The Gemini on my device just became 10x smarter. Google Assistant didn’t know ‘what was the temperature a year ago’. and Gemini has no problem with it.
The increasing enshittification of every service pushed me to GrapheneOS long before Google could force this shit on me
this makes zero sense because it’s on device, it’s no difference than the damage that just owning a phone is costing, are people here special?
I swear people just want a reason to freak out. Atleast make sense if you’re going to post such a stupid article title.
It’s funny because they’re trying to find ways to cut cloud costs by offloading to users, but when that’s not a concern, they shove everything into the cloud and then ensure no local running option is available or viable.
What are you even talking about?
Alarming, but not surprising.
The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn’t work.
I don’t do web development or anything, but I haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn’t like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I’ll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it’s over to normal firefox.
Can someone ELI5 why they are doing this? I thought all the AI shit was in the cloud?
AI runs in the cloud because it needs a powerful server to run the biggest (i.e. “smartest”) models.
The cloud servers are doing nothing special that another powerful enough computer could do, just a huge amount of data processing.
You can run an ai chat on a steam deck or directly on a phone, if it’s not too demanding (“smarter” models are bigger data files, so won’t fit in the memory of a small device).
Today, for instance, I had a phone call from “Spectrum Internet support” and part-way through the call my phone blared an alarm and said “possible scam” on screen.
The phone itself interpreted the conversation as sus.
https://support.google.com/phoneapp/answer/15654065?hl=en
For Pixel 9 and later devices: Scam Detection is powered by Gemini Nano on-device
They need their features to work offline too probably.
It’s also cheaper, if they can offload a portion to the user’s computer.
since edge is chrome based i’d expect another 4g copy there. fuck windows
This is very alarming. My eyes have never been opened so widely as they are in the last two months since I started ungoogling and FOSSing. This post has veritably split my eyelids.
uninstalled Chrome a looooong time ago on my Win 10 machine
I’ve used Firefox since 2004 and never once thought about using Chrome.
Uninstalled Chrome and Windows a looooooong time ago on my computer
You had Chrome installed?
You guys have computers?
Hey, when I was a kid I had a slide rule.
Back in my day, computer was a job, and all you had was an abacus. We liked it that way. None of this newfangled al-gebra nonsense.
I am a meat popsicle.
Remove and prevent 4 GB Gemini nano install into Chrome, on Windows 11:
- Backup registry
- Start
- regedit
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies
- right-click Policies, New, Key
- confirm Google, Enter
- right-click Google, New, Key
- confirm Chrome, Enter
- right-click Chrome, New, DWORD (32-bit) Value
- confirm GenAILocalFoundationalModelSettings, Enter
- right-click newly created key, Modify
- set value to 1
- OK
- Restart computer. https://pureinfotech.com/stop-chrome-gemini-nano-download-windows-11/
Or, you know don’t install software from companies owned and operated by psychopaths, like Google and Microsoft.
- Uninstall Chrome
- Uninstall Windows
- Uninstall boot loader
- Uninstall cmos
- Uninstall ac unit
- Wait at least 30 sex
- Begin new life with linux
This sounds like something a flag can solve…
“Linux is hard” but godawful reg key hacks are fiiiiine, eh.
Hell, even borking my linux install was a relatively painless experience. I was updating from Fedora 43 to 44 and noticed at one point that my keyboard had power but nothing was displaying on my monitor. Capslock still responded so I wondered if the update had messed up the video display or something and restarted after seeing someone say that they saw the same and restarting seemed to actually kick off the update.
Well, for me, it fucked the dnf5 install, which I tried fixing from the command line for a bit before deciding to just grab the 44 iso and install it fresh. I kept my home and game partitions and just reinstalled the root dir, then created two new accounts, renamed one of them to my old username and took over the old home dir, logged in and it was like the update had just worked. Only thing I need to do to get back to where I was is reinstall some packages or software. All the settings are stored in my home dir, so even the ones I don’t have yet will get their old settings back when I do get around to installing them. All I had to do was install steam and it launched like it normally does, all my installed games still there.
And I’m pretty sure I could have even done this with a different distro and whatever was the same would have preserved settings, too.
No cloud involved or even saving any files specifically. I did ask an LLM what I should preserve to make sure I wasn’t missing anything but everything it suggested waa already in home. It could have gone even quicker if I wasn’t overthinking it so much, but it was just like an hour or so before I was back up and running once I started the install process.
