I use the same, I just forget about it because I hate and so rarely use my phone, haha.

No defense needed because everyone died after a series of unfortunate disasters struck in rapid succession and there was no hope of self-rescue or Earth-based rescue. Mars is an exercise in unhinged hubris that will end in mass death at least if it is attempted in the foreseeable future. The logistics are far beyond anything we have ever attempted nevermind succeeded at, and Martian nature makes Mother nature look like the kind gentle mothering figure she actually is in comparison. If you think she can be harsh with what she’s going to do to us over climate change, just wait until we see how cruelly the rest of the universe is going to treat us.

ollama is a comfortable starting point for most people. They offer cloud models but they’re opt-in only and it’s really primarily for local models. Nothing about the ecosystem is what you’d really call “stable”, I suspect a lot of it is vibe coded (even the drivers and documentation for all these tools is sketchy AF, even when its coming from large companies, nvidia’s documentation is atrocious) and you will often have really frustrating bugs and crashes and incompatibilities. It’s a bit of a janky mess, if you’re lucky it works out of the box but be cautious with it, it can be a bit fragile. Welcome to the brave new world.

ollama has a bunch of models you can direct download from them and run from the CLI with a super basic text interface, but where it starts to get more powerful is with the ollama server running on localhost:11434, it mimics OpenAI’s API and can be connected to almost any other LLM frontend which makes it much more useful. OpenWebUI is a common one, I prefer LibreChat which is similar but the latest version has terrible context compression/summarization which has ruined it for me, they’re both a bit frustratingly janky (again high likelihood of vibe coding throughout). Huggingface.co is the main source for user-created models, which are often optimized for particular usages and often have the models baked-in restrictions removed (look for keywords like abliterated, uncensored, heretic) although this can some with some loss in quality it may or may not be noticeable. The best format to look for is GGUF (in my experience) and you can use quantizations to get smaller versions of large models, named for the number of bits used, like Q4 (the numbers and letters after that are details not really worth diving into) means 4 bits, instead of the default 16 bits. That’s a lot of quality loss numerically but it turns out to be not that bad in practice and it shrinks the memory usage (and download size) a lot. Q4 is generally considered a pretty reasonable and safe target for local usage and causes very little compromise in model quality while making it a lot more usable and faster. Other techniques like imatrix are useful for even smaller quants with smaller bits but also more quality loss.

The next step into the rabbithole is agentic tool-use harnesses. These are things that allow the AI to actually use tools (ranging from editing files or running command line tools or doing web-searches or far more complex things through things like MCP servers or “skills” which seem to be a somewhat newer and potentially better alternative). Harnesses range from extremely minimal, carefully controlled and directly manageable harnesses like pi/pi-mono, to the absolutely batshit crazy (do not recommend, terrifying) OpenClaw. There are more middle-ground harnesses like opencode (similar to open source claude code) or hermes. You can also redirect many commercial harnesses like claude, codex, cursor, etc onto your local Ollama either partially (to reduce API token usage) or completely (for privacy and control) How it works is, you just point them at your localhost:11434 ollama API and they talk to the models by providing all the context and prompts they need and if the model supports tool-calling it will send those command requests back to the harness and the harness will see them and run them. To be clear, the model is still just text. It’s not “doing” anything. It’s requesting the harness to do it. It spits out and receives specially formatted and tagged text for tools (which it has been specifically trained on) to teach it how to use tools and how to interpret the results. In my experience, commercial tool use harnesses like claude and codex are tightly coupled to their company’s models and don’t do a great job with open source/open weights models, so I don’t really recommend wasting your time with them for local use.

For generative images or video ComfyUI seems to be the go-to runner and Civitai.com seems to be the main source for models and these are a different kind of models (stable diffusion rather than LLM) and I don’t have a lot of experience with generative images and think any potential uses are even less ethically defensible than LLMs in a lot of ways, so I generally avoid them.

Hopefully that isn’t too confusing or overwhelming and gives you at least a summary, starting point and many keywords to look into. I don’t know everything about this topic and I’m still learning myself, this is what I have learned so far and some of it might be wrong. Good luck!

gemma4 is also pretty amazing (both fast and unbelievably capable for its seemingly-small size) on modest hardware. TurboQuant seems like a really, really promising technique and I hope we’ll start seeing the open source community developing it into something even more useful to keep democratizing the capabilities of this technology so we can all have access to the best and highest forms of it.

That’s a fair criticism and an important clarification, I agree.

End-to-end encryption is the final boss of false-sense-of-security.

