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Hadn’t used it or upgraded it in a year. I deleted chrome from my Linux box. It felt. Pretty good actually.
A preinstalled AI on the most popular web browser that most people wont even know is there sounds like a nearly perfect recipe for a cybersecurity and/or misinformation nightmare.
Another reason I’m glad I degoogled my phone.
I did that too, but that was a very long time ago. A the time, I had some serious problems with getting specific apps working. Is it any better these days?
All the bare bones basics still worked fine. It’s just that the modern world kinda expects you to have access to much more than what was considered basics back then. Just because you have email and a web browser on your phone doesn’t make your phone smart enough in many cases. If you want to do modern things in the modern world, you’re expected to run specific apps that may or may not run at all unless you have vanilla Android on your phone. Did you run into issues like that?
I’m running GrapheneOS with their sandboxes Google Services. Its rare to find an app they doesn’t run. My bank and credit card’s apps are full of trackers so I just use a PWA.
Thanks to sandboxing in GrapheneOS, I haven’t ran into any of those issues. Things like banking apps that are only available through the play store ecosystem can be installed anonymously via Aurora, and play services can’t usurp the sandbox, so you can limit the permissions of it and all apps (including spoofing permissions that they can’t actually use)
Everything I’ve needed to use runs pretty great on GrapheneOS so far, and I’ve been on it for years now. The non-Android mobile Linuxs have a lot further to go (so I’ve heard), but may become the only option depending on what Google does to Android in the future.
The author doesn’t say it happens on phones
homer_so_far.bmp
True. But it’s unlikely that it will. More likely is apps using a phone-wide ML service.
You already shouldn’t be using Chrome, and if this is what moves the needle, great.
At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane.
No.
Just flatly, no.
Local models spin your GPU like a video game. Unless you think Overwatch is a climate disaster, please learn to separate datacenter condemnation from people running their own computers a little harder.
I’d say you should read the article a little more closely, but it’s not written very well. But it brings up interesting things that have nothing to do with your local GPU usage. For example, it names an interesting point about simply delivering 4 gigabytes of data to that many people. If pushed out to ~15% of Chrome users without consent:
- That’d be 500 million people
- It would be 2 exabytes of data
- 120 GWh of energy, equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of about 36,000 average UK households
- 30,000 tonnes CO2 emitted, roughly the annual emissions of 6,500 cars
And that’s just for the initial data push. Models need ✨updates!✨
We must kill the environmental disaster that is Steam.
Youtube is history’s greatest monster.
Installing a game you want is different than hundreds of millions of people having something they didn’t ask for getting pushed on them.
Not in terms of power use.
Power use is not always bad. Power waste is. 4GB I’m not going to use is much worse than 6GB I will use.
The atmosphere doesn’t care whether you found joy in how you’ve impacted it. Either downloading files is bad, actually, or it’s not a big deal.
What happened to separating personal use from condemning data centers for expending unnecessary and unwanted energy?
Does consent change how much power a server uses?
Here, yes. Two exabytes of data transfer could have been one or zero.
I don’t get the point you’re trying to make here.
Local models spin your GPU like a video game. Unless you think Overwatch is a climate disaster
90% of users aren’t playing Overwatch.
And even if you are, that’s a significant increase in power draw if you’re spinning up a local LLM every time you start to type into your browser’s address bar to do a search or something.
And, most importantly, you can choose when and if you want to play Overwatch. It didn’t get installed without your knowledge and consent, and it doesn’t run automatically.
If everyone chose to play Overwatch, would that be a climate catastrophe, specifically?
I’m not sure if that would rise the level of ‘catastrophe’ but it would certainly draw a lot of power, which would be bad for the climate, since much of that power would come from burning fossil fuels.
Does the general existence of the video game industry deserve the same finger-wagging about environmental impact? Guy in the other subthread did the math for everyone downloading this one file, and refuses to extend that concern to all the people streaming movies.
I don’t feel like using your video card is the worst thing most randos have done re: climate change. There’s some uncomfortable accounting every time you eat a hamburger.
The power involved here is just not a big deal. Not unless we want to harangue people for a variety of other unremarkable habits.
Removed by mod
Agreed. Hate the data centers and corporate obsession with extreme waste for total value capture. Not the tech, especially on a local scale.
A 128GB amd strix halo runs at 120W and can host large LLMs at home. If you ran it full time for inference it would still be under $20/mo in electricity costs.
Install Chrome, get Chrome, including the AI parts. If you don’t like it, don’t use Chrome.
AFAIK Chromium is almost the same and doesn’t have this.
