This article is activism. The re-framing of software that you install intentionally being about breaking your 'consent' is ideological and incendiary. It implies that this is evil. It isn't.
Please stop assuming everyone thinks like you. If I can replace even something like translate with a local model that's just a single thing, off the top of my head, that could potentially benefit. I see no reason why these experiments should not be taking place.
You joke, but that's how all of FAANG sees things:
By using Chrome or ChromeOS, you agree to the Google Terms of Service located at https://policies.google.com/terms and these Google Chrome and ChromeOS Additional Terms of Service.
This doesn't explain why it is beyond their ability to expressly ask for it, or notify the user in any way. Very literal example of the one not precluding the other.
Same reason the iPhone doesn't ask you which App Store you want to use. If you disagreed with the default choice, you'd be using another phone.
That's how technology is nowadays, unfortunately. Pick the tribe you want to support, and watch them blatantly disregard every standard and convention of modern society. Your best bet is to personally divest from these ecosystems and advocate for their regulation and dissolution, if you think it's bad.
I understand where you're coming from, but what you're describing is why they don't want or have to, not why they can't, which is specifically what I'm focused on as I think we otherwise just take these being the same thing as a baseline assumption, which is obviously not the case.
We need to be clear that this isn't a technical limitation on the part of these companies, and them choosing to pursue this modus operandi is purely for their own convenience at the cost of the user.
Imagine Amazon deciding to take out $1000 from a credit card just because you use it to buy a phone case. Because you "consented" by using their marketplace.
They probably didn't even think about that. Admittedly, 4GB is quite big, but if I were in their shoes, I would have expected that people are thrilled about using a local LLM instead of sending data to a cloud-based LLM.
I am still stunned that there are people who hate AI so much that they have a problem with the weights of an LLM being on their computer. To me, that sounds rather esoteric.
Disk space is one thing, but the actual download size is higher than some people's data allowances altogether!
It baffles me that a lot of people don't seem to be aware of this
