Two decades. We're old
That post seems to be missing.
HertzDentalBar 15 points 3 months ago
I believe they did it a second time more recently.
deliriousdreams 13 points 3 months ago
It was last year. /s
grue 102 points 3 months ago
Do you mean that time they installed a rootkit on people's PCs when they went to play (what was supposed to be) a music CD, or the time they retroactively and remotely sabotaged Linux on people's Playstations?
Just wondering which massive felony that should've landed the entire C-suite in prison you're referring to, since there was more than one.
FrChazzz 23 points 3 months ago
My mom never used iTunes on her phone, meaning she never once put any music on her phone, and so she was completely confused/angry when she'd get in her car and suddenly it would pair and start playing this U2 album. She didn't know how to stop it, so it would play over and over (she'd just drop the volume). It also didn't help that the cover art is among the gayest things to ever appear on her phone screen. I'd come home to visit and get in her car and she'd just start hollering "this stupid thing, where did this come from?!?"
MirrorGiraffe 5 points 3 months ago
To be fair, I'd probably prefer the 4gb model.
whotookkarl 3 points 3 months ago
I remember when microslop was sued for monopoly antitrust for packaging a browser with it's OS, pretty sure now in win 11 it resets default to Edge on every reboot.
daggermoon 0 points 3 months ago
Free music was awesome.
Ensign_Crab 13 points 3 months ago
Well, and it was U2.
teyrnon 11 points 3 months ago
Idk about that, you can't uninstall any of the ai bs they put on phones and computers, from microsoft to android. You can't uninstall edge on a newer computer either, not without being an IT specialist or whatever.
Chozo 5 points 3 months ago
The U2 album could be easily removed. The issue is that the average iTunes user doesn't remove songs from their libraries, and thus had no idea the option to do so even existed and just assumed they were stuck with the album.
EldritchFeminity 1 point 3 months ago
In a comment on another post about this the other day, I saw someone claim that they had to resort to CCleaner to remove Chrome off of their system after this update. Chrome wouldn't let them uninstall the browser manually.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know, I haven't used Chrome in a while and I'm not gonna install it just to try (or ever again - I like my ad blockers, thank you very much). But, with the current state of the software landscape, it wouldn't surprise me if it were true.
Passerby6497 181 points 3 months ago
The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google's servers for processing by Google's hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in
What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.
Kissaki 15 points 3 months ago
It's probably a typo and supposed to be Nanu. In German, nanu is an expression of surprise. This model's slogan is "Nanu, wo kommt das denn her?" meaning "Huh, where did this come from?".
Septimaeus 10 points 3 months ago
Was Mork attempting a surprised German, an elderly Japanese man, or some strange third thing?
Jack 170 points 3 months ago
Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
- Start
- regedit
- Backup registry by exporting it
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
- right-click Policies, New, Key
- right-click Google, New, Key
- Chrome
- right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
- GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings
- right-click newly created key, Modify
- set value to 1
- OK
- Restart computer. https://pureinfotech.com/...
Or, you know don't install software from companies owned and operated by psychopaths, like Google and Microsoft.
Limonene 35 points 3 months ago
I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, "it's easy to work around that. You just have to..." and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.
But even if it's easy to do that, it's not easy.
- You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there's a different one for every problem.
- You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
- You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don't want you to be able to remove their trash.
- You have to vet the tools, make sure they're not malware. And continuously make sure it's not replaced by malware in the future. There's no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.
rob_t_firefly 13 points 3 months ago
And, most of all, you need to be allowed to do such things in the first place.
I, for one, am certainly not allowed to play in the registry of computers I don't own at my office job.
rumba 29 points 3 months ago
Naw, Linux is easy, until OBS won't start virtual camera because V4L has dependency on the previous kernel which is pretty old.
if you did't run it right after the update, you might not even put together it was a kernel issue.
No easy errors, start obs from cli see v4l errors out, start digging into v4l, it's not hard, but you have to know about it, then you have to know grub well enough to select an old kernel.
Regrettable_incident 15 points 3 months ago
Personally, my familiarity level is maybe 2 out of 10. Don't really know what I'm doing with Linux, only made the jump a few weeks ago. I've had to google some stuff but it's still much less hassle than windows. I just got bored of seeing all those 'switch to linux durr' comments so I gave it a try, turns out they were right.
XeroxCool 15 points 3 months ago
I'm in the overlap where I can easily follow reg edit direction and similar tutorials but can't actually diagnose it myself. I wouldn't have a clue. These known regedit edit workaround posts exist and are spread because there's a ton of people in this overlap. We just aren't vocal because it's not one of our hills to die on.
But I can deal with cars, fix older models, and avoid buying an internet-connected model. Shit, I even learned how to fix drum brakes to maintain my options. I also disconnected my smart TV and grabbed a retired pc with win 10 pro or whatever to get some control back over that.
