Open the Pod 🇦🇺✈️✈️🐭

Google Chrome is quietly downloading a roughly 4 GB AI model to many users’ computers without clear upfront consent. The file, called weights.bin, is part of Google’s Gemini Nano on-device language model and lands in the browser’s user data folder under OptGuideOnDeviceModel. It powers built-in AI tools such as “Help me write,” smarter tab suggestions, on-device scam detection, and page summarization. The download triggers automatically for devices meeting minimum hardware requirements, and Chrome often replaces the files if deleted. While the model processes data locally, installation happens in the background with minimal notification. The scale is noteworthy. Hundreds of millions or billions of installations add up to thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions globally from data transfer, even though each is a one-time event. To prevent or remove it, go to chrome://flags, disable the entries for the optimization guide on-device model and Prompt API, restart the browser, and manually delete the folder.

Probably the most controversial way to harvest organs is Normothermic Regional Perfusion (NRP), which begins by clamping off blood flow to the brain (so you don’t wake up) and then performing a full resuscitation on the remaining organs such that your heart starts beating again in your own chest. This technique is used for people who aren’t brain dead, but who have a poor prognosis for recovery. They are taken to the operating room and their support is withdrawn. After they become pulseless, they are observed for just 2-5 minutes before surgery begins. According to the University of Nebraska NRP protocol, here’s what happens next: 1. The chest is opened via standard sternotomy 2. The blood vessels supplying blood to the brain are clamped off “to ensure that blood flow to the brain is not reestablished once circulation is restarted” 3. The patient is hooked up to a cardiac bypass machine 4. The initiation of cardiopulmonary bypass will re-establish blood flow to all of the organs, including the heart. “The initial step for ligation of the blood vessels to the head is necessary to ensure that blood flow to the brain does not occur. 5. Once blood flow to the heart is established, the heart will start beating. How dead are you if your heart is now beating again in your own chest? This technique plays fast and loose with the definitions of death under the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA). First, death is declared under the “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory function” clause. But, since doctors are going to restart your heart (showing that the cessation wasn’t actually irreversible), they clamp off blood flow to your brain, making you brain dead on purpose. Now, when they restart your heart, you are dead under the UDDA’s neurological criteria. This unethical switching of the criteria under which death is declared in mid-procedure is why the American College of Physicians called for a pause of NRP in 2021. But no pause has occurred. How many people would consent to this if they knew what was happening behind the operating room doors?