So where is the line we draw where bait-and-switch goes from being acceptable to unacceptable?

MA Chapter 93A for example clearly says that businesses are prohibited from "unfair or deceptive practices" including misrepresentation or concealing defects. Where do you think the line should be?

If you market a product as a Browser and it's codebase is 10% browser related and 90% some other program... Should Google have to correctly represent that product?

Related; If you didn't like when Apple forced you to use Siri on your phone, why did you purchase a Mac? Did you not expect them to continue disrespecting your sovereignty after you let them get away with it the first couple dozen times?

What isn't part of the software? Can they just install as much garbage they want to, as long as they claim it is part of the "browser"?

Also, scale absolutely matters. If I pull up in front of your house and say "hey, mind if I park here?" and you say yes, then I park, walk away, and 10 minutes later park a fleet of 18 wheelers in front of your house, you're going to feel like I wasn't...entirely forthcoming about what I intended.

Honestly, for most features you could justifiably say its fine. I mean honestly, how large is an English dictionary? 100 KiB? That is a far cry from 4 GiB. Just taking up 4 GiB of disk space without even asking is indeed a shit move no matter how you shake it. If Microsoft Word updated and suddenly took up 4 GiB more for something like a dictionary, it might not cause as much uproar as if it were something that many people are tired of hearing about and not interested in, but I'm not sure you would find a single soul who would find that acceptable, more just tolerated, probably partly because a lot of people simply wouldn't know better.

Shipping an AI model with a browser is starting to look like sticking cameras on ALL glasses, not just smart glasses, regardless of whether anyone wants that. Saying this is fine and not unusual is clearly motivated reasoning and just normalizes the surveillance state. It's very obvious the way this ends. Browser-based models will eventually be using your computer at the edge to save corporate money in the cloud while they do ever more expensive and invasive stuff to profile you.

For me the most significant problem is the lack of consent. I assume it's just not how you want to frame the problem. Ignoring the problematic parts or behavior of some sort of behavior is a common problem in modern software, and it's actually what the article is complaining about.

You're right in the sense that practicality and consent are orthogonal issues. There are probably stronger arguments to complain about a feature than the disk use.

Chrome is not entitled to my disk space just because I installed it and Microsoft has been excoriated for the exact same behaviour with AI.

[1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.

is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?

For one, not everyone in this world lives on high bandwidth unmetered connections. In Germany, you got a lot of people still running on 16 MBit/s ADSL, that's half an hour worth of full load just for AI garbage. With the average 50 MBit/s, it's still 10 minutes. For those running on hotspots - be it their phone with often enough 10 GB or less on your average data plan or train hotspots that cut you off after 200MB - the situation is similarly dire.

The other thing is storage. I got a nominally 256GB MacBook Air. Of these 256 GB, easily 50GB are already gone for macOS itself, swap, Recovery and everything that macOS doesn't store as part of the immutable partition (such as, you guessed it, its own AI models). Taking up 2% of the disk space without consent is definitely Not Cool.

You mean like Siri? It does the exact same thing and no one asked for it, either. That shit barely works too.

You know, I never thought about it like that, but it is true. The bloat and spyware is a core part of the OS now.

It's just more efficient that way!

I wonder what that will do for the competition between hosted genai and local models...

You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle.

I don't have even a single use for Siri on my Mac. It's useless AND redundant with the Siri that I have to have on my phone, yet Apple downloaded and installed "Siri" on there. If I install GarageBand which is the only first-party way to do basic audio manipulation, Apple installs at least 4GB of audio samples on my Mac.

None of this is to say "I approve of this exact thing Google is doing" - just that I agree with GP that this is exactly the same as what every big company (and many small ones) do every day.

The only "consent" we ever get is basically the all-or-nothing EULA we have to click Agree to in order to log in for the first time - the relevant terms are "Want computer? Accept that we will be shipping you all kinds of code constantly, for 'reasons.'"

Equating a 4GB file installed without explicit consent to the installation of a language dictionary is comical. That's like saying an unwanted political mailer left in your mailbox is the equivalent of a pallette of hammers left in your driveway.

If tomorrow Google was to include a Blockchain miner in Google chrome, you'd still say you consented to it by using their software ?

Because I'm pretty sure that this LLM is also going to be used by Google to gather data on the user and feeding it to Google, hence just like the Blockchain miner using our computer ressources (space & performance) to feed Google yearly benefits.

One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?

Google should know better. Chrome has local administrator permissions anyway (w/ its updater) so they should have installed a single copy for the entire machine.