I do what I can, but at the end of the day, I still need to relax at some point.
zalgotext 5 points 3 months ago
Honest question, not necessarily for you but for maybe one of those people that actually understands the registry - how do those people figure that stuff out? Like, do software authors actually publish their registry config, or do people have to decompile/reverse engineer things to figure out what registry settings a given program might use?
ColonelSanders 5 points 3 months ago
Yup. I don't think it's hard. I used to have a dual boot setup. I'm just lazy.
And by that I mean, lazy enough that messing with regedits is something I'm already familiar/comfortable with and can do relatively quickly.
Too lazy to (re)learn an entirely new OS and file system (it's also why I'm still on Win10 because fuck Win11), learn what programs of mine are compatible and not compatible, dealing with grub/kernals anytime I need to diagnose an issue, etc.
That being said, Windows will eventually piss me off to the final breaking point/straw where my anger/spite will outweigh my laziness. And THEN they'll be sorry!
But until then... Opens up regedit with a sigh
Buddahriffic 12 points 3 months ago
Hell, even borking my linux install was a relatively painless experience. I was updating from Fedora 43 to 44 and noticed at one point that my keyboard had power but nothing was displaying on my monitor. Capslock still responded so I wondered if the update had messed up the video display or something and restarted after seeing someone say that they saw the same and restarting seemed to actually kick off the update.
Well, for me, it fucked the dnf5 install, which I tried fixing from the command line for a bit before deciding to just grab the 44 iso and install it fresh. I kept my home and game partitions and just reinstalled the root dir, then created two new accounts, renamed one of them to my old username and took over the old home dir, logged in and it was like the update had just worked. Only thing I need to do to get back to where I was is reinstall some packages or software. All the settings are stored in my home dir, so even the ones I don't have yet will get their old settings back when I do get around to installing them. All I had to do was install steam and it launched like it normally does, all my installed games still there.
And I'm pretty sure I could have even done this with a different distro and whatever was the same would have preserved settings, too.
No cloud involved or even saving any files specifically. I did ask an LLM what I should preserve to make sure I wasn't missing anything but everything it suggested waa already in home. It could have gone even quicker if I wasn't overthinking it so much, but it was just like an hour or so before I was back up and running once I started the install process.
Auth 4 points 3 months ago
Im laughing at the image of linux users trying to sell someone on linux by talking about how painless of an experience borking their computer was.
It really goes to show that giving people the tools to solve their problems is the better route. Windows has the same thing, if they bork the root partition you can hit repair and it tries to attempt to do what you describe but if it fails to automatically detect and resolve then thats it your fucked. But it might be a simple problem that the user could correct and fix if they were given the option or included in the process.
mechoman444 5 points 3 months ago
Omg!!! You're absolutely right! Running through YouTube tutorials from India or Linux terminal videos from India is exactly the same!
trackball_fetish 1 point 3 months ago
Honestly you only need like a handful of commands to install, update and remove applications. It's not like your compiling each package by hand (unless you're into that sort of thing). Also those commands can be located in the documentation.
I've spent countless hours in the registry. Linux filesystem is cakewalk compared to the bloated abomination that is system32.
Blue_Morpho 2 points 3 months ago
Begin new life with linux
- Find a package you need.
- It's only distributed as a docker container.
- Install docker.
- Docker installs it's AI assistant.
- Install podman.
TachyonTele 0 points 3 months ago
I use women btw to fill a gap in my life i cant see
itisileclerk 4 points 3 months ago
And Apple, don't forget Apple.
tomatolung 70 points 3 months ago
So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome's own per-profile state, Chrome's runtime feature flags, and Google's component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user's disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.
Fredselfish 11 points 3 months ago
How do we uninstall or block the download?
livligkinkajou 76 points 3 months ago
Uninstall chrome
feannag 12 points 3 months ago
You can use adb on a computer to remove chrome.
zerozaku 10 points 3 months ago
Use Shizuku and Canta to uninstall any uninstallable app. Or if you don't want to bother, just disabling works fine too as long as you are not worried about the storage.
frischkaesbagett 7 points 3 months ago
That depends on the ROM you are using.
The one i am using (https://iode.tech/) is using a firefox based browser that you can actually uninstall.
turboSnail 8 points 3 months ago
And install Firefox or one of its many forks.
Fredselfish 1 point 3 months ago
So it just to the Chrome app?
livligkinkajou 15 points 3 months ago
The article actually gives 3 options:
The only ways to make the deletion stick are to disable Chrome's AI features through chrome://flags or enterprise policy tooling that home users do not generally have, or to uninstall Chrome entirely
- It can probably be reverted at their whim at any time
- You probably don't have access to it
- It is the most realistic option, just use another non chromium browser
tomatolung 23 points 3 months ago
More difficult to remove than install. Adding the file took zero clicks. Removing it requires (a) discovering the file exists, (b) understanding what it is, (c) navigating into a hidden user profile path, (d) deleting it (and on Windows, also clearing the read-only attribute first), and (e) accepting that Chrome will silently re-download it on next eligible window unless the user also navigates chrome://flags, enterprise policy, or platform-specific configuration tooling to disable the underlying Chrome AI feature [5]. None of those steps is documented in the place a normal user looks - none of them is even hinted at in default Chrome.
