Some stranger somewhere would have my email and be able to monitor everything I do and say.

That's the trust you are giving on literally anything you do on the Internet. Behind every service, server, app, whatever, is some (or multiple) strangers that have potential access to your data. If you don't want your email to leak here specifically, use either a throwaway email or register on an instance that does not require email.

Still, there is a difference on a company with a public leadership whose names are known, and who have to follow laws and mark down their privacy notice publicly.

Any for profit organization will give a fuck about laws only for as long as it does not interfere with what they want to do to get more profit, and as long as the penalty is bigger than whatever profit they expect to gain. As a regular person any fine usually is some significant portion of your paycheck, and lawyers are fucking expensive as well - that's why you won't do anything bad. For an organization that potentially has several hired lawyers and a whole legal department the fine becomes a cost-benefit calculation and they'll use any legal loophole to fuck you over if they feel like it.

If a server admin gets funny with the data, I'm shit out of luck.

I'd argue that a lemmy server admin has more to lose (e.g. reputation, users leaving for other instances and defederation) than reddit.

Something you might not be aware of: Lemmy (and other fediverse servers) are based on ActivityPub, so really dumbed down and short, servers provide a feed of what happened (a post, a comment, whatever), other servers that are federated read this feed and replicate the appropriate data on their instance and show it to their users. But, other servers might ignore it, by accident, by a software bug, by malice, or for whatever reason. So if you post something and e.g. delete it, other instances might take their sweet time to delete it, or simply never do, and there is nothing you can do about it. Just as a heads up.

Fomenting chaos, one fridge at a time. Because in year 4 of a full scale war there are no more valuable targets than fridges. There's nothing else that might contribute to issues like that, like unnecessary internet-connected devices in domains without any IT knowledge, an influx of "hacking" incidents due to LLMs getting better at cyber at an alarming rate, and somehow still the most basic security not getting implemented.

From previous experience we know that LLMs are great at confidently producing plausible output with problems that are hard to detect and fix without expert level knowledge and experience.

What experiences exactly? Whether the output is correct or just plausible and how many and how severe the problems are depends on the actual problem, and this statement is way too broad. There are also enough experiences where it works. It depends on how you use it.

I don't see too much of a difference between a LLM producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering and a human engineer producing plausible output as the result of reverse engineering. Again, we're not talking about absolute experts doing this for the past 20+ years spending months to do this. For a "regular" engineer doing this, it's the same best guess.

While I personally think you are right, I don't think that any "serious" FOSS project will use sources from a fully LLM generated project.

While it's pretty funny that one of Microsoft's crown jewels gets shit on with AI, I don't want to start the pro- or contra AI discussion, but what now? They reverse engineered or rebuild, or however you want to call it, all of Office, Autodesk, hell, for the fun of it do SAP next. Even assuming a perfectly working copy, not getting sued into oblivion, and not the dude going into bankruptcy due to Claude token costs - but what now? There is no way they can manage several repositories of this size alone properly (no, claude doesn't count). There is no way this gets the community and traction to self-manage.

Apart from a ridiculous invoice from Claude and proof that frontier LLMs can reverse engineer / clone well (...duh), this is a big pile of nothing.

It doesn't, since you're not repackaging or reselling. It's classical FUD as it is with any other license change in popular software. There already is a subscription. You already need the subscription for features even if you self host. The moment bitwarden pulls anything too greedy or suspicious there will be hard forks, and since vaultwarden already exists as a drop-in replacement for the official server, the API is well-known, those forks would be a massive problem for bitwarden as a company. Realistically, the single question is the same as it's been before the announcement: do you want to pay for comfort and to fund further official development, then go for bitwarden, or to use vaultwarden and self host it, and get more free features on your infra. OSS projects can pull fucky shit too, and die just like any other commercial product. You gotta trust someone.

Is it really feasible to run it 100% locally? I know there's plenty of people with very powerful rigs indeed, but still.

It's absolutely possible, and done more and more. Smaller models exist, and run on sub 8GB VRAM without any issue. If you have a gaming setup, you can run the bigger models without any issue locally. You don't need Astra or Mythos or whatever. As a daily driver for "light" tasks (e.g. summarizing a document) small models perform without a significant difference to frontier cloud models. For bigger tasks (e.g. coding or agentic workflows) you need a bit of beef on your graphics card, but it still runs on regular consumer hardware. Anything above that is not needed for any normal use-cases.

If yes to the previous: the software doesn't come from nowhere and ultimately still relies on gas-turbine-powered datacenters and stolen IP and stolen personal data, no?

This has multiple layers:

• for running models locally, FOSS solutions exist and are no different to any other piece of software
• models themselves are usually trained on beefy data centers and questionable data, but alternatives exist, both for training and curated data sources. Second but - those usually underperform, because LLMs need those massive data sets. Limiting the dataset limits the output quality drastically.

If what I wrote above is true, what exactly are people arguing when they say it's still possible to use LLMs ethically or true to FOSS philosophy, because ... ???

Also multiple answers:

• ...because first there is a massive amount of hardliners both in the pro- and anti-LLM camp, and differentiated and objective views are rare. Ethical software and "true FOSS" are also very heated topics currently.
• ...because, while possible, objectively non-ethical use of LLMs does happen more (public vibecoding of products, weaponized use in cyber and conventional warfare, use in surveillance, etc.).
• ...because there are absurd amounts of money circulating in the AI bubble, it's too big to fail, and ethical and for-profit usually do not match.

The absolute least likely reason for that screenshot is that they literally just had a Hitler rally speech in German playing in the background for the ambience. Let's be serious here and shit on the Republicans for the shit they actually do, not for unfortunate/ironic images with no actual context.

How much more context is needed for hitler at the gathering of a political party? There's nothing unfortunate or ironic about this, this is not an accidental YouTube Autoplay, this has been deliberately chosen and played there. And it's not the first time that they've been associated with Nazi symbolics. Musk, Ingraham, the young republican leaks, the whole debate around the cpac stage?

Okay, you could somehow excuse Ingraham and the CPAC stage, and find some weird explanation for this bullshit too. But isn't it a fucking strange coincidence that so many political parties worldwide somehow manage to stay clear of Nazi symbols and imagery, and somehow there are five examples just from the top of my head for them?

Nuclear fission has been used in nuclear reactors for good, and was exceedingly efficient at that time, and has been a significant factor in the recent human history. Just as it's been with the "evil" use in nuclear weapons.

I'm not aware of any breakthrough that has not been used for both good and evil.

Aren't you all stockpiling weapons to protect yourself and the "security of the free state"? So, you've got ICE on your streets in unmarked vans taking people, where's that protecting? Those guns aren't helping you there either as it seems.