861–870 of 1001 posts
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It is changing the product significantly. I wanted/consented to a browser. Nothing more. Agreeable, nothing new with the browser vendor pushing plugins down our throat which are not browser core features, nevertheless not right.
Welcome to 2026, in which a browser is an operating system!
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I use Chrome because at Google Meet it renders a nice separate window with mute/unmute controls as you switch to another tab and screen share. Curious if Google plans to allow other browsers doing that too.
You could use Chromium just for Google Meet. That's what I do. I have Chromium relatively up to date that I basically solely use when I need to. It can be Google Meet, or Teams, or whatever was purposely botched in order NOT to work with Firefox, basically sabotage, but it can also be very rare cases like Lego Spike or GrapheneOS Web installer which require WebUSB. 99.99% I do not need Chromium but when I do, it's wo…
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Hey if people could go for their pitchforks and torches over Apple giving them a free U2 album that ate up limited device storage space, we have every right to be upset at Google's audacity to suddenly gobble up 4 fucking GB Also from the same webiste, Claude installing spyware: https://www.thatprivacyguy.com/blog/anthropic-spyware/ but discussion about that seems to have been suppressed on HN: https://hn.algolia.com…
That was an even more ridiculous post. It wasn't spyware, it was a messaging bridge being installed for exactly the purpose it was intended. It was Claude Desktop installing a bridge that would allow Claude browser plugins to communicate with it. It was only used if the user had installed the browser plugin, and all it did was grant that plugin access to the app that had installed it!
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Maybe it’s pro-browser activism. A browser should render web pages not bring its own AI
Yeah, it's already egregious how resource intensive browsing the web can be, between the browser and the content its loading. Why should we just accept that Google will force another performance hit by loading up an AI model as well?
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We don't have AI. We have language models trained by rapacious companies on copyrighted material with no concern for copyright violations and with a penchant for intentionally anthropomorhizing their models. I'm an anti corporate malfeasance activist. Hacker News and it's underemployed and underpaid user base gets these two confused all the time. I assure you, your tolerance for language models, or your willingness t…
It's not a copyright violation if courts have ruled it's not I have no pay scale to worry about, I own the software I build and don't rely on wages
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It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of. Reminds me a bit of back when installing software was a minefield due to all of the integrated "promotions" for things like toolbars, only now they've vertically integrated the unwanted software, cutting out the middleman. Honestly, for most features you could justifiably say its fine. I mean honestly, how large is an Englis…
> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bundle…
It's called a PUP, or Potentially Unwanted Program and most anti-viruses offer to remove them. They can be legitimately installed, but often aren't. (Usually they were shipped in the installers of legitimate software downloaded from sketchy distributors.)
Random AI models being shipped with Chrome is very much a PUP. The user wanted to browse the internet, not use a model. They'd install an extension if they wanted that.
The Ask toolbar was seen as a virus. Mozilla had massive user bleed in Firefox due to installing sponsored extensions in the browser. The only reason this shit isn't regarded the same way is because it's both done by Google and because it's labeled with AI, so all AI bros have to retroactively find an excuse to justify it.
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4GB, $0.10 (whatever the HD price) that is the equivalent of a High School level intelligent brain that can perform many cognitive tasks (and in the future even PhD level intelligence) for free? Oh, the horror!!! Wait, let me pay my HVAC guy $500 he deserved because he came all the way from his home to replace a fuse
If you’re pissed you had to pay your HVAC guy to drive to your house and do something you think is trivial, why didn’t you do it yourself?
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> It's additional software that many users didn't ask for, don't want and will not be aware of > You just described 95% of the parts of all software, especially in this era. And think of the Web - how many gigabytes of terrible adtech and tracking code does the average user download in a month of web browsing without an adblocker? Remember, each one probably packages in a couple hundred NPM dependencies into its bund…
The story is only trending because it’s an AI model and the internet is anti-ai right now. It’s a double standard. It’s like how people are outraged that electricity is being used in data centers to power AI models. When you do the math, the power consumption is far, far less than all the other things you do all day without thinking twice. But again, anti-AI double standard
The 'internet' is not an entity. Outrage and engagement drive ads. Beyond that 'AI' has very little benefit for most people and it's straight loss if you look at consumer electronics (getting price out of PCs) or energy prices.
cloud: FUCK YOU GOOGLE