I have been thinking a lot about digital sovereignty lately and how quickly the internet is turning into a weird blend of surreal slop and centralized control. It feels like we are losing the ability to tell what is real because of how easy it is for trillionaire tech companies to flood our feeds with whatever they want.

Specifically I am curious about what I call “kirkification” which is the way these tools make it trivial to warp a person’s digital identity into a caricature. It starts with a joke or a face swap but it ends with people losing control over how they are perceived online.

If we want to protect ourselves and our local communities from being manipulated by these black box models how do we actually do it?

I want to know if anyone here has tried moving away from the cloud toward sovereign compute. Is hosting our own communication and media solutions actually a viable way to starve these massive models of our data? Can a small town actually manage its own digital utility instead of just being a data farm for big tech?

Also how do we even explain this to normal people who are not extremely online? How can we help neighbors or the elderly recognize when they are being nudged by an algorithm or seeing a digital caricature?

It seems like we should be aiming for a world of a million millionaires rather than just a room full of trillionaires but the technical hurdles like isp throttling and protocol issues make that bridge hard to build.

Has anyone here successfully implemented local first solutions that reduced their reliance on big tech ai? I am looking for ways to foster cognitive immunity and keep our data grounded in meatspace.

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    Thats awesome! I was going to add some sort of AI to my proxmox homelab for researching but I figured the risk of halloucination was too high, and I thought that the only way to fix this was getting a bigger model. But thid seams like a really good setup (if I can actually figure out how to implement it.) And I wont need to upgrade my gpu!

    Althogh I only have one ai suitable gpu (I have a gtx 1660 6gb in my homelab which is really only suitable for movie transcoding.) I have a 3060 12gb that I use in my gaming pc I was thinking I could setup some kind of wol system that boots the pc and sets up the ai software on that. Maybe my homelab hosts openwebui and when I send a queory it prompts my gaming pc to wake up and do the ai crunching.

      • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        4 months ago

        I have a 12 gig gpu that I dont use for most of the time, might as well put it to work doing something. And even second hand ddr4 memory has gotten so expensive I’d rather not have to upgrade my homelab.

        What is your main use case for this anyway? Do you use it for researching? Thats what I would mainly use it for, but also finding things in my obsidian volt.

        What stage have you actually gotten to?

        I do like the idea of this all though. I should really get into undervolting/overclocking my stuff, there is really no reason not to I could either gain performance or longevity or both!

        Also I hate that the stock fans on cpu’s are so garbage. Luckily arctic fans are really cheap and quiet. Noctua is great but i’d sooner buy a budget aio than a single noctua fan lol.