It's not cool to give a damn about the people who keep mundane stuff like desktop infrastructure, file servers, etc, working, I guess. The wanton disregard to even talk to a single in-the-trenches corporate sysadmin seems like malice.

The tactic used to work even as prevention to common RPC exploits (viruses/worms) on windows as well (in the early 2000s).

[0] https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/

I have gigabit internet (125 MB/s). This would imply when I'm downloading something I'm using 18 to 45 kW of electricity. Completely bonkers.

Curious to know, what viable alternatives did you discover?

There’s nothing stopping Google Chrome from doing something similar except, I suspect, Google knows or feels it will result in many fewer installs of its bloatware.

A 4 GiB model has nothing to do with the functionality of a web browser. It is something forced on users without their consent.

Of course that's what we get for giving the benefit of doubt to the company that insisted on learning the wrong things from the Google Buzz fiasco.

It's good to have something to work with if these Web APIs are going to be part of a standard. I suppose this means that ALL the browser vendors are likely to implement something

Or this summary on its status:

> Mozilla: Opposed

> WebKit: Opposed

> Microsoft: Several concerns

> W3C TAG: Several concerns

> Developers: Mostly negative

From https://mastodon.social/@jaffathecake/116527007495775507

#omnibox-ml-url-scoring-model

#omnibox-on-device-tail-suggestions

#optimization-guide-on-device-model

#text-safety-classifier

#prompt-api-for-gemini-nano

#writer-api-for-gemini-nano

#rewriter-api-for-gemini-nano

#proofreader-api-for-gemini-nano

#summarizer-api-for-gemini-nano

#on-device-model-litert-lm-backend

Then around gemini but not caught by the search for models: #skills (maybe? I think this is implied by "gemini in chrome"?)

edit: I don't see a carte blanch AI disabling option. As much as I dislike Mozilla's growing obsession with AI, at least they give me a top level option to disable all AI stuff. I only keep Chrome around for occasional testing reasons.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028662

I'm not even sure that is actually true for most people. If you mainly work in the browser, which many do, then you can change the OS under it without impacting the user too much but change the browser and there will need to be much more to adapt/relearn.

If Chrome shipped a crypto miner and used the resulting coins generated on my device to let me automatically bypass paywalls with micropayments that would be way better than if they shipped the same and just took the coins.

https://adsm.dev/posts/prompt-api/#which-browsers-support-th...

    Summarizer.create()

I think this is a distinct model from the Prompt API, since the other shipped AI APIs use fine tuned models.

Because my Chrome stable has been updated to v148 now, and I don't see any AI models in my user profile folder. My profile size is only 328 MB, with the Code Cache subfolder occupying the most space (135 MB).

With Librewolf I can get proper WebGL, full UBo -with the AI blocklist too to avoid all the slop- and Bypass Paywall Clean from Giflic or whatever was called. Yeah, eh, y local newspaper won't mainly get adverts' money but the rest of local company ads show up well even with UBo/BPC, so they get some money after all.

On RAM usage, Librewolf it's far lighter on the long term and it doesn't ping back as Firefox, and many times less than Chrom* based browsers where, I repeat, Chrome based browsers don't allow UBo any more even if installed from their Github repo enforcing some about:flags variables related to legacy extension support.

The web today without UBo it's unmanageable. Popus, more than the ones from 2003, malware disguised as ads even on mainstream, safe sites, and all of these running zillions of cookies and trackers converting your -otherwise perfectly usable- old amd64 Celeron machine with 2GB of RAM into some crawling Pentium III with 256MB of RAM. With LibreWolf and UBo I could even test Yandex Maps with Prypiat and the like and InstantStreetView too. No slowdowns, no OpenGL >= 3.3/Vulkan video card required, and no need to own a 8GB machine.

HN developers there without UBo if they depend on the web for documentation they are bit screwed if they use Chrom* based browsers, sorry. Half of the resources for their machines coudn't be used, you know for IDE's, compilers, virtual machines/containers and whatnot. And, yes, I know about ZRAM under GNU/Linux, and just imagine how many tasks would anyone accomplish with a ZRAM compressed chunk (~1/3 of the physical RAM), a light desktop environment as Lumina/LXQT and a non-Chrom* browser blocking all pests. Up to 3X more tasks in the same machine. No need to waste money on upgrades, and compilng cycles are cut down for the good.

Yes, that's the problem

I doubt anyone would appreciate software bloat purely because of how widespread it is[1] - it just hasn't risen to the level where it's so noticeable for such a contemporarily controversial topic yet.

