Seems to me like Microsoft might be opposed to this duopoly and have pockets deep enough to fight it, right? For one, this would make their possible re-entry into the mobile space harder and more costly but I guess it'll inevitably become a standard that other providers could fulfill.
I'm not unconvinced Hegseth bought wholesale into the book version of Starship Troopers, since Heinlein complaining about calling it the Department of Defense is one of his stand-in character rants. But that is my personal bias since I forced myself to suffer through it recently.
I don't know what Costco parking lots in the PNW are like but in the NE, they're a nightmare. People racing around, lining up and jockeying for spots, enormous carts careening around and being left ... wherever because people can't be bothered to put them back. My family has a membership but I permanently opted out after one trip to the Danbury, CT location.
> otherwise you are rarely confronted by the staff here, and I like that.
That is, until they try to stop you from leaving the store with your property until you show them a receipt.
> ... I don't know what Costco parking lots in the PNW are like but in the NE...
I live near, and commute by, one of the PNW Costcos in the PDX area the author explicitly references. I can confirm that just the mere sight of the parking lot, at all hours, has been the primary factor in my refusing to get a membership. Plenty of friends and family I trust love Costco, and I'm sure they're right and that I'd find lots to appreciate, but that damn parking lot madness is such a hump for me to get over.
FWIW, I'm referring to the Beaverton Costco right next to Nike.
Nashua NH Costco is crowded most days, but not near what you're describing.
I also don't like the door check 'game.' Additionally, being hounded at checkout to upgrade your plan while juggling a 5 year old, dealing with payment, and a line full of people behind you is not enjoyable.
My secret is just parking immediately on the edge of the lot and walking the 100 yards on in. People will play this stupid game for 10 minutes getting steaming red waiting for a spot near the front and I'm already shopping.
This is a good option if there are any spots available. At my local Costcos (Danbury and Orange, CT) the lots are often completely full and there's a queue just to enter the lot.
This and also, "Wait, so you didn't do anything when ... ?"
It gives you a new found level of empathy or, at least, understanding for the people throughout history who "should have done something". We all (well, most of us) grew up thinking that if we were a workaday German (fill in the conflict) with Jewish neighbors that we'd have obviously hidden them in our attic or whatever. It turns out the reality of taking that class of action is actually a lot more fraught that your 4th grade self thought it was.
Would you harbor a neighbor facing deportation to some far flung prison camp? You have to be willing to face the consequences of losing your home, job, liberty and life. If not, what would change the calculus enough for you to do so? If you know they're in your country legally? If they were pregnant? If the prison was rumored to be executing people?
It was notable that in Minneapolis enough people were doing this kind of thing that ICE were seriously impaired, and had to resort to escalation and shooting Americans in the street.
> It turns out the reality of taking that class of action is actually a lot more fraught that your 4th grade self thought it was.
It's funny my entire adult life has been me slowly realizing that no, it is not. It is easy to do what is right, it is easy to see what is right to do. Stop making excuses and do it.
I don't know where you live or what your life situation is but this line of reasoning is quite privileged and naive. It's one thing to _do direct action_ somewhere like France where the stakes are relatively low but in the US, where there is no social safety net and bankruptcy, foreclosure and friends are forever looming, there is a very real calculus (as outlined in my previous comment ...) for people with adult responsibilities to consider.
You're right, you don't know. Just as a quick relevant summary I'm american, old enough to be retired if that were possible, and have lived most of my life in poverty, illness, and incarceration with long stretches of homelessness.
These are your adult responsibilities, it's time to grow up.
This reality also crystalized for me earlier this week when I saw a post about unchecked AI slop videos about WWE being posted to YouTube. Many of the videos suffer from the LLM stroking out (for lack of a better term) and devolving into mumbling, screaming and white noise. Yet, the comments are replete with obvious bot content which doesn't mention this at all and talks past the larger, flimsy narrative on display (i.e. AI-generated), anyways. We're exhausting our natural resources and reducing quality of life for a great number of real, live people so bots can talk past each other on YouTube.
So, if you're looking for me, I'll be hiking while it's still legal.
You better mean “hiking” as in through the metaverse forest strapped into your corporate-sponsored VR headset, because outside time is for citizens only, friend.
Equating a 4GB file installed without explicit consent to the installation of a language dictionary is comical. That's like saying an unwanted political mailer left in your mailbox is the equivalent of a pallette of hammers left in your driveway.
It sounds like you have a specific number of GB in mind that an app can take up, below which it's totally their business, and above which they need to plead their case, disclose the purpose, and allow me to choose.
What's that number? How did you arrive at it and why?
My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows. Is this below or your line, or are they actually in trouble as soon as they're extracted?
