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Comment by tobylane | Hacker News Reader

Those two (and more) exist in chrome://flags in Chrome 147. I'm disabling them now, with the expectation that will prevent the new default.

One option I'm leaving as default is "Use LiteRT-LM runtime for on-device model service inference." Any comment on that?

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I'm on Chrome 147 too and disabled:

"optimization-guide-on-device-model"

- Enables optimization guide on device

"prompt-api-for-gemini-nano"

- Prompt API for Gemini Nano

- Prompt API for Gemini Nano with Multimodal Input

and deleted weights.bin and the 2025.x folder in "OptGuideOnDeviceModel"

Will report if Chrome 148 downloads the model again.

If you touch those files into existence and chown to root and chmod to 0, it shouldn’t be able to ever overwrite them right?

yeah, should work. Will try readonly on windows too.

Now I can't see it anymore, but shouldn't the model be under chrome://on-device-internals/ -> model-status?

Maybe you can uninstall there too.

I'm on my phone now so I can't check if something has changed, but what you want to protect from change is the directory, not the files. A file can be deleted and created again if the process can write the directory.

You want to use chattr +i (make the empty file immutable)

thanks, went to flags in Vivaldi and just in case disabled all flags containing "gemini" and first five results for "model"

maybe I was on the wrong side of the early release but I’ve deleted this model many times in the last year. I’ve had it for at least 12 months.

it downloaded the model again...

Those flags will exist already, but will default to enabled in 148.

That other flag is for using a different open-source inference engine to the (from what I can tell) closed-source one that's used by default.

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