Tech, life and everything else
I have a lot of fun with self-hosting lately. It got much easier with the help of AI. After tackling and improving music self-hosting, it was finally time to find an adequate solution for my AI chats. Previously I mainly used Gemini, then Mistral Vibe (Le Chat). But I’m not happy with having just another subscription, given I also use OpenCode with Cortecs.ai or OpenRouter for my private programming projects.
Even though I wonder how they finance it (reading their post suggests, there will be a paid option later), DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is probably a good privacy-friendly way to try out the different LLM models for chats. You don’t have to register, you don’t have to pay, you don’t have to change settings that your chats aren’t saved or used for training.
Some years ago, I started reading the novel “The Circle” by Dave Eggers. I never finished reading it, but today I watched the movie. It has an important message about privacy, transparency and surveillance and shows that there’s a thin line in between. I can definitely recommend watching it, although I sometimes wasn’t impressed by the acting.
You might have discovered two new links in the footer of my blog or homepage. “🔓 Connect via Tor.” and “What is Tor?”. I now try to promote the use of Tor with GoBlog.
Today I got an email that read something like this:
Honestly, I don’t quite believe Apple is that altruistic and actually cares about the privacy of their customers and users, rather I think it’s driven by a desire for even more profits. Apple has jumped on the privacy bandwagon because it’s financially rewarding.
Right now, there’s drama because WhatsApp is changing its terms of service and wants to share even more data with Facebook (at least from users outside the EU).
Chris Wiegman shared a status update about his journey to replace big tech with small tech.
Today I finally deleted my Instagram account, or rather initiated a deletion for 30 days. Yesterday evening I started a data export, today I was able to download a ZIP file with all my data from Instagram, including all photos, likes, comments and stuff like that. So if I think of something important, I can still pull the data from the archive.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some good arguments against selling your privacy, a so called “data dividend” or “pay-for-privacy”.