My point is just that it seems there may be an arbitrary limit here that may not be the same for everyone (and 90% of users are nontechnical and thus couldn't give an answer whether 4GB is "worth it" for whatever the features are). Rather than add another whole ecosystem of "Cancel or Allow?" dialogs I'd rather operating systems did a better job of letting users put piggish applications on a strict space budget. Most of the apps on my phone are storing half a gig of "stuff" (called "Documents & Data" but not itemized, and even apps that have none of my 'data' such as browsers), which I can't force them to dump even in an extreme emergency. I can only delete the whole app.
I'm talking about Apple platforms as examples because I use those a lot and with their epic stinginess of SSD, anyone who doesn't pay $400 more than the base model will exhaust their storage within hours to months.
People don't typically have specific numbers already set aside whenever they discuss what is too much. The example given was people can handle a political flyer in the mailbox but not a pallet of hammers delivered in their driveway. Do you have specific amounts (probably will need to be a weight limit and a volume limit) already figured out when you think of how much junk someone can mail to you reasonably? Or how much HD space a browser is allowed to install before it gets to be not-their-buisness?
So as long as I'm allowed to bump into you I can also smash your face in, right? After all there isn't any clear point where I'm applying too much force.
agreed that not everyone has the same limit, but 4GB is big enough to be annoying to many. that still costs real money (in bandwidth) and storage (on low-end hardware) for a lot of folks.
> My Chrome binaries are about 700MB on Mac and 500MB on Windows
That's kind-of the point though right? An application that has been say <700 MB for decades, suddenly deciding it'll take a multiple of it's size without asking seems pretty unreasonable, I think it's pretty fair to say the expectations for Chrome were set already.
It'd be similarly unreasonable for a video game that once took 50 GB, to suddenly decide to take 400 GB.
Local storage and cache only have limits relative to available disk space in Chrome, IIRC, and can easily bloat to 100 GB without intervention. Personally I think that's a design flaw and they need customizable hard limits as well, but web browsers wasting space without asking is not a new or sudden development.
What a completely asinine post. I'm sick of seemingly smart people in the technical world think they are being so clever by trying to literally rehash the continuum fallacy. You hear this literally everytime anyone even so much as suggests a standard, norm or god forbid a regulation. It seems especially common among libertarian types who think governance of any kind of simply impossible because of it.
Just because there is a gradual spectrum between two states doesn't mean we can't draw distinctions. For example, just because we cannot define the exact, precise color when blue turns into green, it does not mean that blue and green are the same color for any normal person discussing an issue publicly in good faith.
When someone says "X and Y are on a spectrum, X is good and Y is bad", the point is to highlight the differences. Pointing out that the spectrum or continuum might not have a precise boundary has literally zero weight towards the validity of the ultimate conclusion a person is making here and really is just a complete derail done by people who have no substantive points to make.
The idea I was replying to suggests "consent" is needed, but apparently just for this one example of bloat.
And doesn't explain how normal non-hacker users (99% of the audience) are supposed to judge what "4GB" means to them.
I'm all for users getting to have more control over the usage of their finite resources, especially in this cursed age of soldered-down storage and RAM. But I disagree that some dialog that explains the feature and asks permission to use 4GB would improve anything. Honestly, it wouldn't even improve the PR with this crowd, it would just change the headline to "Chrome pushing users to download and install a 4GB model for so-called 'AI features'!"
Agreed. If anything your comment is too charitable. This is just one of the GP's highly sophistic comments here. Considering how he is exploiting the sorites paradox, I wouldn't be surprised if he bases his sophism on Zeno's paradox from time to time.
Excuse me while I go count the hairs on my chin to see if they are >= MIN_BEARD_THRESHOLD.
I'm sorry to have offended you. I had to go research all your interesting Greek philosophy terms.
I don't think it's too much to ask that someone at least define their line if they are saying apps must ask permission to use disk space. I didn't say consent is irrelevant. And I think when you're asking to burden the user with a technical question such as "Can I use 4GB" I struggle to see how most people can make a good informed choice. You can argue in this one case that the AI model is not useful and therefore it's "good actually" if users, not being able to judge what 4GB is, reject it even when they actually had plenty of space. But it seems like those who disagree with me here aren't really speaking to whether the model is useful (or if it has future potential), they're mad specifically about an app downloading a thing that's 'too big.'
Also, just pointing out - Apple also uses ODMs, which it installs on its customers' hardware via its normal default-on software update procedure, to power its (imho mostly useless) AI - to great praise for the positive privacy ramifications of on-device. So it's interesting to me that this one model's presence is being cited as a betrayal of user trust. I admit though that it's whataboutism to imply that excuses the behavior of anyone else - if we are saying that any software downloading anything over 1GB (or whatever) is bad.
Personally I'm pissed at both. A large jump in requirements without warning is bad, if I want to avoid it I now need to take immediate less considered actions or get stuck with the consequences. Plenty of decent software actually lets you decide what plugins to install for added functionality, chrome actually has a extensions store that they could have put this crap in.
