Claude: papers please?

2026-04-17 03:25 UTC

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: …claude.com/…/14328960-identity-verification-on-c… 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.

Replies (9)

@pound_heap@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2026-04-17 16:55

> Being responsible with powerful technology starts with knowing who is using it. The fuck it does. Claude is already censored - you can't get a recipe of a poison, schematics for a bomb, an advice on how to hide a body. If you can, then it's Anthropic engineers didn't do their job. Knowing who is using it helps either with conditional censorship, or helping governments to track people based on their prompts, or just plainly lying and using data for analytics and training. All these easons are shit. And don't tell me this is to protect the kids again. Let the parents do their job.

Open ##1333334
@maegul@lemmy.ml 2026-04-17 07:11

Probably a shallow response … But I always figured AI/LLMs are basically apocalyptic for all sorts of individualistic values in computing (including privacy but also independence and diversity). Whether they’re good or useful etc, I just struggle to see how they will ever be justifiable against these sorts of values. Sure, local models and our hardware will get better … but better than the state of the art from the big labs and providers? Given that data and training are the big bottlenecks on quality … I struggle to see how AI isn’t a complete feudal capturing of information computing and processing. Not to mention what happens to the pipeline that produces information content if everyone is only consuming it through the models that train on it. So for me the big question is, what’s our call on a possible (likely even?) future where we are forever stuck using cloud provided AI along with all of its negatives, in the same way that basically all of us has been and still is stuck using MS windows, Google and the big-social-media hellscape? For me, I baulk at this.

Open ##1333337
@eager_eagle@lemmy.world 2026-04-17 03:38

I hope people in the us wake the fuck up and these companies start losing users to foreign ones by the millions

Open ##1333338
@utopiah@lemmy.ml 2026-04-17 05:19

IMHO LLM usage isn't coherent with independence. That being said I wrote quite a bit on self-hosting LLMs. There are quite a few tools available, like ollama itself relying on llama.cpp that can both work locally and provide an API compatible replacement to cloud services. As you suggested though typically at home one doesn't have the hardware, GPUs with 100+GB of VRAM, to run the state of the art. There is a middle ground though between full cloud, API key, closed source vs open source at home on low-end hardware : running STOA open models on cloud. It can be done on any cloud but it's much easier to start with dedicated hardware and tooling, for that HuggingFace is great but there are multiples. TL;DR: closed cloud -> models on clouds -> self-hosted provide a better path to independence, including training.

Open ##1333339
@trailee@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-17 04:18

Even if the tools are not yet there, “they” want to know exactly who asks for code to things like [a DIY radar station](https://lemmy.world/post/45676814) or autonomous drone control. We’re well into “first they came” territory.

Open ##1333340
@ropatrick@lemmy.world 2026-04-17 06:56

I love the sound of this but can I ask, if the net goes down and you hardly notice, where do you get your 'net' from? Or is it that your intranet doesn't need internet as such and everything is just local? I might have answered my own question there but I'm interested to understand it a bit more. Thanks!

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@Sims@lemmy.ml 2026-04-17 04:02

Yucky.. The identity partner looks nasty. I bet all these corps are linked to the Epstein class and their think tanks. The 1% are taking control of their cattle..

Open ##1333342
@steel_for_humans@piefed.social 2026-04-17 05:32

Say I have a GPU with 32GB VRAM and I am on Linux, what local LLM would be good for coding? Currently I just have an iGPU ;) but that's always an option, albeit a very expensive one.

Open ##1333343
@lsjw96kxs@sh.itjust.works 2026-04-17 05:56

Personally, I would like to use AI, but I don't due to it being non local. I know there are local AI that could do things, but I don't know which models are the good one for each task. If someone can give me pointers for it, I'd be grateful, for exemple a good model for local coding :)

Open ##1333344