I don't think that adding the feature is the issue here, but instead Google deciding it needs to push an order of magnitude more data and store it on your device. I can understand wanting to at least re-evaluate your use of a tool when that happens.
If you were to install Chrome fresh, what if it was a 4GB+ download from their website? I would at least pause. For reference, a regular offline installer is 140MB.
Sounds like you've jumped to conclusions without reading the whole thing, or are making a disingenuous connection between two very different concepts. Climate impacts (really just energy waste) and "legal" arguments are different parts of this article. The legal part centers around whether they have permission to install this model along with Chrome, and whether they are using deceptive practices related to the model.
"Article 5(3) of Directive 2002/58/EC (the ePrivacy Directive) prohibits the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user, without the user's prior, freely-given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent, except where strictly necessary for the provision of an information-society service explicitly requested by the user..."
That is not about climate.
The article goes on to say that there would not be a legal issue if Google simply asked, documented, not taken initial action without user approval, allow deletion, etc. Also not about climate.
What they do imply is that Google's being dishonest if they say that they are carbon neutral (as is often said in their Environmental, Social, and Governance reports) while imposing up to 250 GWh of power use on network providers and end users. I can see the concern.
Sure, AI tools can do this. However, VS Code is the platform. Why aren't more people worried about running arbitrary VS Code extension that can do the same thing, AI or not?
The Steam Deck is an established product that was first released in February 2022. You may be thinking of the Steam Machine, which indeed does not have public pricing that I'm aware of.
After a few months of testing the waters, I just moved my gaming PC over to full-time Linux this weekend. Proton has really been revolutionary, as I haven't yet encountered something in my Steam library that won't work.
It's a serious requirements-gathering exercise. I would look inside your organization for HPC storage experts and ask them to sit down with you for an hour to walk through your users' typical workflows, expectations, and budget. If you need some names, send me an email.
Or just shell out for as much Weka as they can convince you that you need and call it a day.
There are several other systems I would recommend before TernFS for your environment. If you're looking at Lustre versus this in particular, Lustre has been through the wringer, and ANL/DOE has plenty of people who understand it enough to run it well and fix it when it breaks.
However, you are right. Your bandwidth needs don't really require Lustre.
My only issue with OVH is that they wouldn't let me rent a VPS ($30/month?) without sending a copy of my government identification. I'm not willing to distribute copies of that without a good reason, so I ended up paying more elsewhere.
Wow, this brings back a memory that was quite heavily buried. Either in middle school or high school, we had some similar amber terminals for searching the card catalog. I appreciated at the time how much quicker it was to use those than the web-based system accessed via Windows 95 (?) desktops.
If you were to install Chrome fresh, what if it was a 4GB+ download from their website? I would at least pause. For reference, a regular offline installer is 140MB.