5 ms·
Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model
by TheServitor 5mo ago
Framing 4GB of data moving in a world of petabytes of traffic as a specific environmental disaster is kind of a stretch, regardless of whether we want the model.
- perks_12 5mo agoThe next Netflix breakout show will burn this planet to the grounds :)
- ekianjo 5mo agoNetflix does not store 4gb on your drive...
- a96 5mo agoIt does if it triggers this download.
- dathinab 5mo agoand people on very limited bandwidth and/or speed don't watch Netflix (or do so at most at 1080p) and if they watch netflix they are fine with clogging up their internet as it isn't some random backround download hindering what they want to do but what they are actively doing
- tthu1 5mo agoWhat is a lot of traffic to you? 2.5 million downloads of 4 GB are 10 PB of traffic. I think there are be a lot more than 2.5 million Chrome users in the world.
- Jleagle 5mo agoYou only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it.
- tthu1 5mo agoYou estimate more or less than 2.5 million? 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.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoDo you think this will not be part of some google product? On top of their normal agenda, this seems perfectly suited for them to push their AI models. So if you use anything from Google via Chrome, I would expect that this will end up on your device sooner or later.
- bakugo 5mo agoI suspect it's not that simple. Last week I noticed I already had it downloaded on one of my devices, even though I'm sure the number of websites already using this API is miniscule.
- bluehex 5mo agoI never intentionally used any AI features in Chrome but first was made aware of the models when my disk was running out of space. I investigated with a disk usage tool and found I had multiple versions of the model in my Chrome directory taking up ~12gb. This was about half a year ago and maybe I was in a bad experiment or something but it's definitely not opt in or user visible. Less tech savvy people will have a really hard time understanding why their disk space is running low.
- sgbeal 5mo ago> You only download it when some JS requests it for the first time, most people will never have it. 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.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoMore data moves in your average playstation system update than that. Steam probably transmits more in a morning than that
- DarkUranium 5mo agoThere are far more Google Chrome users than probably PlayStation & Steam users combined. 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!
- derangedHorse 5mo agoHave you ever watched a 2 hour lecture on Youtube? Next time check the memory consumption of the open tab.
- lstodd 5mo agoA 720x400 two-soundtrack rip of first season of 'On becoming god in central Florida' is only 5.5G. That's 10 episodes. Now what you were saying about 2-hour lectures?
- HDBaseT 5mo agoValve published some numbers of this. 11.42 petabytes per hour, and roughly 190,000 GB per minute and 100 exabytes delivered in 2025.
- acchow 5mo agoWikipedia say 3.6 billion Chrome users.
- oriettaxx 5mo agoI do not agree: I live by the sea and this is exactly the answer I get when I talk about trash in the sea. I personally appreciate even more that kind of "stretch" then the privacy one (which could be another "stretch" on getting closer to 1984 scenario)
- TheServitor 5mo agoI guess you can write an article about every new gigabyte released, and we can use more gigabytes talking about it, but other than that 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. An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. Millions of gamers. Fire up the presses! I'm not at all saying nothing matters so we shouldn't care. I just disagree about the utility of calling out specific things out of proportion to their place in the climate crisis. Tackle AI, yes, and fast fashion and cars, and ... that one change to Chrome? I guess if that's where you want to put your energy, Sisyphus.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoI 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 feel like you're being intentionally naive here. There's a difference between a forum using up a gig here or there, and one of the biggest software makers in the world shipping 4GB to all of its millions of users (if not billions at this point).
- lstodd 5mo ago> An xBox game can be 50+ gigs. 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.
- darkwizard42 5mo agoThe last 5 years of Game of The Year (Astro Bot (2024), Baldur's Gate 3 (2023), Elden Ring (2022), It Takes Two (2021), and The Last of Us Part II (2020)) are all nearly 45 GB+. All of them are incredible games spanning a vast series of game style (coop puzzle, solo platformer, stealth, ARPG, RPG) and animation. 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.
- salviati 5mo agoYour word might be of petabytes of traffic. Some people have slow lines. Some people have metered Internet subscriptions. Not everyone has access to the same infrastructure you have.
- SilverSurfer972 5mo agoOr just tethering abroad with an esim data plan... Just opening chrome would deplete your quota and leave you stranded. Google you are sick!
- efdee 5mo agoSurely it will wait when the connection is marked as metered.
- user_7832 5mo agoI definitely trust Google's team (and large trillion dollar companies with sufficient resources to do this) to make reasonable choices for their users... said, perhaps, someone ever? Certainly not me. (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.)
- McGlockenshire 5mo agoNope! The Chrome updater on Windows 11 ignores the metered flag.
- account42 5mo agoA tethered connection often just looks like a normal WiFi access point to the computer.
- efdee 5mo agoThat's why you can mark any WiFi connection as "metered" in Windows.
- 5mo ago
- mschuster91 5mo agoThere are multiple problems here. 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.
- keyringlight 5mo agoAnother angle is the processing cost, I assume Google is seeking to offload the computation for whatever features this covers from their own data centers to end users. On the scale of billions that's probably measurable and from google's side worth doing whether the users is paying for the service or not, and each of them will have more power usage with some reduced battery life on portable devices. At that scale I'd also wonder about efficiency based on what proportion of end users are using AI or running it on CPU/GPU/NPU.
