What other proprietary software is necessary to use model weights?

I've been checking my password manager for over a year now, and I'm still finding more old accounts I have to delete!

My 120 deleted or pending deletion accounts only make up about 1/2 of the ones I need to delete overall. 😶

Many people will see the post, assume it's recent news, that it's something that's still being done despite the existing administration and its power, and that can mislead them into believing that more is currently being done against Trump & Elon while they're in power than is actually being done.

The response from the LLM I showed in my reply is generally the same any time you ask almost anything negative about the CCP, regardless of the possible context. It almost always starts with the exact words "The Chinese Communist Party has always adhered to a people-centered development philosophy," a heavily pre-trained response that wouldn't show up if it was simply generally biased from, say, training data. (and sometimes just does the "I can't answer that" response)

It NEVER puts anything in the <think> brackets you can see above if the question is even slightly possibly negative about the CCP, which it does with any other prompt. (See below, asking if cats or dogs are better, and it generating about 4,600 characters of "thoughts" on the matter before even giving the actual response.

Versus asking "Has China ever done anything bad?"

Granted, this seems to sometimes apply to other countries, such as the USA too:

But in other cases, it explicitly will think about the USA for 2,300 characters, but refuse to answer if the exact same question is about China:

Remember, this is all being run on my local machine, with no connection to DeepSeek's servers or web UI, directly in terminal without any other code or UI running that could possibly change the output. To say it's not heavily censored at the weights level is ridiculous.

TLDR;

• Check your Password Manager/Stored Browser Credentials
• If on Apple devices, check your Keychain
• If on Android or using/used Chrome, check your Google Password Manager (enabled if you chose to save passwords to your Google account)
• Search old email inboxes
• Search for your email in data breaches
• Search for old usernames you re-used across sites

I personally would also add searching your browser cookies, since some browsers will keep around old cookies for years if you don't clear them.

This article is many months old.

the company states that it may share user information to "comply with applicable law, legal process, or government requests.

Literally every company's privacy policy here in the US basically just says that too.

Not only does DeepSeek collect "text or audio input, prompt, uploaded files, feedback, chat history, or other content that [the user] provide[s] to our model and Services," but it also collects information from your device, including "device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language."

Breaking news, company with chatbot you send messages to uses and stores the messages you send, and also does what practically every other app does for demographic statistics gathering and optimizations.

Companies with AI models like Google, Meta, and OpenAI collect similar troves of information, but their privacy policies do not mention collecting keystrokes. There's also the added issue that DeepSeek sends your user data straight to Chinese servers.

They didn't use the word keystrokes, therefore they don't collect them? Of course they collect keystrokes, how else would you type anything into these apps?

In DeepSeek's privacy policy, there's no mention of the security of its servers. There's nothing about whether data is encrypted, either stored or in transmission, and zero information about safeguards to prevent unauthorized access.

This is the only thing that seems disturbing to me, compared to what we'd like to expect based on the context of what DeepSeek is. Of course, this was proven recently in practice to be terrible policy, so I assume they might shore up their defenses a bit.

All the articles that talk about this as if it's some big revelation just boil down to "company does exactly what every other big tech company does in America, except in China"

• For Mail, I'd recommend Tuta (which comes with 15-30 aliases depending on the plan) and a third-party aliasing service like Addy if you need more than that. If you want a different aliasing service and are searching around, and trying to avoid giving money to Proton, avoid SimpleLogin, since they are owned by Proton. I don't believe Tuta has email scheduling, though.
• For Drive, either use Tresorit, or use Cryptomator if you're okay with paying for OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive. (Cryptomator encrypts uploaded files & names so the cloud provider itself can't view the contents)
• For Pass, I personally would recommend Bitwarden or Keepass simply depending on whichever one you prefer more. Both are good options.
• For VPN, definitely use Mullvad. Simple, unchanging monthly price, you can pay via numerous different ways if you want to keep your identity more private from them (e.g. paying with cash by mail, XMR, etc) and you'll get an account number rather than needing to actually give them any information like an email to create an account. Do be aware it has much less locations than Proton, and most other VPN providers, although it's still quite fast and usable for most cases.
• For Calendar, Tuta also has a calendar feature built-in.

I'd highly recommend checking out Privacy Guides by the way, since they tend to have good lists of alternatives for any other services you may want to switch from also.

I'm running the 1.5b distilled version locally and it seems pretty heavily censored at the weights level to me.

Possibly, but in my view, this will simply accelerate our progress towards the "bust" part of the existing boom-bust cycle that we've come to expect with new technologies.

They show up, get overhyped, loads of money is invested, eventually the cost craters and the availability becomes widespread, suddenly it doesn't look new and shiny to investors since everyone can use it for extremely cheap, so the overvalued companies lose that valuation, the companies using it solely for pleasing investors drop it since it's no longer useful, and primarily just the implementations that actually improved the products stick around due to user pressure rather than investor pressure.

Obviously this isn't a perfect description of how everything in the work will always play out in every circumstance every time, but I hope it gets the general point across.

As Cory Doctorow put it, "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it."

For those who don't care to read the full article:

This basically just confines any cookies generated on a page, to just that page.

So, instead of a cookie from, say, Facebook, being stored on site A, then requested for tracking purposes on site B, each individual site would be sent its own separate Facebook cookie, that only gets used on that site, preventing it from tracking you anywhere outside of the specific site you got it from in the first place.