This is 5: https://pureinfotech.com/...
Obviously only windows focused, so how other platforms stop would require more searching.
Fredselfish 8 points 3 months ago
I don't have Windows 11. Still on 10 until October then switching to Linux.
TachyonTele 4 points 3 months ago
Don't even bother with 11. At all.
I bought a win11 laptop, didn't create any accounts just installed the os... Then microsoft locked me out of the laptop with thier new bitlocker bs. It won't even let me factory reset the effing thing.
Switched to linux and im happy. It's just a steam deck, but it's still a better pc than the bit brick.
MangoCats -13 points 3 months ago
The average new PC is equipped with a $115 1TB SSD, so 4GB is 0.4% of that storage space, all four put together comprise 1.6% of available SSD space - 1.6% of $115 is $1.84. So, across a billion users, how likely is this to make a dent in anything other than the bandwidth consumed in delivery? And updates...
foggenbooty 5 points 3 months ago
Used to be. Have you seen SSD prices recently? 1TB is now ~$250 CAD.
MangoCats 1 point 3 months ago
path: 0 23573711 23578747 23585154 23592014, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 0
It's not like OEMs pay more than they have to...
MML 7 points 3 months ago
The article doesn't really say but this is just for desktop chrome right now right? I've long had chrome disabled since graphene isn't an option unless I build it myself but I do worry about that pesky web view that snuck it's way into everything.
mrvictory1 1 point 3 months ago
Desktop chrome only
ropatrick 54 points 3 months ago
This is very alarming. My eyes have never been opened so widely as they are in the last two months since I started ungoogling and FOSSing. This post has veritably split my eyelids.
Edit: Since reading this thread I have installed Shizuku + Canta and removed Chr9me and about 50 other pieces of bloatware from my phone.
Props to @zerozaku for the suggestion.
Worstdriver 49 points 3 months ago
uninstalled Chrome a looooong time ago on my Win 10 machine
Asfalttikyntaja 23 points 3 months ago
Uninstalled Chrome and Windows a looooooong time ago on my computer
mechoman444 4 points 3 months ago
I am a meat popsicle.
Regrettable_incident 4 points 3 months ago
Hey, when I was a kid I had a slide rule.
mlg 34 points 3 months ago
It's funny because they're trying to find ways to cut cloud costs by offloading to users, but when that's not a concern, they shove everything into the cloud and then ensure no local running option is available or viable.
CanIFishHere -3 points 3 months ago path: 0 23583811 23584511, hotness: undefined, score: -3, children: 0
lechekaflan 32 points 3 months ago
How unsurprising anymore in this hellish world where corporates hate your desire for anonymity... but try to hide theirs, such as dark expense accounts, tax evasion, secret offshore banking accounts, connections with crime and hate groups, etc.
Zink 27 points 3 months ago
Alarming, but not surprising.
The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn't work.
I don't do web development or anything, but I haven't run into anything that hasn't worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn't like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I'll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it's over to normal firefox.
Fredselfish 26 points 3 months ago
Maybe that why Google sent me this bullshit
Fredselfish 10 points 3 months ago
What? I don't own a van.
Fredselfish 15 points 3 months ago
Oh that yeah that Trent the Traveler. And that was a Patreon exclusive video. And it got it fixed.
turboSnail 6 points 3 months ago
Congrats! You've just beaten the final boss and finished the main quest of Gmail. Sounds like a great time to switch to Tutanota.
Fredselfish 2 points 3 months ago
Will need look into that, would love to self host my email.
turboSnail 2 points 3 months ago
That's totally doable! Get a domain, find a server you like, pay for hosting, and you can install whatever you want on it. If you want to have your own cloud service, just install nextcloud. Install pihole and start blocking ads everywhere. Do you want to run an LLM in your own cloud? Totally doable as well. Maybe even host a Fediverse instance, while you're at it.
I know I don't have the time and energy to play admin in my free time, but I can definitely see the value in a hobby like that. I don't mind paying for a cloud service or email, because that way I can be sure amateurs like me aren't running the show. Obviously, I'm not paying Apple or Google to defile me. Those scammers don't deserve my money or my data. Privacy respecting companies deserve to be paid for their efforts though.
brbposting 2 points 3 months ago
A joyous day!
TachyonTele 4 points 3 months ago
What is a Google One plan?
Edit. Oh i see. Is that 15gb the original storage for gmail and stuff? Are we that old that we're filing that up? Oh man
HiTekRedNek 16 points 3 months ago
I remember when Gmail was advertised as unlimited email storage. Then they limited it. Then they sold more storage for it.
XLE 18 points 3 months ago
I remember when the Google Pixel offered free unlimited high quality photo backup to excuse the fact it had no SD card.
