic provenance of human content, federated communities being structurally harder to slop-flood (maybe).
Honestly? Nobody has solved that problem just yet. The people building the biggest models know it’s a problem and don’t have a clean answer either. Anyone who says they do is selling something.
All I can say is the only way to win is not to play the game. Which WORP would no doubt meep-morp at.
Oh I hear you (and appreciate the response).
For me, I can’t help but think of another alternative, which I’m surprised I haven’t heard of yet …
stripping down one’s personal technological cognitive load to a stack of systems that can fit into one’s brain (like the Python mantra), focusing on learning that stack well building sustainable and stable systems, and then just detoxing from the increasingly polluted digital information stream (protected commons, traditional formats such as books and in person engagement … dunno).
Depends on what the end goal is, but AIs seem to be about using tech more or just opting out of sovereignty. Something like the above seems to me to be about using tech less (in the end) and pushing toward being a secondary tool rather than an end of its own.
I agree.
God help me, I’m actually reading books again.
Books.
It’s…harder than it use to be. A lot harder, actually.
But there’s something to be said about marginalia etc.
Ha yes … on the other hand, it was easy to forget how good damn expansive non-internet information is: the whole world ran on that shit for millennia.
IMHO LLM usage isn’t coherent with independence. That being said I wrote quite a bit on self-hosting LLMs. There are quite a few tools available, like ollama itself relying on llama.cpp that can both work locally and provide an API compatible replacement to cloud services. As you suggested though typically at home one doesn’t have the hardware, GPUs with 100+GB of VRAM, to run the state of the art. There is a middle ground though between full cloud, API key, closed source vs open source at home on low-end hardware : running STOA open models on cloud. It can be done on any cloud but it’s much easier to start with dedicated hardware and tooling, for that HuggingFace is great but there are multiples.
TL;DR: closed cloud -> models on clouds -> self-hosted provide a better path to independence, including training.
Yeah, me too :)
https://bobbyllm.github.io/llama-conductor/
https://codeberg.org/BobbyLLM/llama-conductor
I’m thinking about coding a >>cloud side car at the moment, with the exact feature you mentioned…but…that’s scope creep for what I have in mind.
Irrespective of all that, I agree: an open cloud co-op could be a good way to have SOTA (or near SOTA - GLM 5.1 is about as close as we have right now) access for when needed.
(Not teaching you to suck eggs, so this comment is for the lay-reader):
For coding, you can do some interesting stuff where the cloud model is the “general” and the locally hosted LLM is the “soldier” that does the grunt work. We have some pretty decent, consumer-level-hardware runnable “soldiers” now (I still like Qwen 3 coder)…they just don’t quite have the brains to see the full/big picture for coding.
I love the sound of this but can I ask, if the net goes down and you hardly notice, where do you get your ‘net’ from? Or is it that your intranet doesn’t need internet as such and everything is just local?
I might have answered my own question there but I’m interested to understand it a bit more.
Thanks!
The intranet becomes the internet :) Everything is local, accessible from multiple devices within my wLAN. The main box plugs into the router and serves everything over Wifi to trusted devices - my documents, media, books, games etc.
I wrote (flippantly) about the bones of the system here, 3 or 4 months ago. It’s more complex now, but the endgame has always been “what if cloud, but you are your own cloud?”
https://lemmy.world/post/41315607/21438607
It may not be fresh (if the net goes down), but it would be local. The only real question I have to grok for myself is if I want to mirror curated section of Wikipedia, books etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwix
Probably I should. May as well go full data-horder. Good excuse to get a few more TB of storage. What I’ve done so far is all within 4TB, using clever tricks and black magic but there’s a limit to 4TB. Fortunately, hard drives are still not too $$$. +4TB is about $200 here locally. So the entire set up is still around $600-700 AUD (around $350-400 USD)
All the other stuff I have more or less tee-ed up (barring the UPS + solar kit I am building later in the year).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q4dUt1yK0g
Anyhow, 8TB local should just about cover what I have in mind (he said, fully aware of dragon horder sickness). Then I’ll grab something for offsite storage for critical docs - I have an old raspberry pi with a 256GB NVMe ssd I can use for that.
I’m semi tempted (because fuck it, why not have fun) to look into LoRA after that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
What I really NEED to do is finish the LLM stack (I’m on it and nearly done) and then do a curated Youtube replacement with yl-dlp feeding into Nova-player or Jellyfin, once/if SmartTube etc gets shit-canned. The youtube thing I’m kinda excited about because I’ve figured out how to squeeze ~1500 videos in around 250ish GB of storage, with TTL (time to live) mechanics, download replacement schedule etc. The kids watch too much random shit on YT, so daddy will make YT at home (ha!).
I have some other wild ideas too…it’s a whole other thing…don’t get me started :)
Once I’m finished, I will open-source the entire thing, post about it here, and let others replicate / improve on it. And so it goes. Once you begin walking down the dark path, you are forever doomed. Be careful :)
OK I have you. You dont need the internet because you have the internet in your terabyte farm. Pretty cool.
Thanks for the detailed reply.
One final question, I’m sure its dark at the bottom of the deep rabbit hole you are in, what do you do for batteries for your head torch?! 😀
Exactly so. Mom - can we get the internet? Mom: we have the internet at home.
Batteries? I don’t need batteries. I have the never-ending warm glow of weaponized autism. And that’s not even a joke.
I tend to hyper-fixate on something until either it breaks or I do. It’s usually 70/30 in my favour :)
Here. Begin your walk down the path to a power some would call…unnatural
https://get.kiwix.org/en/solutions/applications/kiwix-server/
Yucky… The identity partner looks nasty. I bet all these corps are linked to the Epstein class and their think tanks. The 1% are taking control of their cattle…
