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Nice. One thing that I am concerned about is giving my emails to Gemini (or any other third party). The article mentioned that they wrote a new MCP server becau

Nice. One thing that I am concerned about is giving my emails to Gemini (or any other third party). The article mentioned that they wrote a new MCP server because they didn't trust existing third party tools. For me it is the same, but including third party LLMs. Someone told once that if optimizing your algorithm is to much work, just wait until computers get faster. Maybe I'll wait until I can do this on-device.

simonw 1y ago
You may well be able to do this on-device right now. The latest local models are all capable of tool calls and summarization, which is what this demo needs. A decent sized Qwen 3 or Gemma 3 might well do the job. Mistral 3.1 Small is great too. (Personally I'd be happy to pipe my email through an LLM from a respectable vendor that promises not to train on my inputs - Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini all promise that for paid API usage.)
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Today I put together a demo of gemma3 27b parameter running locally looking through my photo library for event fliers, it extracts the information satisfactorily well. With some enhancement I expect it will be quite useful.
- paffdragon 1y ago
  I think, I need to buy new HW maybe. My 12 core 32GRAM laptop is running these local models so slowly, it's unusable (I do have an Nvidia card in it as well, but I ended up disabling due to issues under Wayland/wlroots and didn't have time to fix that yet). And most of my phone's advanced AI features won't work when only on-device processing is allowed.
bsimpson 1y ago
For the last 2 decades, reddit and its ilk have been pseudonymous. You might mostly be careful not to give too much context about your daily life, but every once in a while, maybe you leak a little detail. Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity. As these models are trained on every piece of content ever written online, there are going to be a whole bunch of identity cracks, the equivalent of brute forcing a password. AIs are going to make judgments about your character and personality based on everything you've ever written. Guesses are going to come out about which burner accounts you've used, because the same password was used on otherwise unrelated accounts. Essays you wrote in high school are going to resurface and be connected to your adult persona. There was a time when an 8 character password was the state of the art, and now it can be cracked instantly. In the same way, sleuthing that would have been an impractical amount of work until recently is going to pierce the privacy veil of the internet in ways that could be really uncomfortable for people who have spent 3 decades assuming the internet is an anonymous place.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Don't even need to match passwords. You can find alt accounts by just matching word usage frequency and other language style. Anyone can do this with just the public comments. It's going to be awful.
  - flashblaze 1y ago
    Yeah, I believe it is called Stylometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
  - whatnow37373 1y ago
    Trigram count can be enough. I saw a demo of that on HN users to look for alt account a year or two ago. Worked great. Found all my alts.
    - flashblaze 1y ago
      Was it this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
      - johnisgood 1y ago
        Sadly I cannot access https://stylometry.net/ https://stylometry.net/. :( I really want to know what it would have said about me. Edit: https://antirez.com/hnstyle https://antirez.com/hnstyle does work though!
        flashblaze 1y ago
        Oh yeah! I remember someone mentioning that on Twitter as well. Bookmarked
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      There's a big flaw with the algorithm that was detecting similarly between users: it only works if your different accounts discusses the same topics.
littlestymaar 1y ago
I share your sentiment, but for most people their email are already hosted by Google, so they don't have much left to hide…
- paffdragon 1y ago
  Oh, totally, I am very well aware that most people don't care much about this, which also makes my outbound emails less private in turn. And the irony, I don't use Google myself, but my wife does, and even when I set up a new mailbox on a custom domain for her, she asked me to redirect it to her Gmail...but that's why we don't use plain text email for private stuff anymore.
  - rossant 1y ago
    What's your alternative to plain text email ?
    - paffdragon 1y ago
      Most of my family was using FB Messenger, but now it's WhatsApp, unfortunately still Meta, and I hate it, but at least it's encrypted and old messages are autodeleted. I couldn't convince them yet to use Signal or Matrix. Signal might work, I used to use it with my brother, but he was the only one, so wasn't really effective. I had hopes that I can move everyone to my own Matrix instance, but that looks unachievable right now. Edit: I forgot to mention calls, if something is very personal (not secret, just personal) we usually make call.

