I'm using AI and I feel terrible now
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I get that, but the problem with this kind of AI is, I feel like I'm sacrificing a lot, not a little.
Don't make a bigger deal out of it than it is. Nothing bad is going to happen.
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I have been suggested to self host in the past.
But as I'm concerned for ecology, and let's be a honest, a bit of my money too, I've thought that self hosting, meaning having the PC always on, was not a good thing.
So I left the dilemma in this state, not knowing how "bad" this would actually be in terms of electric consumption, and if it was worth the trade with privacy or not.That's pretty dependant on hardware. If you host small stuff , like a pihole or something, that can be done relatively cheaply, by using a micro-PC or a Raspberry Pi. Some services don't need to be always-on either, you only need stuff all the time if it's mission-critical, otherwise you can turn stuff on and off as necessary, for power-saving purposes. Self-hosting doesn't necessitate a huge rack and switches, or even your big gaming rig, my favorite thing to do with old laptops is throw Debian on it and find something I'd like to self-hosting from this list.
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I've been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc
But lately I've been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it's always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn't this basically cancelling every effort I've made? (using it in the first place anyway)
I'm weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don't care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I've found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so...I'm lost)I honestly am not sure on the privacy of it but if you really need a useful tool that's ai driven I tend to trust perplexity.ai for general questions and research but I agree with one of the others just run ollama if you can
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Thanks
In a way I did still change a lot of habits.
This on the other does feel like giving up a huge fight and making my brain think that I actually don't care about privacy/Foss at all, I'm usually not a "all or nothing" type of person, but it's a bit hard to wrap my head around this timeDude, it's all good. I doubt anyone has entirely removed intrusion from their lives. I've been the nut in my family, friends and work environments (not complaining, I actually love being that person) on privacy and cybersecurity. I still keep my Gmail account, the one I used to buy all my movies when I thought Google wasn't evil. My kids love using the Lenovo Google Assistant screens. I have 2 Chromecast with Google TV with the account I mentioned (my TVs do not connect to the internet). I play on my PS5 with my account and use my credit card (none of that temp credit card or cash or crypto), but I haven't used my PayPal in years (but still have it). I buy shit on Amazon (it's so convenient).
The point being, do what you can to safeguard your privacy as much as possible, as long as it does not affect your mental health. You need Facebook for whatever reason? You can minimize the invasion, and still use it. (Full disclosure, I fucking hate Meta, so I don't use any of its platforms, or even their open source language model). I'm on GrapheneOS in my phone, use Linux exclusively in my personal life, but I'm picking up a surface pro 11th Gen for work this Friday. I nerd my job, everything is windows based, and it's just getting harder to use Ms shit from Linux effectively. So, I use Windows. I have a good job, get paid well, so, I have to decide if that's worth some of my privacy.
Live life man, enjoy, be happy, then worry about the rest.
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I've been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc
But lately I've been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it's always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn't this basically cancelling every effort I've made? (using it in the first place anyway)
I'm weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don't care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I've found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so...I'm lost)I get it, I've been there, but there is just no point in hating yourself because random big company wants to make money off of you, so they shove convenience in your face. Just do you best to align yourself to your values. Doesn't have to be perfect. It's ok if it's always work in progress. Don't put your life and wellbeing on hold.
Also duckduckgo.com/aichat is a thing.
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I've been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc
But lately I've been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it's always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn't this basically cancelling every effort I've made? (using it in the first place anyway)
I'm weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don't care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I've found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so...I'm lost)Use Andisearch, there are zero privacy concerns and it's apart the most accurate (independent Benchmark)
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Those seem like good advice, but when I was saying dictate, I was just talking about sending my requests to the chatbot app via microphone, not writing.
I tend to be super adhd-y, forget things, be overwhelmed, get into sideway things, and having a quick way to ask this or that, while thinking out loud, is kinda what helps me.
But yes, in a way, some sort of journaling, trying to focus and slowing down would help me.Writing is a really good tool for slowing down. Handwriting even more so.
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Go set up an ollama instance and melt your worries away. Data in your hands once again.
However, you should also learn some restraint. Privacy and security aren't an all or nothing battle. Everyone has some holes in their armor, they need them to breathe.
most security planning workshops start with this statement:
"it is unreasonable as well as impossible to try and protect against every threat out there. there is no magic app, website, service that will solve everything. security is a mindset, and taking the time to understand what you want to protect and why will serve you better than any application."
