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.


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.
Well, there’s a quick check. Take a shot of whisky and I’ll see if can type “gottle of geer”.
Yep, definitely talking to myself again
Jokes aside, i haven’t seen you mention anything for media streaming.
I highly passionately recommend Navidrome for music. It is my absolute favorite and most used self hosted service.
For acquiring media like film and music depending where you live ripping those from your local library is in some places arguably a protected fair use. (Comes from the time mp3 players became common and runners used to take rented cds in their walkman outside before). In my experience, 480p dvd is much higher quality then internet 480p streams and the total size is much smaller then what you find in downloads.
ARM can help you automatically rip these as long as you have a drive in your pc. I got ARM running in a proxmox lxc with drive passtrough but that honestly was a pain to setup so not sure you should go that exact route, either way the moment arm is functional its smooth sailing and your only concern becomes storage space.