Then it offered free medium quality photo backup to excuse the fact it had no SD card.
Then it offered nothing because it had squeezed serious competitors with SD cards out of the market.
zerozaku 4 points 3 months ago
High quality uploads were free for all Google Photos users and tben they changed it to medium quality and now we get nothing.
I used high quality uploads for a long time deleted the original files. Turns out those *high quality" uploads were not very high quality and realised that I have ruined years of my photos believing in this gimmick. Fxck Google.
Chozo 1 point 3 months ago
I don't remember Gmail ever offering unlimited storage, and I can't find any record of that offer ever being made, either. When they first launched, they gave 1GB, which was the highest of any free email service at the time by an order of magnitude, but never unlimited.
HiTekRedNek 1 point 3 months ago
I have had Gmail since it was in beta and needed an invite to use.
Yes, it was originally touted as unlimited email. "Never have to delete another email!!" This was in 2003 (or was early 2004? It all runs together these days. I got married in 03, and got the invite not too long after) when my cousin sent me the invite.
The big webmail provider back then was yahoo.com, and I still have that email address as well. AOL even started offering a free webmail for people who had broadband Internet, but wanted to use or keep their old dial up AOL account.
Hotmail was also a thing, and this was before MS bought them and merged it with msn.com
baggachipz 1 point 3 months ago
They kept incrementally adding more storage capacity to your account every day. It slowly ticked up and their marketing claim was that it would just keep growing forever. As we can see, that… did not happen.
Fredselfish 11 points 3 months ago
No my Gmail isn't even full, my wife got same email. Fucking scam to make us sign up for their extra storage.
XLE 6 points 3 months ago
Google One is the combined storage of every service you use, even accidentally. Google Photos Gmail, Drive, it's all in there.
Emails take up some space, especially if they have embedded images or attachments.
moseschrute 3 points 3 months ago
How is a local model being downloading on your computer counting against your Google cloud storage?
Suavevillain 25 points 3 months ago
Man I sure do wish Linux mobile was a thing. I really want a full on Linux phone.
rob_t_firefly 8 points 3 months ago
There are some early-days options for such things.
sanitation 1 point 3 months ago path: 0 23591416 23592379, hotness: undefined, score: 1, children: 1
sanitation 8 points 3 months ago path: 0 23591416 23592379 23592405, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 0
FE80 22 points 3 months ago
A less harmful Chrome derivative:
Regrettable_incident 15 points 3 months ago
Can someone ELI5 why they are doing this? I thought all the AI shit was in the cloud?
bandwidthcrisis 14 points 3 months ago
AI runs in the cloud because it needs a powerful server to run the biggest (i.e. "smartest") models.
The cloud servers are doing nothing special that another powerful enough computer could do, just a huge amount of data processing.
You can run an ai chat on a steam deck or directly on a phone, if it's not too demanding ("smarter" models are bigger data files, so won't fit in the memory of a small device).
Today, for instance, I had a phone call from "Spectrum Internet support" and part-way through the call my phone blared an alarm and said "possible scam" on screen.
The phone itself interpreted the conversation as sus.
https://support.google.com/...
For Pixel 9 and later devices: Scam Detection is powered by Gemini Nano on-device
trackball_fetish 8 points 3 months ago
The cloud being a bunch of computational power (servers). A bunch of phones in a network also can be utilized for said computational power. Passing the savings on to you! ;)
adespoton 5 points 3 months ago
Cheaper for them, that is.
What I want to see is throttleable models, kind of like progressive JPEG, where the default model is “nano” and it has a watch function that analyzes if more tokens might be needed for a certain task and scales up as needed — identifying if the resources are too much for the device and offloading to the cloud (with explicit permission) only if (but always if) needed. Over time as the technology improves, larger models move to the endpoint.
And then people could have a basic set of sliders: on-device only, on-cloud only, or somewhere in between, based on the user’s preferences.
T156 2 points 3 months ago
That's basically model routing, and has existed a while. Open AI's GPT-5 and llama-swap do that, for example. If the task is simple, it uses a smaller, less intensive model, and only uses the slower, larger one of the task is more complex.
Though most tend to operate with models on the same device/service, rather than a model run elsewhere.
fiat_lux 2 points 3 months ago
Yeah, even there. A page loading is one thing, but browser features are somewhat independent of the content. There's also a good chance this is being used as a hook for other Google products like Drive or Docs (which are basically websites under the hood) to allow offline file management, creation, etc.
It's a bad choice, but it wouldn't be the first bad choice Google has made.
anon_8675309 15 points 3 months ago
Who still uses Chrome?
TachyonTele 17 points 3 months ago
Companies.