Omg!!! You’re absolutely right! Running through YouTube tutorials from India or Linux terminal videos from India is exactly the same!
I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, “it’s easy to work around that. You just have to…” and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.
But even if it’s easy to do that, it’s not easy.
- You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there’s a different one for every problem.
- You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
- You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don’t want you to be able to remove their trash.
- You have to vet the tools, make sure they’re not malware. And continuously make sure it’s not replaced by malware in the future. There’s no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.
didnt make the switch, but it feels like theres more and more shit to disable on fresh installs
Naw, Linux is easy, until OBS won’t start virtual camera because V4L has dependency on the previous kernel which is pretty old.
if you did’t run it right after the update, you might not even put together it was a kernel issue.
No easy errors, start obs from cli see v4l errors out, start digging into v4l, it’s not hard, but you have to know about it, then you have to know grub well enough to select an old kernel.
If there is one thing AI is useful for, it’s to make sense of and learn Linux.
Yeah, that’s a relatively easy issue to debug. It goes to show that it’s really about where your familiarity level is.
Personally, my familiarity level is maybe 2 out of 10. Don’t really know what I’m doing with Linux, only made the jump a few weeks ago. I’ve had to google some stuff but it’s still much less hassle than windows. I just got bored of seeing all those ‘switch to linux durr’ comments so I gave it a try, turns out they were right.
Those comments really do get tedious. But there’s no billion-dollar company pushing desktop Linux and buying podcast ads and whatnot, so … there’s really no other way to get the word out.
I think the overlap between people who think using Linux is hard and the people who would open regedit in the first place is basically zero.
Yup. I don’t think it’s hard. I used to have a dual boot setup. I’m just lazy.
And by that I mean, lazy enough that messing with regedits is something I’m already familiar/comfortable with and can do relatively quickly.
Too lazy to (re)learn an entirely new OS and file system (it’s also why I’m still on Win10 because fuck Win11), learn what programs of mine are compatible and not compatible, dealing with grub/kernals anytime I need to diagnose an issue, etc.
That being said, Windows will eventually piss me off to the final breaking point/straw where my anger/spite will outweigh my laziness. And THEN they’ll be sorry!
But until then… Opens up regedit with a sigh
I’m in the overlap where I can easily follow reg edit direction and similar tutorials but can’t actually diagnose it myself. I wouldn’t have a clue. These known regedit edit workaround posts exist and are spread because there’s a ton of people in this overlap. We just aren’t vocal because it’s not one of our hills to die on.
But I can deal with cars, fix older models, and avoid buying an internet-connected model. Shit, I even learned how to fix drum brakes to maintain my options. I also disconnected my smart TV and grabbed a retired pc with win 10 pro or whatever to get some control back over that.
I do what I can, but at the end of the day, I still need to relax at some point.
Honest question, not necessarily for you but for maybe one of those people that actually understands the registry - how do those people figure that stuff out? Like, do software authors actually publish their registry config, or do people have to decompile/reverse engineer things to figure out what registry settings a given program might use?
keys tend to be organized (that’s a horrible word for whatt he registry is lol) in a handful of locations depending on context. so those chrome keys are next to the other chrome keys. in enterprise we mod that area pretty often.
the 2 was to discover a new key are:
- reg watcher that takes a baseline, then you install soemething, and you see the diff.
- in the case of no new key has been added (like for this new setting), most softwares have support articles aimed at Enterprise Admins who need to control deployments granularly. So the regkeys tend to be available.
Sometimes some dev figures it out, sometimes word spreads from the devs themselves on Discord/etc. Sometimes if you contact Support they have that workaround (after escalating to engineer). Not that you can easily get to Google Engineers, but you have a much better track with say a paid Workspace account.
It’s a FT job though to maintain a set of controlled software in an enterprise environment. Constant fiddling/tweaking. SOmetimes it’s a RegKey, sometimes a GPO setting, sometimes you’re modding a config file in AppData, or adding some lines to a Logon Script. And a lot of the info spreads by word of mouth still and to really answer your question - sometimes, no one knows where the hell it came from but after days of searching, you’re happy some random forum post finally worked and you hope to never have to touch it again. Then you close your ticket and move on to the next one.
I don’t miss it lol
There are tools that let you hook the registry and see what keys programs are trying to read from.
