I’m sure the search engines log the IP, and with enough searches could be correlated back to you fairly easily even if you host it on a VPS? Unless it does some kind of mitigation I’m unaware of.

Qwant is French. Not a privacy search engine and looks like it features AI now. Kagi is really good, but US based and expensive. I think most of Europe does intelligence sharing with the US (“14 eyes” or something like that)?

Relevant novelette: Manna – Two Views of Humanity’s Future

AI companies offer HIPPA compliant services. They have zero data retention policies (supposedly).

It’s possible to do some server side AI stuff with decent privacy guarantees. Apple utilizes homomorphic encryption to do stuff like landmark ID in photos, which is neat.

I’ve heard the excuse that they’re private property so they can’t. They’re not hard to remove though. They’re usually just attached to poles with pipe clamps.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of stories of people getting addicted to the “agentic harnesses” and personally (and happily) blowing through hundreds to thousands of dollars/month. I’ve seen people write articles about how their $200/month subscriptions are such a good deal, lol. Companies are forcing their employees to use AI at insane costs. Nearly every software engineering job posting mentions using AI tools as a requirement. Anthropic’s revenue is set to double this quarter and be its first profitable quarter (likely using a lot of accounting tricks).

I’m really curious if this AI industry can self-perpetuate itself with stupidity and greed indefinitely as everything becomes shittier and unreliable, and civilization slowly crumbles.

Some people are comparing this to the industrial revolution. Which resulted in hellish conditions for much of the working class for ~100 years until unionization started becoming more widespread.

Forgejo has a roadmap for federation: https://codeberg.org/forgejo-contrib/federation/src/branch/main/FederationRoadmap.md

Not sure how many people, or any, are actively working on it.

“Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility—reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge—at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. If Rome possessed the power to feed everyone amply at no greater cost than that of Caesar’s own table, the people would sweep Caesar violently away if anyone were left to starve.”