And you, if you work for a company.
ozymandias117 15 points 3 months ago
The corporate images for our company come with Firefox ESR, and you can file an automated request for Chrome if you want it added 🤷♂️
TachyonTele 8 points 3 months ago
That's dope. And rare. Good on them.
turboSnail 5 points 3 months ago
Same here. Our IT guys have good taste in browsers, but they also know that some people in the company may still need one of the messy sites that are incompatible with web standards. Chrome is for those edge cases.
brbposting 4 points 3 months ago
Will intern 4 free 4 FF ESR
andros_rex 7 points 3 months ago
Most middle and high schoolers use chromebooks nowadays.
anon_8675309 1 point 3 months ago
That is a technical response to a philosophical question.
mfed1122 1 point 3 months ago
It was a philosophical question posed about a technical matter.
Okay, succinctness aside, I get that you're trying to imply that the kind of person who still uses Chrome is basically asking to be mistreated (I think?) - but the author's point about climate impact depends on user count, not user personality.
Ironfacebuster 14 points 3 months ago
At least all the carbon emissions will be offset by Windows being carbon aware! Right? Right...?!
"Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions."
Now, excuse me as I generate a picture of a man with 15 fingers on my browser, using my computer with chatgpt built intp it, while next to my phone with Gemini built into my texting app and assistant and maps app and photos app and
robinadams 4 points 3 months ago
Hahahaha fuck no https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Ironfacebuster 1 point 3 months ago
NOOOOOOO
Soleos 12 points 3 months ago
Is it sleazy? Absolutely. Is it exploitation of a massive power imbalance? Undoubtedly. Is it illegal? Probably about as illegal as a game pre-loading 4gb of DLC I'm not going to buy as part of an automatic update. The terms of your agreement with Google for Chrome allow them to update their software as they see fit. Their gamble is that you won't switch.
brbposting 2 points 3 months ago
A person really does give up a lot of control to Google when they use Chrome. If the article instead said Google was using the model for everything and it was a big privacy gain for consumers that might never have raised eyebrows about whatever size file. They push big updates all day long
kevin2107 12 points 3 months ago
this makes zero sense because it's on device, it's no difference than the damage that just owning a phone is costing, are people here special?
I swear people just want a reason to freak out. Atleast make sense if you're going to post such a stupid article title.
pycorax 43 points 3 months ago
Downloading 4 GB of data without your consent is a pretty big issue. If you're on a bandwidth starved or data capped network, that becomes a huge problem. Wasting 4GB of space on this nonsense that users aren't gonna use too is pretty absurd.
desertdruid 2 points 3 months ago
i would burn a whole forest right now just to unread your comment
pycorax 2 points 3 months ago
I didn't write my comment to disagree with your point or to make a bad faith argument. I merely wanted to point out another thing that is of greater concern to me and most likely many others. That is in no way mutually exclusive to your point and doesn't invalidate it. So get that snark out of here.
I frankly don't think the amount of "trees being burnt" from posting a comment is relevant compared to the potential of hundreds of devices performing a unnecessary download. Hell, a billionaire's carbon footprint in a couple seconds likely already far exceeds that. At least this conversation is going somewhere. In any case, this is an unquantifiable cost anyways.
chunes 25 points 3 months ago
Just because the software is running on your device doesn't mean it can't phone home. You might not care about your local storage but 4GB is pretty steep for some of us.
Not to mention the performance impact of actually running the thing.
trackball_fetish 8 points 3 months ago
Honestly shouldn't even explain it to him. With a thought process like his he deserves what's coming to him.
pipes 16 points 3 months ago
Probably a ridiculous notion but personally I wouldn't feel 100% sure my device isn't joining a distributed bot net ai datacenter for other people's slop generation, burning my energy, my battery, my ssd (higher temps shorten their half life) without my consent
pipes 2 points 3 months ago
How many trees to send some text? Lol, my aging phone depletes its battery more if I don't use it xD
I just have a high level of distrust of FAANG, and of proprietary software; I still use most stuff I'm not very extreme in practice
Who's to say that local LLM model won't be used when we leave our device on standby, to ease a usage spike from other users? It's technically possible, the things stopping many companies are the potential legal trouble (but there's an ever longer TOS for that), different levels of morality, company culture, etc.; many botnets were from simple games installed by regular people connected on a residential line. Some VPNs have been caught using their clients line as an endpoint for other clients in different countries
You could say it's a ridiculous thought for now regarding this "hidden" Gemini local LLM, I just feel like it's a possibilty.
graynk 11 points 3 months ago
https://news.aibase.com/news/25955 https://developer.chrome.com/...
It was bound to happen, since they started testing it more than a year ago. While I really hate this decision, I hate the linked blog more. It's populist SEO slop that exists to advertise "that privacy guy"'s consultancy services. Measuring environment impact of the downloads, that's your chosen angle here? Bleh.
BendingHawk 11 points 3 months ago
All solved with one simple step, DON'T INSTALL THIS GARBAGE!
gokayburucdev 11 points 3 months ago path: 0 23601298 23602044, hotness: undefined, score: 11, children: 1
BendingHawk 3 points 3 months ago
Not simple but worth the effort IMO. Totally agree with your list, use FOSS when possible, Adguard Home makes for great DNS filtering, I've been a fan of Kagi for search, gotta pay a little but get a ton of control over your search engine.