Ah ok cool, that was the sort of middle ground option I was missing
Tell that to my Windows desktop support coworkers, hah.
It’s really all about what you’re familiar with.
after setting up a windows machine started taking days instead of a few minutes, I quit using it. so many bloated spywares you’d never get them all
And Apple, don’t forget Apple.
Macintosh.
“zsh: regedit: command not found…” I use arch btw. 😂
zsh
Good.
no no no; since you are using zsh you will need to use ragedit not regedit.
And of course you made sure we know you use zsh because of course you do
I use fish btw
I use women btw to fill a gap in my life i cant see
That’s the joke!
I was about to type something something about just switching to Linux and at least Firefox but you already got there in the end
Remember how few years ago there was a massive outcry when U2s album was downloaded to devices without permission?
I remember when Sony installed rootkits on our home computers when we played CDs with music we bought.
I have not bought a single Sony device or product since.
Never forget.
My mom never used iTunes on her phone, meaning she never once put any music on her phone, and so she was completely confused/angry when she’d get in her car and suddenly it would pair and start playing this U2 album. She didn’t know how to stop it, so it would play over and over (she’d just drop the volume). It also didn’t help that the cover art is among the gayest things to ever appear on her phone screen. I’d come home to visit and get in her car and she’d just start hollering “this stupid thing, where did this come from?!?”
Two decades. We’re old
As I said, few years ago.
It was last year. /s
I believe they did it a second time more recently.
Remember how pissed off everyone was when Sony added software to people’s computers?
Do you mean that time they installed a rootkit on people’s PCs when they went to play (what was supposed to be) a music CD, or the time they retroactively and remotely sabotaged Linux on people’s Playstations?
Just wondering which massive felony that should’ve landed the entire C-suite in prison you’re referring to, since there was more than one.
I may be a forgetful curmudgeon, but I sure remember those!
*shakes cane at things*
Hey come on now, there’s no need to lie. We all know that when the C-suite does it it’s not a crime in America. It’s illegal to hold them accountable!
/wrist :(
The sad thing is that Sony is multinational, and they weren’t prosecuted in Japan or anywhere else, either.
I think the rootkit was only on CD’s sold in North America. I could be wrong though.
Nope Europe too
…did you mean to say Korea?
What do you mean? I don’t follow.
Remember when people used to go insane in newsgroups screaming bloat if a program update was 80 KB bigger than the previous version and now people do not notice an extra 4 GB.
Free music was awesome.
No they took payment
If it was actually good people may not have cared so much.
Even if it was good - and it’s not - it’s still an incredibly unethical thing to do.
The big deal about that was that it was added to people’s libraries and couldn’t be removed.
This isn’t pushed in your face, and you can easily uninstall Chrome.
The U2 album could be easily removed. The issue is that the average iTunes user doesn’t remove songs from their libraries, and thus had no idea the option to do so even existed and just assumed they were stuck with the album.
Well, and it was U2.
Idk about that, you can’t uninstall any of the ai bs they put on phones and computers, from microsoft to android. You can’t uninstall edge on a newer computer either, not without being an IT specialist or whatever.
It’s like the new Bitcoin miner.
It’s worse even, at least a Bitcoin miner would get you Bitcoin, this gets you slop for the same amount of GPU cycles
The AI Mode pill in the Chrome 147 omnibox is a cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface - every query the user types into it is sent over the network to Google’s servers for processing by Google’s hosted models. The on-device Nano model is not invoked by the AI Mode UI flow at all. They are entirely separate code paths - the most visible AI affordance in the browser does not use the local model the user has been silently given, and the features that do use the local model (Help-Me-Write in <textarea>, tab-group AI suggestions, smart paste, page summary) are buried in textarea-context menus and tab-group right-click menus that the average user will discover, on average, never.
What a double kick to the dick. First, they silently download 4gb to your disk, and they still fucking send your shit to their cloud AI.
>cloud-backed Search Generative Experience surface
😡🤢🤮
4GB is now a Nano model?
It’s probably a typo and supposed to be Nanu. In German, nanu is an expression of surprise. This model’s slogan is “Nanu, wo kommt das denn her?” meaning “Huh, where did this come from?”.
That’s interesting. It’s an “old man” way of saying “nani?!” in Japanese.
A less harmful Chrome derivative:
That’s your fault for using Chrome.
