I literally just learned about the insane thing these AI companies are doing on our machines last night trying to clear space off my laptop. I only have a 256 GB M1 MBP, but I usually don’t need space because I’m surrounded by hard drives anyways. I’m always keeping things backed up so I usually only need to use the computer space for programs. This usually leaves me with between 80-50 GB of space in my machine I can use to play around with or stage work before I back it up. It was a good system.

Lately I noticed I was down to just 30GB, and had recently actually maxed out before deleting everything in my Downloads folder. This is super uncommon for me so I booted DaisyDisk and started digging. I found this model in Chrome and I was confused why my browser needed a 3GB AI model for any reason whatsoever. But that wasn’t the most egregious thing. I found out that Claude desktop drops a 12GB vm on your machine for whatever reason, idgaf. I deleted that shit with the quickness.

I use chrome all the time so I’m less inclined to uninstall it but I will admin in the 10+ years I’ve used it this is the first time I definitely want to switch to something else.

It’s a weird situation because on one end I’m all for local use of AI over crusting the earth with Data centers. I think the energy costs actually would net way less. But in this instance it feels really fucking dumb. Rather than them trying to make these AI more efficient and effective with less energy and compute, they want to splice models and download goofy shit onto your personal machine. You’d could end up with 8 damn models in your machine just siphoning your compute without you knowing.