This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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.
Edit: Since reading this thread I have installed Shizuku + Canta and removed Chr9me and about 50 other pieces of bloatware from my phone.
Props to @zerozaku for the suggestion.
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.
So we now have a four-way evidence chain - macOS kernel filesystem events, Chrome's own per-profile state, Chrome's runtime feature flags, and Google's component-updater logs - all four agreeing on the same conduct, and the conduct is: a 4 GB AI model arrived on this user's disk without consent, without notice, on a profile that received zero human input, in a window of 14 minutes and 28 seconds, on a Tuesday afternoon.
Can someone ELI5 why they are doing this? I thought all the AI shit was in the cloud?
The cloud being a bunch of computational power (servers). A bunch of phones in a network also can be utilized for said computational power. Passing the savings on to you! ;)
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
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.
