so fucking glad I wiped that piece of shit off my devices.
it’s all been downhill since.
All solved with one simple step, DON’T INSTALL THIS GARBAGE!
Man I sure do wish Linux mobile was a thing. I really want a full on Linux phone.
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.
Is most consumer hardware even capable of running this model?
The article says it has hardware requirements to even download it. But yeah, you can run lots of stuff on the CPU, just at a fraction of the speed.
And for significantly more power draw right?
I’m assuming this is 3-4b model. That’s technically runnable on most consumer hw but I can hear the fans whirring now.
Hard to say. CPUs generally draw fewer watts, but they’ll also take longer to run the same job.
Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
To be fair, I’d probably prefer the 4gb model.
Free music was awesome.
No they took payment
Two decades. We’re old
As I said, few years ago.
Remember how pissed off everyone was when Sony added software to people’s computers?
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.
Hey come on now, there’s no need to lie. We all know that when the C-suite does it it’s not a crime in America. It’s illegal to hold them accountable!
/wrist :(
The sad thing is that Sony is multinational, and they weren’t prosecuted in Japan or anywhere else, either.
I think the rootkit was only on CD’s sold in North America. I could be wrong though.
Nope Europe too
major L
If it was actually good people may not have cared so much.
Even if it was good - and it’s not - it’s still an incredibly unethical thing to do.
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 <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
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.
4GB is now a Nano model?
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?”.
That’s interesting. It’s an “old man” way of saying “nani?!” in Japanese.
Was Mork attempting a surprised German, an elderly Japanese man, or some strange third thing?
deleted by creator
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.
How do we uninstall or block the download?
Uninstall chrome
So it just to the Chrome app?
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
Even Chromium should be fine. I doubt it has the branded Google AI features.
Can you even uninstall chrome on an android phone? I only get the option to disable.
Probably not stock Android. I’m on GrapheneOS and it doesn’t come with Chrome at all. But I don’t think the article is claiming it happens on Android.
Vanadium is Chrome derived; but I’m sure Graphene de-enshittifies it to the maximum possible extent.
Technically speaking, it is chromium derived which does make the difference in this instance.
Maybe that why Google sent me this bullshit
How was the van repair?
What? I don’t own a van.
Top row of your screenshot
Oh that yeah that Trent the Traveler. And that was a Patreon exclusive video. And it got it fixed.
Suuuure, “buddy”…
Yessss.
I literally don’t have any clue what I even responded to or why, I’m drunk most of the time, all the best to ya.
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
I remember when Gmail was advertised as unlimited email storage. Then they limited it. Then they sold more storage for it.
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.
It still does, for models that were sold that way. My Pixel 4 still gets free uploads to Google Photos. Which I should really move to immich one of these days.
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!
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.
Chrome sucks, sure. Did you have a coherent point beyond that? No, didn’t think so.
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.
The environmental impact of AI is massively overblown all the fucking time and I don’t like lies. And I do like AI
Can I send you this month’s electric bill to split the difference off of?
I have maintained a rigorous control on our home power useage for years and in spite of this, the bill has increased roughly 52% in the last year - and it’s aparently down to the increased demand that needs to be supplemented by purchasing power from outside of our region because of data centers.
If you love it so much… How about YOU pay the extra cost for those of us who did not ask for, and do not need, it.
It’s all part of the same thing… offloading burdens from the provider - be it a data center or google, onto the user, without permission.
No. It’s risen because corporate execs think they can gouge you for money to increase the high scores in their bank accounts. Increased demand means they’d be selling more which would mean more profits or even your bills decreasing if they were being fair. As usual it’s corps and billionaires that are the problem
Data center operators can and will negotiate yearly rates for bulk electricity up. That’s how they can guarantee supply, by paying more than the competition. Small local distributors will never have that kind of leverage, that’s why consumers end up paying more.
So yes, you are correct in saying that corporations and billionaires are the problem, but in this particular case, it’s because of a particular subset of those.
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.
I would assume the enormous environmental impact of McDonald’s comes from the amount of meat, specifically cow, they are responsible for
Can you convert those cow meats into watts? I was asking about energy usage in the context of that specific claim
Sure. 1 kcal ≈ 1.162 watt-hours.
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).
I don’t even know what you’re getting at here. You claim my comment, which points out how disingenuous the article is, is whataboutism, then provide some whataboutism.
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”.
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.
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.
A dvd is roughly 768mb.
It’s 8GB
Shit… yes, I had cdr numbers memorized.
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
uninstalled Chrome a looooong time ago on my Win 10 machine
Uninstalled Chrome and Windows a looooooong time ago on my computer
You had Chrome installed?
You guys have computers?
I am a meat popsicle.
Hey, when I was a kid I had a slide rule.
Back in my day, computer was a job, and all you had was an abacus. We liked it that way. None of this newfangled al-gebra nonsense.
