3 ms·

You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. Yes, that's the problem

iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
Yep. The fact that it is being hand waved away in this manner as if it was a valid argument is beyond maddening. I am starting to wonder if the move behind land and 'extreme personalization' of software is a fad I thought it was ( I mean, yeah regular users won't, but there is no helping some people if they don't want to be helped ).
cachius 6mo ago
The problem here is that the on-device model is old news packed as clickbait without any research beyond his file system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034889 And all news outlets spreading it w/o any further research of their own. 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.
- alsetmusic 6mo ago
  > The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered. Actually, it does claim this is the stable release channel. And it's reasonable to assume that if the author is documenting on a fresh profile / user account on the Mac, they probably downloaded the current (that day) release, though we're inferring when don't don't truly know for sure. > 10. Code-signed, shipped through the normal release channel. This is not test build behaviour. It is Chrome stable. I think it's poor form to run cover for one of the biggest corporations in the world like this. Don't let them off the hook. As the author correctly points out, metered connections are being abused. Hell, last month I somehow hit ATT's bandwidth limits on my mobile and got throttled for five days. It made my phone so unusable that I turned on hotspot on my work phone and connected to that over wifi when I went to lunch.
kjs3 6mo ago
I had a client complain that some software we recommended installed a database. How fucking dare we install this giant blob of software without his consent! It was MySQL, and integral to the application. So what's your solution? A click-through acceptance of every single library, component, dependency, etc. every app uses? P.S. - out here in the real world of the people who just use software, they don't want this. Which is its own problem, because they should care more than they do, but we play the hand we're delt.
- anigbrowl 6mo ago
  That's going to the opposite extreme. Making major components optional and including some basic information about what they are at install time is easy to do. It's very common with creative software and even some games. I think this will be increasingly true in this extended period of more expensive memory and storage media. The Macbook Neo, for example, has 250GB onboard storage and 8gb memory. Many users will not want to spend 2% of their storage and allocate half their memory just to run a web browser.
  - xp84 6mo ago
    I agree that the disk usage we're discussing here is especially painful on that hardware, but: > "just to run a web browser" I don't even mean to be hyperbolic here, but 'running a web browser' is almost the only purpose of a MacBook Neo for at least 90% of its target audience. Consider what normal people do on a laptop: - Email - web browser - Social media - web browser - pay bills, research, book trips - web browser - watch video content - web browser For many users, you could hide the Dock and just autolaunch Chrome at Startup and it wouldn't have any negative impact on them. And I'd bet that any browser with more than 5 tabs open, especially without an adblocker, is using whatever portion of its paltry 8GB of RAM that the OS hasn't hogged. So the argument to be made for allowing some feature bloat (and paying the space cost) in a browser is that this is probably the app most people will spend 75-100% of their time in anyway.
    - danudey 6mo ago
      Running a web browser _with a local AI model_ is likely something that most users are not aiming for. This is extra disk and bandwidth for something that benefits Google but does nothing for the average user.

Yep. The fact that it is being hand waved away in this manner as if it was a valid argument is beyond maddening. I am starting to wonder if the move behind land and 'extreme personalization' of software is a fad I thought it was ( I mean, yeah regular users won't, but there is no helping some people if they don't want to be helped ).

cachius 6mo ago

The problem here is that the on-device model is old news packed as clickbait without any research beyond his file system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034889 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48034889 And all news outlets spreading it w/o any further research of their own. 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.

alsetmusic 6mo ago
> The article doesn't mention Chrome version, release channel, whether on fresh vs existing install an if settings were altered. Actually, it does claim this is the stable release channel. And it's reasonable to assume that if the author is documenting on a fresh profile / user account on the Mac, they probably downloaded the current (that day) release, though we're inferring when don't don't truly know for sure. > 10. Code-signed, shipped through the normal release channel. This is not test build behaviour. It is Chrome stable. I think it's poor form to run cover for one of the biggest corporations in the world like this. Don't let them off the hook. As the author correctly points out, metered connections are being abused. Hell, last month I somehow hit ATT's bandwidth limits on my mobile and got throttled for five days. It made my phone so unusable that I turned on hotspot on my work phone and connected to that over wifi when I went to lunch.

kjs3 6mo ago

I had a client complain that some software we recommended installed a database. How fucking dare we install this giant blob of software without his consent! It was MySQL, and integral to the application. So what's your solution? A click-through acceptance of every single library, component, dependency, etc. every app uses? P.S. - out here in the real world of the people who just use software, they don't want this. Which is its own problem, because they should care more than they do, but we play the hand we're delt.

anigbrowl 6mo ago
That's going to the opposite extreme. Making major components optional and including some basic information about what they are at install time is easy to do. It's very common with creative software and even some games. I think this will be increasingly true in this extended period of more expensive memory and storage media. The Macbook Neo, for example, has 250GB onboard storage and 8gb memory. Many users will not want to spend 2% of their storage and allocate half their memory just to run a web browser.
- xp84 6mo ago
  I agree that the disk usage we're discussing here is especially painful on that hardware, but: > "just to run a web browser" I don't even mean to be hyperbolic here, but 'running a web browser' is almost the only purpose of a MacBook Neo for at least 90% of its target audience. Consider what normal people do on a laptop: - Email - web browser - Social media - web browser - pay bills, research, book trips - web browser - watch video content - web browser For many users, you could hide the Dock and just autolaunch Chrome at Startup and it wouldn't have any negative impact on them. And I'd bet that any browser with more than 5 tabs open, especially without an adblocker, is using whatever portion of its paltry 8GB of RAM that the OS hasn't hogged. So the argument to be made for allowing some feature bloat (and paying the space cost) in a browser is that this is probably the app most people will spend 75-100% of their time in anyway.
  - danudey 6mo ago
    Running a web browser _with a local AI model_ is likely something that most users are not aiming for. This is extra disk and bandwidth for something that benefits Google but does nothing for the average user.