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The obsession with privacy can be taken to an extreme where it's a negative for your mental health. You can sacrifice a little privacy for another important benefit. 100% privacy is either not possible or practical, so don't let it stress you out. I'd be more concerned that AI might lead you down a wrong path, but you're an adult, use your own judgement.
I feel like the "getting into privacy" journey for a lot of people tends to look like a bell curve - you start off with a few apps and minor tweaks to protect you from the worst online privacy invasions, and then it gradually builds and builds until you become the sort of person that has all their cat pictures on an air-gapped encrypted server hidden in a cupboard somewhere while you use SearX to find the best mask that will confuse facial recognition cameras, and then after a while you break through and just go back to using a few apps and tweaks to protect from the worst of it again.
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I've been digging into the rabbit hole for a few months. Been switching to Linux, FOSS everything I can, trying to go to smaller sites, the least dubious social media, VPN, trusted mail, etc etc
But lately I've been in a rough state mentally (I say lately but it's always been with me) and having GPT guide me and being able to just dictate what I think helps me a lot on various levels, for various reasons.
But at this point, using ChatGPT with a mic, isn't this basically cancelling every effort I've made? (using it in the first place anyway)
I'm weak and it helps me, should I just throw my efforts out of the window and just say I don't care about privacy anymore and use whatever everyone uses? (on one hand, I've found alternatives for almost everything, so I could keep on using those, but also, again, if I keep on using GPT on a regular basis, this is probably the worst threat the future has to offer in termes of privacy, so...I'm lost)You could check out localllama on lemmy to run foss ai models locally, or you could check out duck.ai as someone else mentioned. Your mental health should come first so do what you can for privacy but don't feel bad about making compromises.
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You could check out localllama on lemmy to run foss ai models locally, or you could check out duck.ai as someone else mentioned. Your mental health should come first so do what you can for privacy but don't feel bad about making compromises.
Yes, you can use an locally hosted LLM, but these never can be so powerfull as an AI with a lot of servers supporting. We have to difference it, between mere Chatbots, relying on its own database, often outdated and with the tendece to invent answers, and AI supported search engines, like Andi, You, DDG AI and others, which retrieve informations in realtime from the Web. But there is important that these are capable to difference trustworth sources from those which are not. Andi does a very good job here, because compare informations from several sites for the answer.
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Yes, you can use an locally hosted LLM, but these never can be so powerfull as an AI with a lot of servers supporting. We have to difference it, between mere Chatbots, relying on its own database, often outdated and with the tendece to invent answers, and AI supported search engines, like Andi, You, DDG AI and others, which retrieve informations in realtime from the Web. But there is important that these are capable to difference trustworth sources from those which are not. Andi does a very good job here, because compare informations from several sites for the answer.
Ollama can pull info from the web using multiple sites, but yes local AIs are more prone to hallucination. Google did release Gemma3 which has a 27B model which is probably the most cost effective way to get into local models that rival chatgpt (if you can call about 2k cost effective). That was why I recommended duck.ai as well, as it has access to gpt and llama3.3:70b which will do a lot better.
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Ollama can pull info from the web using multiple sites, but yes local AIs are more prone to hallucination. Google did release Gemma3 which has a 27B model which is probably the most cost effective way to get into local models that rival chatgpt (if you can call about 2k cost effective). That was why I recommended duck.ai as well, as it has access to gpt and llama3.3:70b which will do a lot better.
The problem is privacythis don't change if the AI uses sources from big bompany - Google GPTs. I tested several free AIs from Hugging face, Futurepedia and Futuretools, and since over two years I use Andi as main search, I didn't find anything better. It use an own LLM, because Andi was the first AI search ever, former LazyWeb, long before the others released AI searches.
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I did, but that's not really the subject. I'm not taking GPT as a therapist by the way, I may have been misunderstood because english is not my first language. But I'm not sharing mental health things with it.
In any case, I think the problem I'm feeling can be real for many people that are not in mental state anyway. But I totally see why you would say that, thanks.
I'm guessing GPT is for practicing your English skills because I also did this for my Spanish. Of course, that was back when I still used Google and Apple services. I'm going to try ollama, myself, but this use case is pretty specific so I wouldn't expect an easy switch
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I get that, but the problem with this kind of AI is, I feel like I'm sacrificing a lot, not a little.
What's wrong with https://lmstudio.ai or https://jan.ai for offline, private, FOSS use?
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