Ask HN: How do you use LLMs for private discussions?

6 pointsposted 4 hours ago
by emerongi

Item id: 48885422

10 Comments

PaiDxng

16 minutes ago

The hardest part isn’t payment; the prompt itself may identify you. For truly sensitive topics, I’d abstract the details first, then use a local model—or avoid an LLM entirely.

7402

2 hours ago

With llama.cpp, Intel i9-13900KS CPU, 96 GB RAM, RTX 4070 running locally.

The models I'm using right now with that are:

  gpt-oss-120b-F16.gguf
  Qwen_Qwen3.5-27B-Q4_K_M.gguf
  Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-UD-Q5_K_XL.gguf
  gemma-4-31B-it-UD-Q6_K_XL.gguf

blinded

4 hours ago

I spin up a gpu instance in a cloud, run my model via vllm, connect to it via an ssh tunnel. done.

stuxnet79

3 hours ago

Can you elaborate on the first step? Which cloud and which service? What's the cost outlay if you are just having a convo and not doing anything 'agentic'?

blinded

3 hours ago

Hey sure.

It depends, but usually spin up an h100 on lambda.ai or coreweave. They have capacity and their UIs/APIs are nice. I spin it up for an hour or two, believe it was 6~ dollars an hour.

Once the gpu instance is up, you need to run vllm and a model, ie https://docs.lambda.ai/education/large-language-models/deplo....

Then you can connect your pi.dev, openwebui, etc etc to vllm and interact with it like normal.

downbad_

4 hours ago

Can't you do it logged out?

Havoc

3 hours ago

With a local one