If someone is comfortable with computers I highly recommend looking into a VPS, you can get one cheaper then cloud services and use tools like Yunohost to make getting started self hosting not hard.
daggermoon 5 points 3 months ago
That's your fault for using Chrome.
GreenKnight23 4 points 3 months ago
so fucking glad I wiped that piece of shit off my devices.
it's all been downhill since.
baconsunday 4 points 3 months ago
Are grapheneos and apple the best ways to avoid anything to do with google?
turboSnail 10 points 3 months ago
A fully de-goggled Android won't be able to run some apps. For example banking apps tend to be really picky about these things. Either the app runs on a vanilla Android or it won't run at all. Sure, you can get rid of Google, but you'll be making some sacrifices. Another option is to use iOS, but it comes with some messed up sacrifices too.
A third option is to use a Linux phone, but I haven't got any personal experience with that. Looks promising, but apparently many basic necessities aren't available yet.
If you don't really need anything more than email, SMS and phone calls, a de-googled android and Linux phones should be fine. If you want to be more compatible with the rest of the modern world, iOS is the least bad option here. Still, pretty awful but at least you can guarantee that all the modern mobile things work. Sure, you'll be living without Google, but you'll be living with Apple now so... Is that a win? Probably not.
Either way, Linux phones look very promising. Remember to check back in 5 about years to see if the situation has improved. Some EU countries are currently severing their ties with American spyware companies, and this move could result in developing the mobile Linux ecosystem to a more usable state. If that happens, I'm probably going to recommend ditching your iPhone and Switching to a mobile Linux phone.
Javi 4 points 3 months ago
I use Ubuntu touch as a personal device, which has zero support for banking apps, meaning I have to have a backup Android device. My work phone is a pixel 6 running graphene OS, which manages to run all of my banking apps just fine. (Though admittedly I 'got lucky' in the sense that my banks are supported by graphene OS)
Graphene, or any other alternative to the big 2, aren't perfect and don't cover all banks, but graphene is by far the frontrunner for a viable alternative. If you haven't toyed around with it and get the opportunity, id definitely recommend it.
I really hope we do see further Linux phone development, but without buy-in from the banks themselves, they will not be supported for the same reason Graphene isn't. The only difference is Graphene allows sandboxing play integrity to navigate the "Google has to say it's okay" nonsense. It's a rock and a hard place problem; the banks won't support without mass adoption, and mass adoption won't happen due to lack of banking support.
I think sailfish OS has a similar integrity sandboxing concept, though I haven't tried that personally, so can't comment on how well it works.
turboSnail 1 point 3 months ago
That “Google has to say it’s ok” type of thing used to be a total dealbreaker. So many things either required fragile workarounds or straight up didn’t work at all.
When I saw the posts about the new Jolla phone, I nearly bought one. Unfortunately, I still have some special hardware that requires android or iOS to work properly, and getting rid of them would feel like jumping back to 2010. That’s the primary reason I don’t think I could get rid of a mainstream mobile device.
However, I’m still tempted to get that phone and try it out as a secondary phone. That way, I would find out where the bottlenecks are these days.
CovfefeKills 4 points 3 months ago
Apple has on-device AI they were probably the first to do it with Apple Metal. Graphene requires a Google phone! Fucked up landscape at the moment.
one_old_coder 2 points 3 months ago
Yes. But Apple is pushing so many things as opt-out (especially their AI detection crap for photos and stuff) that I now consider GrapheneOS to be the only OS left for a phone.
GutterRat42 2 points 3 months ago
Not on mine
CanIFishHere 2 points 3 months ago
The Gemini on my device just became 10x smarter. Google Assistant didn't know 'what was the temperature a year ago'. and Gemini has no problem with it.
Blue_Morpho 11 points 3 months ago
I'm not sure if Gemini is that much better or they slowly degraded Assistant. I distinctly remember being able to ask certain things of Assistant and a year ago it stopped working. Assistant was still there but many requests no longer worked.
CanIFishHere 2 points 3 months ago
Android Auto was recently upgraded to Gemini. On a drive today, I asked Gemini to explain the privacy implications of bill C-22 (Canada), and it gave me very detailed clear explanation of the pros and cons of the bill, asked if I was a company or person and then gave me highlights relative to who I was. Pretty impressive actually.
Wispy2891 9 points 3 months ago
Assistant was made 100x stupider over the course of the years. I clearly remember in 2020 asking basic questions like "where's Lima" and it replied "Peru", while since 2023 it replied "ok, starting navigation to Lima, Peru, estimated time 2 days and 10 hours".
Around 2023 also they made the voice assistant completely useless by changing the responses from "for this answer open the link in your notification bar on the phone" to "sorry, I didn't understand", which was pissing me off too much. I completely stopped to use it as 9 questions out of 10 would be "sorry I didn't understand" instead of "I understood but I'm not programmed to give a voice answer, use your phone".
