this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Privacy issues aside, don’t allow yourself to become too comfortable with leaning on AI for so much. Aside from the obvious things like AI info being flat out wrong sometimes and hallucinations, it’s going to train you into some bad habit holes during a vulnerable time. Look at how quickly we reach to map software for travel. It causes us to get mentally lazy.
If you are focused on using it and worried about privacy, you can host your own model like someone else mentioned, but you need a pretty beefy computer for it, and you could potentially host a model on the cloud (I know that breaks privacy and self-hosting rules a bit), but that can get expensive.
Edit: You could give Jan a try.
I’m a programmer and I’ve had to discipline myself with how I use Copilot. I try to lean on it for troubleshooting code I’ve written, and for doing tedious tasks that I know how to do but want to save time on.
You don't actually have to have a beefy computer to self host. I know with deepseek there's a 1.5b model which is optimized for low end hardware. I self hosted it on a desktop from 2012 and it worked alright. 8gb RAM, i5 processer, quad core. Was the GPU usage high? Yep. Still worked tho.
Obligatory: you're not running deepseek 1.5B. You're running some other distilled model which was finetuned by the deepseek folks
Wait, what? How does that work?
Deepseek 1.5B doesn't exist. I don't know why the Deepseek team named the models on Huggingface like this, but what is labelled as "Deepseek 1.5B" is actually not the OG Deepseek 70B model distilled to 1.5B, it's a different model either trained or finetuned by the Deepseek team. My theory is some sort of intentional manipulation on their part so people stay confused on whether they are actually running the Deepseek model or not. There is a lot of commentary on this online, sorry I don't have the links from the top of my head.
Oh wow, that’s awesome. I’m gonna have to try that model out. I have an old XFX 7950 I can try burning out lmao.
I am definitely leaning on AI quite a bit lately. I ask and check sources now and then tho.
Side thinking, but I'm ot sure how we'll see this problem in the future, when/if AI is "guaranteed" to basically never get things wrong. It's the same with GPS/Maps software, since you're talking about it. I've always been way worse than average to situate myself in space (? sorry, bad english probably), and GPS helps me immensely, me and my anxiety (and even then, I still manage to get stressed and miss things sometimes lol), it's basically right most of the time as far as I know. Now IA being "always right" (let's simplify) would have other consequences entirely, since it touches way more aspects of what we do as humans.
Not sure what to think from here, but yes, I'm definitely checking sources for important things, and restraining myself to not type every request I'm looking for into a chatbot.
Oh I am a terrible navigator haha. I lean on tools a ton, so it’s not faulting you. I just worry about AI because of how complex and enticing it is.
I find that if you diversify the models you use, you can find what works best for what you’re asking. I use Copilot daily at work and I have to coach it sometimes. I’ll go off on the web to check its work and correct it as needed. Sometimes it works, other times it gets into a loop of unhelpful answers.