1. As an aside - ubisoft game sizes are absolutely bonkers. I didn't realize that each Assassin's Creed had twelve different operating systems crammed into it but I can't see how else they're clocking in where they do.

> You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle.

So what are you saying? Don't be mad over this becoming the norm, just shut up and sit down and accept it?

The alternative is sending the data to Google.

It's the fact that they were forcing it into MY computer, using MY bandwidth for THEIR profit goals. The lack of consent was the final nail in the coffin for me, no computer in my house uses Windows now, and it will at best be a long time before that changes.

I got rid of Chrome ages ago as well. Chrome's only redeeming feature is its user base. It's slower, uses more system resources, ugly as a browser, and now its an AI rapist too.

you would think google is not stupid enough to mess with gcp account holders

Silicon Valley is not the world.

The current state can be viewed at the internal debug URL chrome://on-device-internals/

Since January there's a user facing toggle in Settings > System > On-device AI in Chrome Canary https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligenc..., described in Chrome Help Center at https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/16961953https://sup...

Precedence for shipping models alongside consumer software.

Potentially without consent if it truly is a silent install.

Or at least justify the hundreds of billions they are burning

now I'm working on upgrading my computer lol

About equal to a major iOS update at 8 GB x 1.5B.

Netflix and YouTube together are perhaps around 200EB/month.

It's called a PUP, or Potentially Unwanted Program and most anti-viruses offer to remove them. They can be legitimately installed, but often aren't. (Usually they were shipped in the installers of legitimate software downloaded from sketchy distributors.)

Random AI models being shipped with Chrome is very much a PUP. The user wanted to browse the internet, not use a model. They'd install an extension if they wanted that.

The Ask toolbar was seen as a virus. Mozilla had massive user bleed in Firefox due to installing sponsored extensions in the browser. The only reason this shit isn't regarded the same way is because it's both done by Google and because it's labeled with AI, so all AI bros have to retroactively find an excuse to justify it.

This is also GOOGLE chrome, it serves their ends, in the past that was to render internet unimpeded (they saw a need then), needs change. I'd rather models serve most requests locally anyway, so long as it's not destroying my battery life.

Remember the whole chrome-RAM-gate saga? This shouldn't be shocking to anyone. PC's shipping 8gb ram, Google removing ad blocker extensions, these should be the real rally points.

yea your analogy doesn't even remotely make sense

Mullvad Browser

Tor Browser for those occasions

If yes, it's an interesting API to call when a AI crawler hit your website.

When you install any program it becomes entitled to your disk space, by the definition of installation. If you don’t like the program, you can just uninstall it and it’ll no longer take up your disk space.

There are only three major browser rendering engines. One is Gecko, by Mozilla. One is Webkit, currently tended to by Apple. And one is Blink, which is Google/Microsoft. Of those, Blink is the most featureful. That's why.

99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's worth the ~200MB of used space.

but to answer your question: one of the services that uses a small model: PermissionsAIv4

""" Use the Permission Predictions Service and the AIv4 model to surface permission notification requests using a quieter UI when the likelihood of the user granting the permission is predicted to be low. Requires `Make Searches and Browsing Better` to be enabled. – Mac, Windows, Linux, ChromeOS, Android """

The oceans are boiling [0], marine life is dying [1]. Land close to the water will be land under water soon [2]. The ice caps are melting and setting free all sorts of diseases. [3]

Large parts of our planet on fire all the time now, here's one from Australia from this year [4], but I'm sure you've read about wildfires in Australia last year, California every year, Greece last year etc etc.

What you're proposing is nothing short of a death cult. It's either degrowth or we all die, sacrificed at the altar of capitalism.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/09/profound...

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03013-5

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02299-w

[3] https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/could-microbes-l...

[4] https://phys.org/news/2026-01-australia-declares-state-disas...?

Are they against washing machines too? Or are they just grandfathered in?

Related... to the functionality of feeding the same profit and loss account, right?

The idea that the model is local is just Privacy Washing. What's the chance they aren't capturing your prompts somehow? For "Telemetry" so they can triage bugs of course!

29 grams for something that takes most folks less than 20 seconds to download? How many watts (neglecting the machinery was going to be running regardless of whether you are transferring something!) do you think it takes to transfer data?

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11

Coal, the absolute worst of all, represents 18 grams over 60 full seconds to produce 1000 watts of power.

What's that number? How did you arrive at it and why?

