Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xp84 | Hacker News Reader

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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?

My arbitrary limit is "not 5x from when I installed it". Like if my gallon milk jug was suddenly 36 inches tall.

Skinny milk jug.

aren't most installers like 10 mb then downloads when run? that's way more then 5x

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.

That depends on how you count, though.

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.

Is your objection just to the bloat, or also to what the bloat is for?

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.

I'm picturing a splash screen announcing the feature(s) it enables, with a Download button

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.

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'!"

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