Artificial Intelligence

[L'Emmerdeur]

Chrome browser wants you to have a 'little' LLM on your machine.

'Chrome silently installs a 4 GB local LLM on your computer'

Google Chrome will steal 4 GB of disk space from your computer for its local large language model unless you opted out.

It's called weights.bin and it's stored in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel. What's more, if you track down the file and delete it, Chrome will download a fresh copy and reinstate it.

The discovery was announced this week by Alexander Hanff, who blogs as "the Privacy Guy," in a somewhat sensationally titled blog post: Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.

It doesn't seem to be new, though: there are signs that Chrome has been doing this for quite some time. In April 2025, this Reddit post suggests the model was "just" 3 GB, but a Stack Overflow question says that by November 2025 it was already up to 4 GB. We would not be at all surprised if soon it went to five.

...

If you didn't opt out, Google has some info on how to disable it. In brief: in Chrome's address box, enter the special URL chrome://flags. In the resulting page, look for an entry named optimization-guide-on-device-model and set it to Disabled, then restart Chrome. The browser should then delete the weights.bin file.

In theory, you can also use your OS to block this – or deploy enterprise policies, if you're free to set your own. (With any luck, soon this will be part of the Just The Browser policy that we reported on in January.)

The Reddit post we linked above says that Windows users can set a Registry key. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome, create a DWORD key called GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings and set it to 1, then restart Chrome.

[Brian Peacock]

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one.

[Svartalf]

well, google not respecting your privacy and even effing stealing space from your disk unless you manage to opt out from something that i guess was deliberately hidden and made difficult to notice? anybody surprised? any question as to why I deleted chrome from my machine with extreme prejudice (and would do the same for edge except wincrap won't let me) and avoid browsers based on chromium as much as can be?

[Tero]

You signed the waiver when you installed Chrome.

[pErvinalia]

Yep, I'm deleting chrome because of this. I don't really use it now that I don't still work at my old job where I needed multiple browsers.

[Tero]

Google's chatbot is now in the Gemini series. In 49'languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Gemini

An article on the language AI uses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ... AI_writing

[Svartalf]

You signed the waiver when you installed Chrome.

well, I didn't, last time I'd chrome on this machine was well before they'd have that creepy AI thing...
still, learning they are still up to that kind of shenanigans makes me happy I ditched them.

[Tero]

I can get used to most browsers but not the Microsoft one. I have Brave which is the second one to use if Chrome does not work. My ad blocker on Chrome gets me blocked from sites. Even if I pause on their page.

[Tero]

In my most recent version of understanding what we are, I have borrowed heavily from AI thinking. Our brain evolved for generation to process information. It sends it to the frontal cortex and that in turn explains to "you" what the situation is. The "you" also has buffered smoothed information from the world continuously. In the same way that AI cannot explain to you how it got the answer, your frontal lobe cannot explain how the info in the brain is processed. neurons firing end up with an idea, image wahtever to the frontal cortex. it cannot explain how it got there. It just generates the thoughts that conscious "you" can understand.

There, I used the dreaded term conscious.

[Svartalf]

I can get used to most browsers but not the Microsoft one. I have Brave which is the second one to use if Chrome does not work. My ad blocker on Chrome gets me blocked from sites. Even if I pause on their page.

first, you should not even try to see if chrome works... ban the spy device cuckoo thing from you machine with extreme prejudice, you should be happier
second, brave still is a chromium line browsers, meaning that despite all their claims, I can't bring myself to fully trust them. to me, the whole chromium family is tainted by its original member.

[Tero]

I have failed, I gave up. Google won. Amazon I am still waging a weak effort to resist.

[Tero]

AI world is exploding!
But it looks a lot like Trump tweting in the middle of the night

We’re evolving our strategy to optimize for the future state of software engineering:

Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents will plan, code, review, deploy, and repair. Humans still own the judgment that matters most: architecture, deep understanding of the customer problem, the tradeoffs that require taste. This is why we built and released the Duo Agent Platform in January. Our first quarter adoption is promising, and we're ready to accelerate.

The agentic era multiplies demand for software. Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. The constraint was the cost and time of producing and managing it. That constraint is collapsing. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. Last year, the developer platform market used to be measured in tens of dollars per user per month, this year it is hundreds/user/month and headed to thousands.

Orchestration across the full lifecycle. A single agent that writes code or opens a merge request produces activity. Enterprises don't need agent activity. They need running software that moves the business forward. Orchestration is the layer that gets you there. It coordinates agents across the lifecycle, assigning work, managing state, passing context, resolving conflicts, enforcing policy, and keeping a human in the loop when it matters.

snip

Why we're initiating a transparent restructure of the company
This restructure process is not like others you may be seeing in the news. Of course AI is changing the way we work and is part of our transformation plan, but this is not an AI optimization or cost cutting exercise. We intend to reinvest the vast majority of savings back into the business to accelerate our unique opportunity in the agentic era as defined in our Act 2 Core Beliefs.

The voluntary window exists for you. After three days walking through Act 2 together, you have the picture you need to decide whether GitLab is the right place for you in the next chapter of your career. If it isn't, talk to your manager or director and, where local requirements allow, apply for a separation before May 18. If approved, we'll include you in the same separation package as anyone else.

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

where will all the electricity and chips come from?

[Brian Peacock]

The energy will come from the usual place - but your lights might have to go out 4 nights a week. The chips will come from space when Musk starts mining the asteroids.

[Tero]

‘Irresponsible’: backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan
Facility would require more power than entire state uses and suck up vast amount of water in drought-stricken area

The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... r-backlash

[pErvinalia]

Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques

A fascinating art social experiment unfolded on social media this week after someone shared an actual Monet painting as an AI-generated artwork and asked people to explain what makes the “AI image” inferior to a genuine Monet piece. There was no shortage of “sharp-eyed” critics eager to chime in.
It all started after X user @SHL0MS posted the painting and wrote: “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe, in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting.”

The user even marked the post with X’s “Made with AI” label to add to the deception.

In reality, the painting is one of the 250 oil paintings in the renowned French Impressionist painter Claude Monet’s Water Lilies series in which he depicted scenes from his home flower garden over the final 31 years of his life.

Critics, however, were eager to point out all kinds of “obvious” details that show why the “AI” Monet can’t hold a candle to a genuine Monet. One person even took the time to write out an 850-word breakdown of the AI work’s shortcomings.

.....

People are pointing out that results of this silly experiment are in line with what studies have shown about how people perceive art differently in light of how it was produced. The famous 2004 Kruger study into something called the effort heuristic found that people liked and valued artworks more if they believe they took more time and effort to create.

There is also a natural human bias against AI. A 2024 study published in Nature found that while people generally prefer AI-generated artworks over human-made ones when they didn’t know they were AI-generated, they preferred AI art less after finding out that AI was behind it.

“Participants were unable to consistently distinguish between human and AI-created images,” write researchers Simone Grassini and Mika Koivisto in the article titled “Understanding how personality traits, experiences, and attitudes shape negative bias toward AI-generated artworks”. “Furthermore, despite generally preferring the AI-generated artworks over human-made ones, the participants displayed a negative bias against AI-generated artworks when subjective perception of source attribution was considered, thus rating as less preferable the artworks perceived more as AI-generated, independently on their true source.

“Our findings hold potential value for comprehending the acceptability of products generated by AI technology.”

It would be interesting for someone to now conduct the same experiment with photographs, perhaps with an obscure photo by Ansel Adams, for example. Given what science is showing about negative human feelings toward AI artwork, the results would presumably be just as hilarious.