Bitcoin maximalist, coder, free and curious. Never stop playing… Never give up.
Born 10 years B₿
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On May 4th, a Swedish privacy lawyer caught Google Chrome silently installing a 4 GB AI model on every desktop computer it could reach.
If you delete the file, Chrome treats the deletion as a temporary error and downloads it again at the next opportunity.
The file is called weights.bin. It lives in a folder called OptGuideOnDeviceModel inside the Chrome user profile directory. It is the weights for Gemini Nano, Google's on-device large language model.
Hundreds of millions of devices now carry it. Two thirds of every desktop browser in the world is Chrome. Alexander Hanff, the Swedish privacy lawyer, installed a clean copy of Chrome on a fresh Mac, ran a script that visited a hundred webpages with no human input, and watched the system logs as Chrome silently wrote 4 GB to his disk.
Chrome 147 ships with an "AI Mode" pill rendered in the address bar. A reasonable user, knowing Chrome just installed an on-device AI model, would assume that visible AI Mode feature uses the model sitting on their hard drive. Local query. Local processing. Local privacy. Every part of that assumption is wrong.
The visible AI feature ships your queries to Google's servers. The 4 GB file on your hard drive does nothing visible. It powers obscure features buried in right-click menus that almost no Chrome user has ever clicked. The invisible binary sits on your disk and waits for the version that does.
Chrome is the most-installed surveillance product of all time. Two billion users. Every URL you visit, every search you type, every form you fill out, every site you stay on, every site you leave. The advertising model that pays for Chrome requires every one of those signals.
Chrome holds 64% of the global desktop browser market. Two-thirds of every reader of this sentence is reading it through software that just took 4 GB of their hard drive without asking.
Until last year, Chrome's surveillance ended at what you typed into the address bar and what your activity log showed. The model can now read the page you have open, the text you have selected, the draft you are writing inside a Gmail tab before you have decided whether to send it.
Google's "Help me write" feature requires that capability by definition. Help me write means read what I am writing. Locally. In real time. Pre-send.
It's time to switch browsers. The cartel cannot watch the screen it is not running on.
@Fedde538098@remcodb Er is geen echte congestie, alleen een papieren congestie. We zijn de afgelopen 10-20 jaar MINDER stroom gaan gebruiken, probleem is de wiebelstroom van de windmolens en zonnepanelen. Tijd voor meer gas/kerncentrales, lost alles op.
@WouterHODL@Innerdevcrypto Looking at good ways to do this myself too... But the state wants a LOT when I sell my business, which I do not want to do, just move it elsewhere. But that makes no difference in paying the "exit tax".. :( Did you pay the freedom fee?
@jesseklaver Laten we dan ook beginnen met 50% van de ambtenaren te ontslaan en hun taken te schappen (dus geen consultants inhuren in plaats). Kunnen we het leven van gewone mensen nog veel betaalbaarder maken. Kan zelfs de belasting hard naar beneden... win win
@lockwoodgary85@Breedlove22 yes you can. You can pay to get goods/work done by someone else. Nothing is to be had free without spending energy, apart from sunlight itself...
Cable tunnels (in multiple directions) for a huge ~60.000m2 underground Nuclear bunker complex near Frankfurt. I went in for around a kilometer, then returned (seems to have no end).
There are around 1.200 bunkers in Germany that are being assessed, selected for possible reuse.
@patricksavalle@arnowellens Eens. Zou het met belasting ook zo werken? Als we maar genoeg massa hebben met niet betalen... het aangepast zal worden? of met stemmen? Hoe krijg je zo'n movement gaande...
@cryptus_jesus@BitcoiNicos ah, je doelt op de wegen. dacht een wandeling in een bos ofzo. Ja,zou liever gewoon overal tolwegen hebben. En geen wegenbelasting, geen overheden die wegen bouwen.Want die huren gewoon een bedrijf in die dat doet,met alle overhead. Kan je beter de overheid ertussenuithalen,niet?