My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows. Is this below or your line, or are they actually in trouble as soon as they're extracted?

My point is just that it seems there may be an arbitrary limit here that may not be the same for everyone (and 90% of users are nontechnical and thus couldn't give an answer whether 4GB is "worth it" for whatever the features are). Rather than add another whole ecosystem of "Cancel or Allow?" dialogs I'd rather operating systems did a better job of letting users put piggish applications on a strict space budget. Most of the apps on my phone are storing half a gig of "stuff" (called "Documents & Data" but not itemized, and even apps that have none of my 'data' such as browsers), which I can't force them to dump even in an extreme emergency. I can only delete the whole app.

I'm talking about Apple platforms as examples because I use those a lot and with their epic stinginess of SSD, anyone who doesn't pay $400 more than the base model will exhaust their storage within hours to months.

I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.

Of course I would. It’s already the largest application on my computer, and I only keep it around for when a site doesn’t render right in Firefox.

This kind of size increase clearly pushes it over the line for me and it’s getting uninstalled.

Have you seen SSD prices recently?

Oh, the horror!!!

Wait, let me pay my HVAC guy $500 he deserved because he came all the way from his home to replace a fuse

A lighter Brave.

If you were to install Chrome fresh, what if it was a 4GB+ download from their website? I would at least pause. For reference, a regular offline installer is 140MB.

EDIT: got the maths very wrong with some other estimates, deleted them.

     I don't see that any one gigabyte of software I don't want is especially more
     noteworthy than any other gigabyte of software I don't want.

i certainly never activated it willfully. i use Chrome only as a fallback testing platform for web dev - a handful of times per month - yet both Chrome Stable and Chrome Unstable had installed this 4GB monstrosity in my home dir. 8GB of junk i'd never used. Both have since been uninstalled and replaced with Chromium.

If you google OptGuideOnDeviceModel, there’s already a lot of results of people asking what it is an how they can delete them. It’s not some kind of obscure niche feature.

I wonder when the first crypto miner-like malware appears that offloads model usage to the client computers.

    Q: Does <company> understand consent?
    A: No / Maybe Later

    Q: Does <company> understand consent?
    A: No / Maybe Later / we did it anyway, you'll need to search to find out how to turn it off, maybe ask the new AI model we've just back-door installed?

It’s probably a business misplay to tell the other 99% of users about something they weren’t going to think about. But if by chance it goes awry and there’s outcry, just apologize and commit to do better.

1. Yes

2. Ask me later

Man, so many things could be better if people cared.

Policy GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings disables and removes the local model without any flag hacks since 2024. In Canary since January behind Settings > System > On-device AI

The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered.

Problem is, nor do half its T&Cs. What we thought was a web browser turns out to be a Google content delivery vehicle - and controlled by Google, not the target users.

11.42 petabytes per hour, and roughly 190,000 GB per minute and 100 exabytes delivered in 2025.

i.e. when firefox does it, people wonder why they aren't using chrome. That's the entire point. The only thing that makes firefox attractive is if they don't do what google does, and they do almost everything google does.

Even if it results in extended campaigns of complaints and hostility from their most devoted users, and the loss of 95% of their installs. As far as I can tell the only thing they backed down on was destroying ublock, and that's because they recognized that it was an existential threat to firefox. The 3% market share that they have now would have become 0.3%, no matter what google did to prop them up.

I certainly don't recommend firefox any more. The amount of effort I have to go through to get the standard 2010 experience quality is absurd and I can't expect anyone else to think it's worth it. It's not worth it to dodge any of this bad behavior anymore, it's industry standard. Going through the effort of dodging it makes you stand out more, and makes you more trackable and targetable. For me it's just compulsive, and my values don't change when the values of the crowd changes. But I can't expect anyone else to download and maintain a git repo that allows you to have basic control over your UI, or to fill out captchas after every pageload.

If you're going to use plain firefox, you might as well use plain chrome. Both of them have the same degree of respect for you, and both of them are owned by the same company. Using plain firefox for freedom is like using an Android phone for freedom. It's amusing that google gets to play the "bad guy" in one of those stories (browser wars) and gets to play the "good guy" in the other (mobile wars.) It's all keyfabe. None of these companies are competing with each other.

> while people have little more to say about Chrome other than "Google gonna Google, but it's fast at least".

Wise words.

- software company decides to release a new version and auto installs it for everyone who has the old version (like Google Chrome)

- software company decides to release a new version. The Debian packaage maintainer checks if the update is fine, is compatible with Debian policies, then includes it in the packages repositories.

