alt Hacker NewsGoogle Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent
Comments
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
"Oh but the climate costs" Who cares?
Doing LLM locally is more climate efficient than doing in datacenters
I stopped reading here because I know this is the ramblings of a whiny person that will contribute nothing, will solve nothing and is occupying space on the internet. Whatever is the climate cost of those kbytes of the page, it seems too much for me
> Google has not, to my knowledge, published any analysis of the welfare impact of this on the populations whose internet access is metered.
This is satire, obviously.
Does anyone else find the writing in the article to be overdramatic? Including a 4gb is a negligible amount of space for current hardware and Chrome is not known as the browser to run on resource constrained devices. To put 4gb in context, I currently have 2 *tabs* open that nearly take up 4gb. The fact Chrome also has a way to disable this makes it kind of a nothingburger in my opinion.
> The roughly 4 GB × N devices of disk-storage cost, sustained, on user hardware. SSDs have a per-GB embodied carbon cost of approximately 0.16 kg CO2e per GB of NAND manufactured [18]
The estimated environmental aspect of the download also seems like an overblown point, noted for sensationalism. There are always hand-wavy numbers involved and I had to look no further than the quote above to find evidence of this. The reference for [18], "The dirty secret of SSDs: embodied carbon", incorrectly links to "Toward Carbon-Aware Networking" and makes no mention of the environmental cost of SSDs. After looking up "The Dirty Secret of SSDs: Embodied Carbon" myself, I was able to see the same methodologies as I was expecting used [1].
> We conducted an analysis encompassing 94 Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reports, which collectively quantify the embodied cost of SSDs. Owing to the scarcity of direct and up-to-date LCA studies focused specifically on SSDs. We compiled a dataset comprising LCA reports pertaining to Server, Workstation, Desktop, Laptop, and Chromebook products, all of which feature SSDs
All these studies rely on metrics extrapolated from layered assumptions and end up being used by those who try to use them as objective numbers.
Anyone, voluntarily installing a spy browser like Google Chrome on their devices, deserves this and much more.
[flagged]