Navigation by voice was a complete disaster.
"Navigate to " - "Ok navigating to <a random business 1000 km away with a name slightly similar to what I said>"
Or, it dropped the road name: you asked to go to "street name, city" and it placed the destination on the geographic center of that city
Also the navigation instructions would have maximum priority and would play even when listening to a command.
"Send a message: I'm going to be late " - "Sending: I'm going to be late on the next exit take the right lane then after 600 meters turn left. Ready to send it?"
"Call Anna" - "OK, I call Daniel"
possumparty 2 points 3 months ago
Easy solution- use Firefox or Librewolf instead.
Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk 1 point 3 months ago
Firefox has a new CEO who is pivoting the project into being an "AI Browser".
aphonefriend 1 point 3 months ago
There is a windows registry tweak to disable it permanently. Just search up the proper key.
innermachine 1 point 3 months ago
Interesting. This update is not on my phone or my PC, which are both up to date. Wonder who it's installing on.
Scotty_Trees 1 point 3 months ago
I don't use Google Chrome, LULZ
ThomasWilliams 0 points 3 months ago
I can't see any issues here.
You agree to download and install Chrome and all its elements.
The size of the file is therefore irrelevant.
Obviously it uses the cloud, you can't run an AI model locally and it would be impossible to secure anyway.
possiblylinux127 -2 points 3 months ago
This seems rather silly to me
Out of all the stuff to worry about, this is what bothers them? Google isn't exactly a saint.
desertdruid 1 point 3 months ago
why would anyone parrot Linux if this will also apply to Google Chrome on Linux?
Skv -7 points 3 months ago
Huh? What's the name of it then? My Chrome is but an .exe with 4mb to it and I don't see any 4GB....
Edit: From Article, "Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed [1]"
So, morons who installed shitty AI are getting AI shafted - makes ALL the sense to me.
desertdruid 14 points 3 months ago
You should not be calling anyone a moron if you think that .exe actually contains Google Chrome
jacksilver 5 points 3 months ago
It's stated in the second paragraph:
This week I discovered the same pattern, executed by Google. Google Chrome is reaching into users' machines and writing a 4 GB on-device AI model file to disk without asking. The file is named weights.bin. It lives in OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device LLM. Chrome did not ask. Chrome does not surface it. If the user deletes it, Chrome re-downloads it.
Its a separate file (as any 4GB download would be).
frongt -29 points 3 months ago
Chrome includes AI, stop the fucking presses!
Who gives a shit? You use Chrome, Chrome uses AI, so it downloads the model like any other module. Don't like it? Don't use Chrome. There are dozens of other perfectly good browsers.
cley_faye 16 points 3 months ago
The AI model we're talking about here is not used for most of the AI features, which instead relies on cloud services. Those 4GB are there only for a fringe feature most people don't know/don't care about, hidden behind hoops you'll have to jump through to get.
leoj 4 points 3 months ago
I thought my win 11 came bundled with it, although I could be wrong.
As far as difficulty to uninstall and remove thats an android situation, but I feel like that could be the next OS to get this treatment (speculation).
Attacker94 0 points 3 months ago
Every mainline android ROM includes chrome as default.
ReCursing -39 points 3 months ago
The article, as usual, makes no comparison to the environmental impact of companies like McDonalds (who use PER DAY what every AI data centre combined in the world uses PER YEAR, not companies like Shell or BP who are orders of magnitude worse than that. This is the usual anti-ai fear-mongering bollocks.
Should Google have installed it unasked? No, that's bullshit, possibly illegal bullshit but honestly considering how disingenuous the environmental impact is I can't trust the legal stuff that I don't know about either. But it is not an environmental catastrophe as whoever wrote this article would like you to believe for some reason.
Honest question: why are the haters pushing their nonsense? What do they have to gain?
edit: As usually the haters and useful idiots provide nonsense counterpoints and downvote because they don't have laugh reacts to demonstrate their groupthink and wilful ignorance. I really wish they'd all shut the hell up, they're annoying!
HubertManne 33 points 3 months ago
look im far from a monger but this argument makes no sense. mdconalds makes food. which is a necessity. In addition its actually pretty well known for its efficiency. So its a question of output vs input. Now granted. super unhealthy but they don't sneak mcdonalds into your home cooked meal while your not looking. This article is far from nonsense.
Passerby6497 7 points 3 months ago
Grocery stores are unnecessary too, you can just go kill/harvest/forage your own food. Shut up.
HubertManne 2 points 3 months ago
thanks.
brbposting 2 points 3 months ago
I see what you’re saying and, parts of it, I’m on your side!
Those final two words there, I must say, do a disservice to the comment. One thought experiment: what makes Lemmy a pleasant place to debate?
