newtonsmethod

So saying you said something because my non-existent position is "absurd" and "clearly false" indicates massive levels of confusion.

You then go on to imply I haven't read the article, using an acronymised swear (I'm not a pious person but clearly directing a swear to someone makes a message come off as aggressive), even though your understanding of what I said is based off non-existent messages. (This is quite ironic).

Flock is a company. Companies are a type of organisation: it makes no sense to describe a company as AI, as AI is a type of computer system. It may make sense to say Flock is an AI-based company, but calling them "AI" in itself makes no sense.

The complaint now shifts to that you'll still have files on your system, or can't control exactly what models are stored on your computer. Apple has reasons not to give this fine control: what you have on HN is a group of people who are vehemently anti-AI, use Apple products, and still want features very specific to their control of the system.

Apple caters to the general user. If they think a setting is going to be confusing or likely to be misused, they won't implement it. People know the reality that if Apple intelligence is successful and if this feature is implemented, the general user won't know which parts of their workflow use which features. Removing the models will be advertised as a cheap hack to save storage, and people will be confused when they can't turn intelligence on again.

The fact that the core premise of the article (repeated in the title and first sentence) is about "phoning home": > The nice thing about keeping a blog is that I can say at precisely 9:51am, Wednesday 5th February 2025, I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data. And that I said “no” and turned it off.

This happens frequently when there are fixes for CVEs, since regression tests can't catch many things which incremental rollouts can. It happened for example in 2025. People are right to imply the reaction is totally outsized here, and it's almost certainly the case that people are overreacting to AI (rather than the somewhat weak idea that it's because of the frequency of these issues).

What's really funny is that the people opposing AI here are showing far less literacy than those who wrote the code. People claiming to be affected by this bug severely are likely exposing themselves: * One bug is for Linux < 5.6, where it didn't hit distributions. This is a low severity bug where it can't build, where distribution maintainers may be reasonably expected to fix it themselves (although rsync will also fix it eventually too).