Local AI Tagging (Optional)

Finally a good use of AI that doesn’t overpromise functionality it can’t actually provide. Just a system for rewriting page text as tags. This is a feature I’ll legitimately use.

It’s what drives most billionaire mentalities: elite projection.

They think that what they want must be what everyone wants. They believe that what’s best for them is best for everyone as long as they believe it to be morally okay for their own interests.

For a billionaire that regularly isolates himself from not just society, but also his own company’s employees, having fake profiles where computers do the communication instead of a human, go along and agree with whatever you say, remain eternally unoffensive, and exist solely to increase engagement doesn’t seem like a bad idea, since it seems almost like what he’d want for himself.

Breaking news, this just in: Socialism is when a capitalist government subsidizes capitalist non-government corporations that are still allowed to seek a profit. /s

All requests are proxied through DuckDuckGo, and all personalized user metadata is removed. (e.g. IPs, any sort of user/session ID, etc)

They have direct agreements to not train on or store user data, (the training part is specifically relevant to OpenAI & Anthropic) with a requirement they delete all information once no longer necessary (specifically for providing responses) within 30 days.

For the Llama & Mixtral models, they host them on together.ai (an LLM-focused cloud platform) but that has the same data privacy requirements as OpenAI and Anthropic.

Recent chats that are saved for later are stored locally (instead of on their servers) and after 30 conversations, the last chat before that is automatically purged from your device.

Obviously there’s less technical privacy guarantees than a local model, but for when it’s not practical or possible, I’ve found it’s a good option.

And there are also free, online hosted instances of those same LLMs in a (relatively speaking) privacy-protecting format from DuckDuckGo, for anyone who doesn’t have a powerful GPU :)

It’s the network effect. It’s always the network effect.

Your current platform enshittified. Where do you go? Well, the majority of people are going to Bluesky, and it’s familiar in terms of UI, so you go there. Sure, you could convince someone like that to try something like Mastodon, but Mastodon is comparably much smaller than Bluesky, so its intrinsic value to people is substantially lower, not to mention the fact that without an algorithm, most of these users have no clue how to curate a feed, since every platform has an algorithm now. A lot of these people will have never used an algorithm-less platform in their entire life.

The same goes for Reddit vs. Lemmy. Reddit has much more users than Lemmy, more niche communities, higher engagement, etc. Why move somewhere that’s identical in function if it’s smaller? Your current platform works well enough.

I think it’s easy to underestimate how much censorship and enshittification people are willing to put up with. People will put up with a lot before they switch platforms. Reddit not letting people publish a person’s manifesto isn’t gonna convince many people to abandon their entire accounts and communities and to switch to Lemmy.

It literally took Twitter being rebranded into oblivion, and turned into an explicit safe haven for fascists and far-right freaks, with an algorithm deboosting non paid-for content multiple times over before people really started flocking out in large numbers.

Technically, drug dealers are using the tech (more specifically, other people are using it, then selling the product to the drug dealers, who then sell it to their customers as a ‘service’ included with the drugs)

The thing is, they’re not doing it to make stronger drugs, or for PR purposes. They’re actually adding pre-exposure prophylactics (PrEPs) into their heroin, which then creates the side effect of preventing the contraction of HIV from the needles. (referenced about 1/3rd of the way down this article)

If people are already going to be addicted to these drugs, them not getting HIV from it is just one harm reduction measure that can reduce their risk of serious, permanent illness.

For those who don’t care to read the full article:

This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.

So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.