In the first, there are no checks. In the second, there are.

Its miles ahead of something like Osmand , which i really, really, tried to like for a year, but its a UX disaster (i could never ever figure it out)

Mozilla has taken a strong stand against the prompt api.

Also, someone installing Steam is going to expect large downloads, hell, the platform tells you the size as you're about to start the download.

I don't think anyone expects a browser to suddenly download 4GB, let alone behind their backs!

The word you're looking for is "respect". They understand consent, the same as JBS* understands animal rights.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBS_N.V.

You wouldn’t throw the same fit if [insert dictator you don’t have high expectations of here] shot a hundred random civilians compared to if your government did, no?

I'm in my 40s I have no desire for this new technology unless we get the kind of AI from Japanese anime.

Because this is something expected from Google. Google has never committed to security, but Mozilla did.

EDIT: I meant privacy, not security.

He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.

... Mozilla absolutely did this to themselves. Come think of it, they really remind me of what Microsift's been doing with Windows.

Why are AI models something I'd be uniquely unable to trust Google to install, compared all the other code included in Chrome updates? Is your point just that you shouldn't trust Chrome in general?

Really? I'm a total amateur when it comes to doing anything with local models but I tried a few in this range using ollama at this point, and they didn't seem to know much about anything, and I couldn't figure out how to get them to search the web or run other tools, so that was where the experiment ended.

A small local model that can use bash would be a bit of a game-changer for me.

It’s like how people are outraged that electricity is being used in data centers to power AI models. When you do the math, the power consumption is far, far less than all the other things you do all day without thinking twice. But again, anti-AI double standard

I mean, that's absolutely your only option other than simply choosing another browser. This will be a non-issue for 99% of Chrome users.

So no, I don't think it's a weird trend at all that people start describing software as "silently" doing things when trust in automatic updates of software (a thing that software silently does) has deservedly gone down the drain in the last few years.

I wanted a browser, not an LLM.

This does not happen. The model is not downloaded unless the user intentionally uses the feature that requires it. Then it's downloaded at that point.

In my experience a game worth playing never exceeded 1 (one) gig in size.

It is only incompetent creators that feel the need to bury their incompetence under gigabytes of irrelevance.

Our users interact with a huge array of internal and external sites and web apps, virtually all of which will be tested on Chrome. Our LMS, collaboration tools, internal apps, SIEM tooling, HR systems, ERP, knowledge exchange partner portals - it's all been tested on, and works with, Chrome. And we're not in a position to force thousands of vendors to make sure their applications are standards compliant and work in less popular browsers (as much as we might like to). Not to mention the deluge of tickets we'd be dealing with when incompatibilities arise; banning Chrome would cripple us.

Google have backed us into a corner with this one by making a careless default choice that takes advantage of their market dominance and forces us to work around their decision.

They're going to get blasted with cellular data charges when they fire up their computer in the field.

I'm more inclined to think it's cost unloading. Move their cloud GPU costs to your desktop.

The author's main points were all the other alarmist nonsense, though.

The OSMand UX is clearly not made for casual use, but Comaps is basically the main user-friendly application. It is missing a couple of commonly-used features though, most notably traffic information, which of course Google bases on data collected from its users.

https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213#i...

Mozilla makes great points. Even if the API is model agnostic, which it ought to be designed as from the very beginning to even be considered a spec, models can act vastly different.

Mozilla didn't say this but the user should at least be presented an option to choose which model (at least once) starting from day one, even if your browser only has one option available. That's assuming a universe where Google plans on actually being concerned about standards adoption.

(I wanted to write something far snarkier and sarcastic but getting annoyed at google is like getting annoyed at a lawnmower/Oracle. That plus HN guidelines.)

If people read the release notes instead of the comment sections, not only would they have a lot more specific knowledge of the work going into the browser but they wouldn't be locked in this cycle of outrage and escalation that normally you only see in YouTube comment sections.

Right, because its totally something an LLM can do, right?

This is better than my current solution of an actual human with masters degreed intelligence performing all my cognitive tasks for free how? I mean, i'm the first to admit i'm extremely lazy and even i'm over here like "really??"

Would you be able to compare this to other local models in it's class and a above that would fit consumer-grade hardware?

"Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product: Incentives matter, but impunity matters more."

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar...

Mozilla doesn't care about your grievances. It collects lots of telemetry about you by default, and has recently officially removed the obligation not to sell your personal data to third parties etc. It also plans to "introduce AI" into its browser.

