Like I’ve said several times before, you’ve scraped the dregs of anti-China “news” online and probably bypassed a ton of stuff that would have actually been interesting here.

This opinion piece, in particular, is extra jingoistic and practically assumes the USA deserves control of not just computing technology worldwide, but also control of time itself.

Reuters reporting confirms that High‑Flyer pivoted from equity markets to artificial intelligence research in 2023, building two super‑computing clusters stuffed with Nvidia A100 processors before US export controls came into force.

On Capitol Hill, the discovery set alarm bells ringing. Washington had barred Beijing from buying the world’s most coveted AI chips, yet here was a Chinese firm running a model of near‑GPT‑4 heft on hardware Washington thought safely out of reach.

So the US got upset at a Chinese hedge fund company that managed to purchase things legally and then build a product that doesn’t need any Nvidia processors to run anyway.

Boo-fucking-hoo. A Chinese capitalist company did capitalism better than the United States. It did more open AI than OpenAI.

Nvidia insists it obeys US law, but lawmakers are now drafting “chip end‑user tracing" legislation to brand each accelerator with an immutable provenance tag.

And these additional regulations are just a net negative for privacy

The House Select Committee… accuses the firm of “spying, stealing and subverting" by siphoning petabytes of conversational data… Through a technique called model inversion, adversaries can reconstruct fragments of that training data. In practice, that means Beijing could fish out a US senator’s embargoed speech or an Indian bureaucrat’s budget note and feed the text into targeted influence campaigns long before it ever reaches the public domain.

In other words, literally everything OpenAI did with the “public” web. But the author doesn’t seem to care about the unethical funneling of data, just the Chineseness of where it ends up.

Hopefully I don’t need to explain how goofy these examples are, either.

Qwant doesn’t prioritize privacy very well, besides leaning on its European-ness. Their privacy policy does not engender trust with me.

https://lemm.ee/comment/19796261

But as soon as you do Proton Mail + VPN, you then go with Proton Unlimited and that is what makes the most sense financially.

That’s how they get you! ;)

Mail and VPN are something I would never want to cross associate, though. After all, any mail provider can see the full contents of any unencrypted email at some point (including Proton), and any VPN provider can see as much as your ISP used to see about your internet activity.

I mentioned revocation of consent explicitly in reference towards Reddit and OpenAI. But even if I hadn’t, a phrase like “that won’t even help” itself isn’t helpful unless you’ve scoped out full knowledge of the other person’s threat model. Case in point, you assumed anyone’s only possible threat would be Reddit, without considering it could be random jackasses.

Regarding potentially making information unavailable to the general public: touche. Sometimes, though, that can be an unintended side effect. Or an intended one. The Reddit blackout was one such case.

I’m of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.

But on the other hand, if it’s a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don’t have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your “VPN” for searches.

It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.

It’s a way to explicitly revoke consent, make things more difficult to find for the general public, etc.

It’s easy to use, it’s fast, it’s cross-platform, it’s free, it’s capable of streaming E2EE video at high resolution and low latency to dozens to hundreds of people at the same time. That’s not something you can say about many competitors.

Addendum: Your source is really bad. Its viewpoints are American exceptionalism to the extreme, and to the stupid. In another article, “how autocrats weaponize AI”, which was published last month, it refuses to call the Trump regime an autocracy, and praises AI when the good guys do it.

It also has the dumbest sentence describing Signal I’ve seen in my life:

Encryption apps like Signal use AI to ensure secure communication and protect activists from government surveillance.

I don’t know what the author was smoking when they wrote that, but Signal does not use any AI.

The article is written like a pro-AI sales pitch. (Considering the author, it might just be a sales pitch.)

The delay in providing activists with AI training and resources has profound implications. Frontline activists are left out of critical conversations about how AI should be developed and deployed.