Like, it’s great and all, but it’s not universal perfect privacy the way a lot of people seem to hold it up as if it were. You have to understand what it’s actually defending against, and who might be blocked by that, and more importantly, who won’t be. Because the list of potential adversaries it is actually useful against are becoming narrower and increasingly out-of-date.

Encryption alone prevents the messages being read in transit between you and Signal, and obviously that’s fundamental basic security at this point. Signal being end-to-end encrypted prevents your messages being spied on by Signal, but ironically they’re probably one of the most trustworthy actors in this whole chain, so the fact that it’s protected from them, while commendable, is not particularly valuable security. They were probably not the ones going to spy on you in the first place. They have prevented themselves from being capable of doing so, and that’s good, but if that’s all you’re worried about and you now think your privacy problems are solved, you’re completely missing the point because instead of Signal themselves, you need to be worried about the guy currently standing over your shoulder with his camera filming.

Treat your phone and your Windows computer like they are permanently compromised with a rootkit taking continuous screenshots of everything you do and feeding that to their big tech overlords, because they might as well be.

For that matter, even Linux PCs still have their black box “intel management engine” or similar processor running constantly and potentially watching everything you do, although I don’t believe they actually do that in any reasonable case, we need to understand they have both the capability and the motivation to be, at least in some cases, compromised by adversaries which may include (but are not limited to) tech companies and governments. You can’t even trust your “dumb monitor” unless you’ve audited every chip inside it, you’ll never know if it could be scanning everything on your screen and feeding it back through HDMI/DP back-channels or even through powerline networking. You also don’t know if the same kind of things could be happening on the other side that you’re sending/receiving from. Sure the network trip is protected, but that’s hardly the only place you’re vulnerable to interception.

That probably all sounds paranoid and extreme and improbable, and it is, but the point is end-to-end encryption does nothing to help you against any of that, so don’t make the mistake of assuming you’re 100% safe because it’s end-to-end encrypted. The “end” is not what you think it is and it’s not paranoid to at least understand that and accept the risk with the understanding.

I realize I am probably preaching to the choir here, and most of you probably understand this as well as I do. But I’m also pretty sure a lot of people truly believe it’s more secure against eavesdropping than it actually is and that needs to change. The surveillance state is adapting and expanding rapidly and I fear they’ve started getting ahead of many of us. Beware, and plan carefully in the months and years ahead.

Monoprice has always been my go-to for boring, reliable, certified cables of any sort.

That said, Anker has never done anything wrong to me either, I just don’t completely trust them the way I do Monoprice. I have no reason for this, it’s just a vague intuition I suppose. Take it for what it’s worth.

It’s a tiny factor in most cases but it’s there. I am prejudiced against Bethesda’s janky engine no matter how much they polish that turd it’s still a turd in so many ways, and I also consider Unreal Engine a cautionary flag to remind me I need to check if the game’s performance is horrific. Not really UE’s fault itself, but developers love that they can easily turn on all the AAA eye-candy features without having any of the knowledge or understanding of how to optimize their game (or frankly the budget) to support those performance-intensive features properly.

ICE: “He died of his guilty conscience, knowing we were absolutely correct to detain him” /s

If it’s a question of installing a rootkit belonging to either the evil pirates who are closer to my kind of evil, or evil corporations who are literally destroying the internet, civilization, and the world in order to masturbate in their AI training gulags with my personal data? I’d choose to trust the pirates every time.

That said, if I have to install a rootkit from anyone to play a fucking game, I’m probably just not playing that fucking game.

Absolutely, just like addiction to fast food causes obesity, our addiction to fast information has developed into a profound societal ignorance. Studying issues seriously takes time and effort, and if you think “ain’t nobody got time for that” I’ll tell you right now you’re going to have to start to make time for it. Because if you don’t, you’ll end up knowing nothing, and being wrong about everything, and while that may be acceptable to anyone following all the other lemmings in the same direction (the double irony of “lemming behavior” being historical fake information itself, while posting this on lemmy is not lost on me), I’m also going to suggest to you there will be serious personal consequences from being wrong all the time, and those consequences are going to catch up with you sooner or later.

I dabble in local AI and this always blows my mind. How do people just casually throw 135b parameter models around? Are people like, renting datacenter hardware or GPU time or something, or are people just building personal AI servers with 6 5090s in them, or are they quantizing them down to 0.025 bits or what? what’s the secret? how does this work? am I missing something? like the Q4 of Qwen3.5 122B is between 60-80GB just for the model alone. That’s 3x 5090s minimum, unless I’m doing the math wrong, and then you need to fit the huge context windows these things have in there too. I don’t get it.