> And I would expect that most Firefox users are of the kind who have strong opinions about how their computers work.

On the contrary. Those people have moved on, or are in the process of moving on, from Firefox itself to more privacy-minded forks. Like Palemoon, LibreWolf and maybe Mullvard.

- It failed? This must be a mistake, I’ll try it again. It failed? This must be a mistake, I’ll try it again because then I will complete the task (repeat about every six seconds until you rescue it).

- You know, the best way to deal with a permissions problem is to erase the entire system. That’ll definitely solve those pesky permissions and I’ll complete the task.

This is infuriating behavior.

Silicon Valley must wake up and understand the entire world does not live like them.

No, this is not true. The large requirement comes after a user wants to use the feature, not as a part of the normal upgrade. If the user never engages with the feature, it's not downloaded.

It's a bizarre way of living your life.

But I would consider us users to be more like an asset on their balance sheet. Not something they would care about the opinion of.

0.1 kWh * 3600s/hr = 360 kJ

360 kJ / 8s (time for 1 GB) = 45 kW

But yes, there is a 100% chance that logs will get sent back to Google too.

Chrome may be a privacy nightmare, but in terms of security it beats Mozilla.

    He’s the founder of Brave, by the way.

    a private political donation from 10 years earlier

For me Firefox is (slightly) better than is used to be, not by a wide margin but it's not gotten worse either.

I've been running it since it was Phoenix so I think my experience is at least somewhat valid, which is why I'm so confused by these comments.

I'm really tired of such overinflated ridiculousness shrillness against Google. Yes there are very real tensions to this company and their as business is scary as heck.

But folks don't seem capable of processing duality, don't seem to be able to do much but ad-hominem until they pass out. Its really so exhausting having such empty energy charging in every single time, and it keeps obstructing any ability to think straight or assess.

It’s not a waste of bandwidth and disk space, it’s a feature!

That that feature (a) requires a local LLM, (b) will install a multi-GB download without telling the user, all happen without any explicit user consent.

(I miss Arc, such a shame it only gets security/chromium updates now ...)

And I think Codex's desktop client has a built-in browser now? At least I've seen someone using something like that. Nevermind Atlas is a thing now too. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/

(Tell me if I'm misunderstanding you?)

Stardew Valley, universally acclaimed and not graphically intensive at all, still takes up nearly 2 GB of space.

Your view on games is not grounded in the reality of modern gaming.

    Firefox does debatable thing, expressed outrage is at Level 11
    but when 
    Chrome does far worse version of thing, expressed outrage is at Level Shrug.

Now I can't see it anymore, but shouldn't the model be under chrome://on-device-internals/ -> model-status?

Maybe you can uninstall there too.

Consumers vote and advocate for what they want and don't want. There are many who say it's not an individual problem and should be dealt with broadly through regulation, then also oppose any attempts at regulation.

Until we're at that point though, the 'winners' in this market society (that wield unimaginable amounts of money = resources) such as Google could certainly think about consequences of their choices. And they usually do to some extent, I'm not saying they don't, just that electric supply and demand has two sides to it

Not everyone wants this at the cost of others. It's not as simple as that / not a necessary consequence of our desire to find clever solutions to solve everyday inconveniences

Those are some goofy numbers. Obviously incorrect.

I hadn't considered that societies rightfully impose standards on these things.

I consider it too early to judge the cost-benefit, but it's fair that others might have already evaluated that. I rescind my comment.

--------

[1] Follow one of them around the way they track us online, or let out a bit of information about, for example, their tax affairs, and see how fast lawyers or law enforcement arrive on your doorstep…

Having said that, I keep a copy of Ungoogled Chromium for those websites that refuse to test against FF.

The feature that didn't say it would cost you 4Gb, right?

It's pretty terrible how much this kind of dynamic rules over tech. I'm not a 'capitalist', but god damn if competition isn't the most important thing to prevent total enshittification.

Ooh, this is interesting. There's nothing stopping them from sending jobs down to local machines. That's some 3 billion nodes. We went through this with coin mining and spam botting.

Nothing stopping it except your ire if it's discovered.

Also, as it turned out, Windows wasn't much more secure than Linux, and I guess we'll find this with Chrome as well. In fact I wonder if this isn't obvious already now that uBlock Origin doesn't work on Chrome any longer?

Besides, isn't Chrome approaching 20 years now and I still cannot have tree style tabs on it so it is still a toy browser meant for causual browsing, not work ;-)

https://share.google/aimode/WOJL4sf0GK2Vyi6kA