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.
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 ~5000 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 :)
Thats weird, i don’t remember having an alt account called SuspiciousCarrot78 but surely you must be me, same project, same neurology… same fixation pattern.