Yes it's also that it's AI and mostly that chrome is foisting off all the cost of that AI model to me and other users. Without warning and explaining what this model is, is my workplaces power cost going to be up 10% because of whatever they want to run it for? Who knows.
There'd be a lot less complaining if they'd actually warned and less still if they asked.
Honestly this is 2026. Chrome on my phone is nearly 2gb. Google on my phone is 1gb. 4gb storage isn't outrageous, Windows barely runs on anything below 128gb storage. Right now my phone has 445gb unused memory and usage isn't likely to go up much. My PlayStation eats 500gb for breakfast. Heck I use a 2011 Thinkpad for casual use and it should still be fine with it.
This is also GOOGLE chrome, it serves their ends, in the past that was to render internet unimpeded (they saw a need then), needs change.
I'd rather models serve most requests locally anyway, so long as it's not destroying my battery life.
Remember the whole chrome-RAM-gate saga? This shouldn't be shocking to anyone.
PC's shipping 8gb ram, Google removing ad blocker extensions, these should be the real rally points.
To get so upset over this is crazy, no need to be so pedantic. Needs change.
Your 2015 MacBook pro had 8gb ram and 128gb storage, the current equivalent has minimum 24gb ram and 1tb or 2tb. Please explain what you're using all this storage for??
Raw footage or something, well there's some double standards it's just a photo too if this is just a browser. 4gb is immaterial.
Dumb- BUT immediate links to sites of the right legislators!
Adam B. Schiff
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Alex Padilla
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>Thank you for contacting me regarding the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). I appreciate hearing from you and welcome the opportunity to respond.
>Keeping children safe and holding accountable bad actors online is an important priority for the 119th Congress, and I am grateful for your input. My staff and I keep track of every message we receive from constituents like you, and your feedback is invaluable in guiding my priorities.
>As you may know, KOSA seeks to establish new guardrails to protect children online by requiring that social media platforms give parents the option to enable the strongest privacy settings possible on their children’s accounts. It also would require audits of how online platforms affect the health and well-being of children. Further, it would create a “duty of care” instructing online platforms to mitigate content seen by children promoting eating disorders, suicide, sexual exploitation, and other dangers. KOSA has been introduced and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, of which I am not a member.
>As a parent, I believe that we must do everything we can in Congress to safeguard children online and will continue to support strong solutions to combat child exploitation. That is why I voted in the Judiciary Committee to advance the Strengthening Transparency and Obligations to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment (STOP CSAM) Act to crack down on the proliferation of child sex abuse material online, support victims, and increase accountability and transparency for online platforms.
>Please be assured that I will keep your concerns in mind should this bill be considered by the Senate.
>Transparency has been a goal of mine throughout my time in Congress. You can find detailed information on every bill introduced in the Senate on Congress.gov, including the summary and full text of the legislation, which Senators have co-sponsored it, and the most recent action taken by Congress.
>An ongoing job of a Senator is to help constituents solve problems with federal agencies, access services, and get their questions answered promptly. On my website, I offer a guide to the services my office can provide, as well as a contact form where you can share your priorities with me. You can also connect with me online via Facebook or Twitter, and you can always reach my office by phone at (202) 224-3841.
>Thank you again for your thoughts. I hope you will continue to share your views and ideas with me.
The classified aspect is probably the most concerning. How can I write my representative (and expect a form letter response six weeks later) if I don't know what I'm objecting to or even if I should be objecting?
Absolutely. We will file your complaint in the appropriate location.
The location is classified.
Ok all jokes aside, if you suspect that there’s wrongdoing in the classified sphere, and it really matters to you, well, you should get involved in politics. We don’t just let everyone everywhere know everything, because we think it would be risky if Putin or the Chinese Communist Party also knew all those things. So we limit it to people who have taken oaths and are accountable and need to know (the military), the civilians who need to know (security clearance holders), and those who hold a high office with the public’s trust (high-ranking politicians). You can be a Senator. You just need a lot of people to trust you enough to vote for you. Or, and this is a bit easier, support politicians you do trust to vet classified things to be elected to high office, and ask them to look into it and give you their word that things are being done properly.
That's kind of my point? I'm concerned by what has been made available but can't form a complete opinion and decide if I need to take action without knowing the full extent of the agreement.
This is why we elect competent (hopefully) leaders to worry about these things for us. Mob rule democracy about every national secret would mean they’re not secrets for very long!
Surely you are responsible for the consequences of what you do, no matter how indirect? After all, we live in physical reality, not in some world of laws.
If you cause something you cause that thing. You are reponsible, even if it is through some long chain.
> Surely you are responsible for the consequences of what you do, no matter how indirect?
No, that’s preposterous. You are not responsible for the actions of others simply because your actions put them in a place to perform said actions. That seems like a very stressful way to go through life.
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