alt Hacker NewsI said no and Apple said yes
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Guess it's time to switch back to Linux... Shame, I'll miss the macbook build quality.
Good to see this thread turned into a flame war full of linux lovers who don't ever use Apple products vs. linux lovers who have exetensively used Apple. That's typically how it goes.
I have spent the last 28 years in the SF Bay Area, working in tech.
I have spent the last two months in Florida.
I was always aware of the disconnect between the insular world I lived in and what went on "outside" - but little did I know how big that gulf was.
If this was a car guy thread the complaint would be about a missing 3 horse power on his new Toyota when he put it on the dyno. And every one else is talking about their custom tunes, and scratch built systems, and how much better they are. Most people would not care and just want to drive to work.
How many of you are gonna have your Mom install linux and do support for it? How about your crazy uncle, or the slow cousin? Being done with Apple wont change Apple - make linux easy to use and usable. Or convince people that Apple > MS to force them to compete again. Or better yet both.
There is a business here.
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
Isn't Apple pushing features or decisions for how things work down your throat regardless of if you want them part of the classic Apple value proposition? If you don't like that, why are you even using Apple in the first place? This is about how much you want the hardware maker to decide things for you, and Apple has always been maximalist with regards to that.
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
people in this thread are so fucking pretentious.
Is it normal that I am enraged by this new process…is there a MacBook version of Graphene or something we can use if things keep boiling this way?
> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.
Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.
And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.
AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.
> AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
The reason corporations disable our right to stop AI tracking is because, at least for now, AI agents can be held to account for crimes once blamed on a person or corporation -- all one need do is disable the off-switches.
Until we sort out our relationship with AI, it will be the universal whipping boy, blamed for all sorts of things that once would indict an individual or corporation.
The best -- or worst, depending on your outlook -- AI trait is its complete absence of an ethical or moral sense. When an AI agent breaks into a computer, it's not with guilty knowledge, because AI doesn't possess that -- it's not part of their design. People need to remember: AI agents live in a moral vacuum, and that's not an accident.
When a corporation is called out for disabling a switch that once stopped AI tracking, the AI bros might say, "Oh, yes, that's an oversight, easily fixed." But it's not an oversight, it's a trial balloon, an A/B test to see how people will react.
But there's more. Decades ago, the Nielsen TV rating service would monitor what people watched on their TV sets (remember TV sets, boxes weighing 500 pounds?), by calling people on their telephones (remember telephones?). By modern standards, the Nielsen people were amateurs -- today's TV sets have built-in AI agents, active 24/7, and no disable switch. They patiently record what you watch.
In the next phase, TV sets will do eye-tracking, find out what parts of a TV scene people are looking at. Not true now but soon (Samsung is working on it). Pupil dilation, facial expressions, everything.
A super-old Bob Hope joke from the Cold War era: "Yes, they have TV in Russia, but you don't watch it, it watches you." Not so funny any more.
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> But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. [..] AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
So... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point
I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
While not as extreme, this reminds me of the whole Bluetooth-re-enabled-after-updates thing I've been bitching about for years. I hate Bluetooth, never use it, always turn it off. Yet, every time I update macOS/iOS, Bluetooth is magically re-enabled, because Apple said so.
Like I said, not as annoying as unwillingly being sucked into the AI-iverse, and seizing 28-GB of storage space, but it's the principle. I want control over my devices - you know, the things I paid $$$ for.