#Fuck_AI #climate #deGoogle #fascism

[stonebear2@hachyderm.io]

#Fuck_AI #climate #deGoogle #fascism

I'm well aware of the fact that getting rid of Google in your life is ..... non-trivial. However, comma, switching browsers is probably the closest to trivial you can get, and it's a huge win. Like, 4GB huge, among many other things.

It's time to ditch Chrome if you haven't already.

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

That Privacy Guy! (www.thatprivacyguy.com)

[stonebear2@hachyderm.io]

You can see the scale of the problem when 4GB isn't just "micro" it's "nano"... supposedly super-tiny, barely noticeable...

Also, I would be remiss in not recommending an alternative. I've been doing this a Long Time; I run four different browsers across my systems for different things, but if I hadda run _just one_, it would be Vivaldi.

Why?

1) It's the most Chrome-like without (most of) Chrome's bad habits. This is useful for e-commerce sites where *fox variants won't work.
2) The founders are two guys who jumped ship when Opera got acquired. While they didn't open-source the product, they've been burned by crapitalism (specific-variant sense) and the featureset they've added, including translation, RSS, IMAP/POP, adblock/tracker block, and hibernation of tabs just really tickles my inner nerd... although, much like Emacs, to which it has been compared, it's perfectly possible to use a basic subset of the browser's full power and still have a good experience.
3) It can do web apps. I don't have Slack or Mapy or Windy apps on my desktop. I have Vivaldi web apps. It saves having multiple Electron images in memory of varying sorts, and it also saves rather a lot of disk... I'm tempted to try doing other piggy, fussy apps in there... I trust Vivaldi's sandboxing way more than I do a proprietary Electron..
4) Running the IMAP client _in a browser_ means I can do browser-y things on an email message (like translate it in-situ or right-click "open in private window") which you can't do with things like Fastmail or Sylpheed... (no, I don't like running webmail in any other browser because it's too easy to lose the webmail tab... but in Vivaldi the inbox widget is findable from any Vivaldi window...)
5) oh, and they're on Mastodon. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN NODE and encourage Vivaldi account holders to use it.

What do I not like? Its default VPN support is Proton. The app itself isn't open source. I wish I knew whether webapps were really sandboxed. I haven't figured out how to WebDAV Contacts/Calendar (yet). That's about it.