- ekianjo 5mo agoIts unsollicited. Not everyone has fiber either
- dathinab 5mo agonot just fiber, e.g. Netflix requires "only" (reliable) ~15Mb/s for a 4k stream, that means most people in most countries feel little difference between ~25 Mb/s and 1Gb/s in their "every day" usage. Sure it's a huge difference if you download a 80GiB AAA game, or preload a 4k movie. But in my experience (which definitely doesn't apply to all countries) a lot of non tech affine people don't do that that often an if they do it (e.g. movies before travel) they tend to do it over the night so it still works out just fine with not so fast internet. So for a lot of people paying for more then 25-50Mb/s (pro person) makes only sense if it isn't too costly. Hence I rarely see people going for more then 250-500 Mb/s even iff 1Gb/s is available and they have money. And for non-gamers with little money, I mostly see them with ~50Mb/s (or paying for 50Mb/s but getting much less due to old wires :( ). (Also IMHO The more important things compared to 1Gb/s is how much of the bought bandwidth is reliably available at all times _with good latency_...)
- vrganj 5mo agoWhat is petabytes if not 4GB at Chrome userbase scale?
- handoflixue 5mo agoAmazing how many people missed the "environmental disaster" part of this post and are talking about personal inconvenience. Sorry folks, your low bandwidth situation is not, in fact, a climate change emergency.
- peder 5mo agoAnd adding climate hysteria here diminishes the climate change argument generally. It's like "the boy who cried wolf".
- zekrioca 5mo agoThe same old individualistic fallacy [1] of highlighting individual effects to hide global effects, all while compromising user privacy. In reality this will be continuous million of devices downloading these useless weight files. [1] Used since forever by the Tobacco & Pharmaceutical, Fossil Fuels & Climate, Food & Diet Industries.
- frnz 5mo ago60.000.000 kg ÷ 1.000.000.000 user is about 60 gramms of co2 per user?
- CamelCaseCondo 5mo agoWhich ullustrates that humanity has reached such numbers that the smallest collective change has an enormous impact.
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoHow do you propose maintaining the living conditions you've become accustomed to without the system we have currently, as shit as it is?
- CamelCaseCondo 5mo agoThere’s the problem: we want change without giving up the things we’re accustomed to. We’re locked in.
- throw310822 5mo agoBy "the things we're accustomed to" you mean food, jobs, healthcare, education?
- bcjdjsndon 5mo agoYou had food as a barbarian. Job wasn't needed because you weren't enslaved by your feudal lord, healthcare and education being the only benefits of civilization... largely benefits for the rich and not the peasantry I might add
- liminis 5mo agoThe basis of so much of Microsoft's complacency (and why the MB Neo was such a nuke to the entry-level laptop market). 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.
- thrance 5mo ago4Gb times 2,000,000,000 chrome installs gives us 8,000 petabytes. Are we allowed to worry now?
- x3ro 5mo agoChrome is used by about 3.8 billion people [1]. So, if this is rolled out to every chrome user over the next year or two, this would generate about 15 Exabytes of traffic. It's difficult to find accurate, useful numbers on this, but lets assume 29 grams of CO2e per GB, this would be about 450k tons of CO2e. This in turn, equates to average household CO2 expenditure of almost 300k households. So make your own judgement, but this seem pretty significant to me. [1]: https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/ https://www.aboutchromebooks.com/global-chrome-user-base/ [2]: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-streaming-video-fact-checking-the-headlines https://www.iea.org/commentaries/the-carbon-footprint-of-str... [3]: https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-tonne-of-co2/ https://www.anthesisgroup.com/insights/what-exactly-is-1-ton...
- Schiendelman 5mo agoThis is about the same as each of those people streaming a movie to their TV. There's no there there.
- oaiey 5mo agoBut that is a choice of an individual. Not a central place rolling it out.
- newsoftheday 5mo agoThey do that anyway, so it's in addition to that which is the parent's point.
- Schiendelman 5mo agoDid you notice when your streaming files went from 1.5 GB for a movie to 6 GB for a movie? I didn't. Almost no one does. And no one writes blog posts like this about the data usage.
- semiquaver 5mo agoTraffic is not homogeneous in total transfer cost. CDN-hosted data at the edge, close to the user is much cheaper than data that has to transit many hops. At the asymptote, transferring data between machines on the LAN is essentially free.
- zeafoamrun 5mo agoAgreed, my eyes rolled hard at that. Definitely more of an F-U to users with bad connections than anything else.
- 7952 5mo agoWhilst I am sceptical about Google in this space I do think it is a move in the right direction to do more locally and actually use the space modern machines have on device.
- Markoff 5mo agoI would more worry about storage space on some laptops with pretty small SSDs like 192-256GB of official capacity prior installing Windows, 4GB of that is already pretty significant part of storage space for something which should be opt-in.
- pessimizer 5mo agoIt is sad that this terrible comment inspired so many responses. It is 4GB of traffic for one person, and I am not aware of any single person who is moving petabytes of traffic. Comparing a single person to the entire world to make the inconvenience to or violation of a single person seem small is deliberately and thoughtfully deceptive. Why not 4TB in traffic and storage for chrome, then? In a world of petabytes of traffic, it's a feather. What's wrong with jailing somebody wrongly for 20 years in a world where millions are jailed, many wrongly, often for lifetimes? What's a lost finger on the job when there's a genocide going on?
- liminis 5mo agoI mean, with the price of SSDs lately, 4GB is not a completely negligible addition.
- xdavidliu 5mo agoframing 4 gb of data per user as 4 gb is even more of a stretch
- russellbeattie 5mo agoThe climate concern pearl clutching is pure muckraking. The author doesn't care, they're just looking for some sort of controversy. Do they (or the other seemingly horrified commenters) know how much data is transferred during a single evening of watching HD streaming video? In 2026 4GB of data is not going to have any measurable effect on the climate. There's a level of hypocrisy involved which is truly absurd. Literally no one reading this is going to curb their data usage. They'll just try to justify their outrage with farcical strawman arguments to be pedantic and then go binge watch some Netflix series without another thought.