Meanwhile I’m over here nearly burning my house down trying to get my poor consumer cards to run glm-4.7-flash.

I hate to break it to you, but we’re never going to be able to trust anything ever again. At least, not the way we used to. In the future, without any doubt, we are going to need to develop a different model of learning, using, and processing information that considers the provenance of where the information came from and how it got there from essentially first principles. We will have to build a web of investigation and trust to determine and mark what information is trustworthy and what is not, especially new information. None of this exists in any meaningful way yet, and the systems we used to have for it, like academic research and journalism for example, would have been catastrophically inadequate to handle this onslaught even at their peak, and they are nowhere near their peak anymore, having been deliberately eroded into a shadow of their former effectiveness so some assholes could get rich and powerful. So hopefully we’ll be able to rely on solid ground like Wikipedia and… books as a starting point, and nobody gets around to burning the Library of Alexandria down in their rage against “woke stuff”, because otherwise we’re going to be rebuilding our information spaces pretty much from scratch in the near future, probably at the same time we’re rebuilding civilized society in general. If this sounds incredibly uncertain, tedious and painful: yes, it will be, especially at first. But we will get better at it, eventually. We will develop new systems for it, we will become fluent in information again and the friction will fade.

I wish we could get to that stage right away, but unfortunately it will have to wait. We can’t do anything to improve the swimming pool while we are currently drowning in it. This is the reality that rampant and unchecked use of AI technologies by soulless corporations and corrupt governments have wrought. Logic and reason never stood a chance, and we are entering the digital dark ages. The enlightenment is probably coming someday, but don’t hold your breath for it.

Support your local library, that’s the most helpful thing I can think of for individuals to do. Librarians know their shit.

It was struck by debris after the drone was successfully intercepted. /s

That sounds like a bonus feature to me. The car keeps me safe by preventing me from entering fascist countries? I’d put that on the fucking sales brochure, honestly.

Welcome. It’s smaller, but the people are better. Most of them, anyway. Sometimes some of them are brilliant and amazing, just like on Reddit. Sometimes some of them suck (sometimes including me) but it’s not so overwhelming because there aren’t as many. Small is beautiful, even if it is a little quieter than you’re used to. You’ll get used to it though, and it’s better for your mental health.

Yeah, I have no interest in becoming the 51st state but I also have no interest in fighting a protracted guerilla war under US occupation so I’d really strongly prefer choosing the path where neither of those things have to happen so we can think about eventually reintegrating our economy into a symbiotic relationship with our friendly and cooperative neighbor.

I’m not holding my breath for it, and I’m not sure we’re ever going to go back to the way things were. But rest assured we’re not looking forward to a future where an authoritarian US government is wielding a terrifying sword of Damocles hanging over our heads either. We really, really want you guys to fix your shit, please. Best of luck, honestly. It matters a lot to us.

Edit to add: And to be clear, I agree Gavin Newsom suuuuuuucks, if you guys end up with him as a presidential candidate we are all cooked.

A business is something owned and run by a real human, who may be an evil person but is still at least a person that can potentially be reasoned with and can suffer consequences for their actions. Sociopathic business owners absolutely do exist and are a real concern, but they are a manageable one, at least theoretically, at least when the entire system isn’t stacked in favor of them.

As you say, corporations are different (and they are a significant part of the reason the economy is stacked in favor of sociopaths instead of against them). They are only nominally run by a human, and typically only in a temporally limited or some other limited capacity. A corporation is owned by its shareholders, an anonymous, nameless, faceless mob of pitchforks and torches, a group that is constantly shifting, amorphous and fluid, impossible to solidify into anything that can be pinned down, typically mostly represented by bankers, fund managers and balance sheets that want to look good for their eventual consumer so they can sell financial products to them. They are inherently amoral, and like any mob can quickly turn from vicious to apathetic and back again at the prompting of single individual acts or actors without any logical reason. The sociopaths on the other hand can easily take advantage of this, becoming the single actor or creating the single act to incite the mobs to riot or soothe them into complacency almost at will, and as a result, they control the corporations, and thus the economy.

This is why I moved away from Gitea to Forgejo. Nothing wrong with Gitea. I just can’t trust the corporate model anymore, especially not for something as critical as my code repos.

It’s awesome that people are reverse-engineering this garbage but honestly who the fuck is using these evil companies software expecting it to not be evil.

Use an open-weights model in open-source software if you have to, fuck these idiots.