simonw 1y ago

You may well be able to do this on-device right now. The latest local models are all capable of tool calls and summarization, which is what this demo needs. A decent sized Qwen 3 or Gemma 3 might well do the job. Mistral 3.1 Small is great too. (Personally I'd be happy to pipe my email through an LLM from a respectable vendor that promises not to train on my inputs - Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini all promise that for paid API usage.)

colechristensen 1y ago
Today I put together a demo of gemma3 27b parameter running locally looking through my photo library for event fliers, it extracts the information satisfactorily well. With some enhancement I expect it will be quite useful.
paffdragon 1y ago
I think, I need to buy new HW maybe. My 12 core 32GRAM laptop is running these local models so slowly, it's unusable (I do have an Nvidia card in it as well, but I ended up disabling due to issues under Wayland/wlroots and didn't have time to fix that yet). And most of my phone's advanced AI features won't work when only on-device processing is allowed.

bsimpson 1y ago

For the last 2 decades, reddit and its ilk have been pseudonymous. You might mostly be careful not to give too much context about your daily life, but every once in a while, maybe you leak a little detail. Unless you run for President, nobody is going to bother reading through your thousands of comments to stitch together your identity. As these models are trained on every piece of content ever written online, there are going to be a whole bunch of identity cracks, the equivalent of brute forcing a password. AIs are going to make judgments about your character and personality based on everything you've ever written. Guesses are going to come out about which burner accounts you've used, because the same password was used on otherwise unrelated accounts. Essays you wrote in high school are going to resurface and be connected to your adult persona. There was a time when an 8 character password was the state of the art, and now it can be cracked instantly. In the same way, sleuthing that would have been an impractical amount of work until recently is going to pierce the privacy veil of the internet in ways that could be really uncomfortable for people who have spent 3 decades assuming the internet is an anonymous place.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
Don't even need to match passwords. You can find alt accounts by just matching word usage frequency and other language style. Anyone can do this with just the public comments. It's going to be awful.
- flashblaze 1y ago
  Yeah, I believe it is called Stylometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry
- whatnow37373 1y ago
  Trigram count can be enough. I saw a demo of that on HN users to look for alt account a year or two ago. Worked great. Found all my alts.
  - flashblaze 1y ago
    Was it this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016
    - johnisgood 1y ago
      Sadly I cannot access https://stylometry.net/ https://stylometry.net/. :( I really want to know what it would have said about me. Edit: https://antirez.com/hnstyle https://antirez.com/hnstyle does work though!
      - flashblaze 1y ago
        Oh yeah! I remember someone mentioning that on Twitter as well. Bookmarked
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    There's a big flaw with the algorithm that was detecting similarly between users: it only works if your different accounts discusses the same topics.

littlestymaar 1y ago

I share your sentiment, but for most people their email are already hosted by Google, so they don't have much left to hide…

paffdragon 1y ago
Oh, totally, I am very well aware that most people don't care much about this, which also makes my outbound emails less private in turn. And the irony, I don't use Google myself, but my wife does, and even when I set up a new mailbox on a custom domain for her, she asked me to redirect it to her Gmail...but that's why we don't use plain text email for private stuff anymore.
- rossant 1y ago
  What's your alternative to plain text email ?
  - paffdragon 1y ago
    Most of my family was using FB Messenger, but now it's WhatsApp, unfortunately still Meta, and I hate it, but at least it's encrypted and old messages are autodeleted. I couldn't convince them yet to use Signal or Matrix. Signal might work, I used to use it with my brother, but he was the only one, so wasn't really effective. I had hopes that I can move everyone to my own Matrix instance, but that looks unachievable right now. Edit: I forgot to mention calls, if something is very personal (not secret, just personal) we usually make call.