YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier

102 points infwhispers 2 hours ago 29 comments

conartist6 1 hour ago | parent

I'm going to be very angry if my mac turns out to be doing this

infwhispers 45 minutes ago | parent

We also created a tool to inspect your graph: https://github.com/8rank/iKnow Only tested on recent MacOS versions (last 26s, and early 27s), though

veonik 39 minutes ago | parent

Works on Sequoia too fwiw

infwhispers 32 minutes ago | parent

Ack. For what I could see, specific tables are added / removed across versions. So, some information might not be visualized (e.g., the graph is tiny with few nodes).

sunaookami 5 minutes ago | parent

Also works on Sonoma.

Hamuko 27 minutes ago | parent

>iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

"We" sounds pretty damn generous if you don't even know whether it works.

gattilorenz 48 minutes ago | parent

Woah. Still on Sequoia with no intention to upgrade, but maybe the next laptop runs Linux.

veonik 40 minutes ago | parent

I'm on Sequoia. Check out ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform

amelius 45 minutes ago | parent

Can we start a class action suit?

infwhispers 42 minutes ago | parent

The output stays local on your disk (in theory). So I’m not sure that breaks any rule. But in theory, Apple Intelligence can query it. Again, close to 0 documentation, so it is hard to know how this is consumed.

infwhispers 40 minutes ago | parent

I am the author of the research. Please, feel free to ask me anything. Also, check out the followup research: https://8rank.ai/game/apple-intelligence-knowledge-graph-in-...

asdfsa32 25 minutes ago | parent

Please stop using AI to author your articles. It was really hard to read it despite how interesting the topic was. I dropped halfway because it was just too annoying.

infwhispers 22 minutes ago | parent

My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...

embedding-shape 18 minutes ago | parent

> In my defense, only the technical parts are AI.

A defense would be "I just used it for spellchecking" not "I just used it for the meat and the important parts people care about, the rest is mine!"

asdfsa32 17 minutes ago | parent

You can't unslop the slop, you should write as you normally do but use AI to review and reframe it. Don't fix AI; let AI fix your writing.

Hamuko 15 minutes ago | parent

So most of it?

amelius 16 minutes ago | parent

Is this really the top question now?

Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?

ahartmetz 9 minutes ago | parent

Why? "There is gravel in the food" is a perfectly valid contribution. You don't need to write a compelling story about it.

amelius 1 minute ago | parent

Because the article itself is way more interesting than the question of with what style it was written.

arcanemachiner 38 minutes ago | parent

On a long enough timeline, all closed-source software turns into spyware.

code_biologist 33 minutes ago | parent

Horrifying, but also really interesting as a student of schema design, especially for probabilistic or inferential processes, and graph data.

zaptheimpaler 28 minutes ago | parent

Im still optimistic that Apple will do all this stuff on your device as opposed to in an opaque cloud somewhere you have 0 visibility into. Meta probably has 1000x this system in a data warehouse somewhere. If this info is not leaving the device that’s fine with me.

infwhispers 24 minutes ago | parent

Yes, but having some kind of documentation and way to disable it would have been reasonable. Also, the thing is that it seems that apple intelligence models can query this information. So, you know, everything is a prompt injection away in theory.

apples_oranges 3 minutes ago | parent

I have lost my faith in that

DSpinellis 25 minutes ago | parent

My understanding is that collecting these data and constructing the knowledge graph violates the European General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). According to the GDPR, personal data (such as an email's sender name and email address) are provided for a specific purpose (in the case of sending an email, for identifying the sender and facilitating email replies). Similarly, a calendar invitation is provided to organize a meeting. Processing that data for a different purpose (as described here, for constructing a knowledge graph) without the subject's explicit consent is unlawful.

Ungh 23 minutes ago | parent

Just spent 30 minutes poking around this. It's horrifying. Absolutely horrifying. All the intelligence and Siri stuff is turned off and blocked on my Mac yet it's still doing this.

Think this might kick me over the fence finally to Debian.

apples_oranges 4 minutes ago | parent

The good news is that with AI, nothing stops Linux desktops from looking and feeling like (Former) osx..

axismundi 22 minutes ago | parent

What about iphones?

thomascountz 6 minutes ago | parent

At one point in my life, I would've found this data fascinating (if it were opt-in, perhaps)! Now, I find it exhausting.

A similar discussion came up recently with Siri Recap[1], where some expressed how useful they thought it was and that, as a party to the conversations it summarizes, there was very little moral or ethical concern. But I have a social concern.

If I'm having a chat with someone, there's a milieu constructed around the fact that not everything will be remembered verbatim. There are all sorts of social and contextual cues that can easily get lost if listening gets replaced by flat transcription.

With Recaps and now the social graph (were it to be productized), the informal fluidity in the way we relate to one another starts to go away, and the expectations that follow from that become artificial and burdensome. In the same way that autocorrect has made typos unacceptable, how could you ever be forgiven for forgetting the name of your colleague's new nephew or the Italian village that your neighbor took a spontaneous boat trip to while on vacation last year?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49641401