RaoulDook 28 points 3 months ago
I'm gonna need some references to back up those energy claims. I do not see McDonalds (or any other restaurant) operating methane gas turbine generators because the energy grid can't keep up with their power demands.
bluefootedbooby 3 points 3 months ago
I would assume the enormous environmental impact of McDonald's comes from the amount of meat, specifically cow, they are responsible for
cley_faye 10 points 3 months ago
Oh, some whataboutism. Great.
Also great to know you don't have to pay to get storage in your devices, otherwise you'd be quite unhappy to see it taken out of your control for no feature (Chrome still relies on cloud services for most AI features).
cley_faye 3 points 3 months ago
Article talk about pushing a large model on people's computer. You minimize this by going about McDonalds, Shell, BP. Do you even know what "whataboutism" mean? Your first sentence is "what about McDonald, Shell, BP".
ReCursing -4 points 3 months ago
I'm calling out how stupidly and obviously disingenuous the article is. That's not whataboutism. Do you know what disingenuous means? The article claims it has a huge environmental impact. It doesn't.
foodandart 9 points 3 months ago
Are they hating, or are they pointing out that companies that claim to be honestly working towards a "greener" end are adding unwanted and unnecessary code to users computers against their will. Code, BTW, that can not be removed permanently and adds not only the cost of the bandwidth of the download used, but also the general cost of the cloud-backed nature of it's functioning to the mix. As someone that doesn't use Chrome or the cloud, I'd be furious.. The Keystone Agent (a perniciously rotten bit of code that eats clock cycles in one's system and runs constantly in the background) that chrome updates with - it's exactly why I quit the browser years ago.
Nuts to that.
foodandart 1 point 3 months ago
You asked.. I answered.
Dunno why you're so butthurt over the fact that beyond the environmental claims, the issue of code being deployed into someone's system without their permission or any ability to halt or prevent it means less to you than the former point.
Do you work for google? 'Cos damn dude, you're coming down on this like you do.
TachyonTele 8 points 3 months ago
Pointing out the huge environmental cost and relative uselessness of shiny word predictors is not pushing nonsense.
TachyonTele 3 points 3 months ago
Sticking your head in the sand and pretending everyone has an agenda is bullshit and you know it.
mabeledo 5 points 3 months ago
Jeez, calm your tits, I think I asked politely enough so I wouldn’t deserve this kind of response.
My question was what do you think this particular model does, not what is achievable with AI in general. And I’m asking because a model that weights 4GB is not some trivial thing that every Chrome user wants or needs loaded in memory.
ReCursing -1 points 3 months ago
That's nothing to do with my point that the article's claim about the environmental impact is bullshit. I don't know or care what that model is, I've not looked, and it's not relevant to my point. And yeah, you haters do deserve anger as a response because you are actively making the world worse via wilful ignorance, and we know what that does because of arseholes like trump and farrage.
panda_abyss -53 points 3 months ago
A dvd is roughly 768mb.
That means 6-8 Netflix movies are probably 4gb.
This is really not a lot, even with a billion chrome installs.
Zwuzelmaus 30 points 3 months ago
A dvd is roughly 768mb.
It's 8GB
PetteriPano 17 points 3 months ago
Only if it's double-layered.
Single-layered are 4.7GB.
panda_abyss 6 points 3 months ago
Shit… yes, I had cdr numbers memorized.
ReCursing -2 points 3 months ago
Also you had movie sizes misremembered - 700mb was 720p divx or 480p mpeg2, Netflix is now more often than not higher resolution that that (1080p for fullHD, minimum, for most people - I have an old TV that's 1080p - though 720p is probably also available), and likely encoded at a higher bit rate, though I don't know what file formats they use. A movie being 2gb is pretty normal for 1080p on torrent sites, and 4gb is not that uncommon for higher res
HubertManne 5 points 3 months ago
Thats a lot to me and a reason to keep them on seperate media. Honestly games are worse. Im not sure I would be wild about some rando software I install throwing 6-8 movies onto my machine along with the software.
panda_abyss -2 points 3 months ago
So to clarify, I feel the environmental impact of the download is not a big deal.
Wasting gigs of hdd space and locking up ram during a hardware shortage is a dick move.
Especially when gemma3n isn’t even Google’s best 4b model, I’ve never gotten that model to do a single useful thing.
HubertManne -1 points 3 months ago
yeah actually I was weary about ai energy usage early on but ultimately determined it was really not all that much when comparing apples to apples. the real problem is people just going crazy doing things over and over that they otherwise would not be doing otherwise. Like generating images. but like using it as web search its more than one search of energy but you get more than one search worth of data. Also someone who uses their free time to talk with it as a buddy (I don't get the appeal personally) instead of streaming video might very well use less energy.
YetAnotherNerd 4 points 3 months ago
Technically a DVD is 4gb; a CD is 768mb. But the size of a modern compressed movie is probably 800-1500mb.
That said, that’s a LOT of wasted space on the boot drive, especially given how much hard drives have gone up in price lately
thanks for using Leebra!
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