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!"
As an older person, AI grates on me, but I found the meat like "It is a triple store written in a vocabulary of 181 entity classes and 278 predicates: every row is a subject, a predicate and an object. The subject is an entity (a person, an app, an event); the object is either a plain value (a name, a handle, a date) or another entity, which is where the graph gets its edges. The predicate is the interesting part: it says what kind of relationship the system believes holds between the two" quite approachable.
So it was like a meal where I just have to push, say, mushrooms aside as best I can to get to what I like. And there was a time I would have refused the entire plate because I truly abhor mushrooms. I blame watching Matango as an impressionable child.[0]
"Slop is here to stay so you better get used to it because slop is inevitable and you will be left behind."
It is both already a cemented permanent presence and destined to arrive by an unbreakable prophecy at a date TBD.
I'm pretty experienced, and have found LLMs to be quite useful.
Like any new tool, there are deficits and peculiarities, but these are becoming less of a concern, and the utility of these tools is advancing rapidly.
Now think about how much you hate mushrooms.
Do you see the problem with your argument?
This. Already there is evolution in AI-related comments here.
For example, a year ago they often featured remarks like "I know AI when I see it: here are unmistakeable 'tells.'"
Then there would be a lively back-and-forth about the validity of the stated giveaways.
Such "How I know it's AI"-type comments no longer appear.
I think it was insightful and relevant.
Check out my work. I don’t hide it.
One of the problems with LLM writing is that the "small group" is very often only itself, maybe including the prompter. Details of the prompts or implementation or internal chain-of-thought nits leak out into prose, divorced from context.
Many READMEs are now littered with proud declarations of the removal of Foo, with any explanation purged with it. It exists in this project, too. A header of one graph is "Where each fact came from, decoded out of the bitmask." Why should the audience care about this implementation detail at this location? Just label it "Sources" and move on.
LLMs fail at those things.
Suggestion for next time: "Review my prose for accuracy, grammar, appropriate strength of claims, etc. Flag any issues for my attention. Do not provide text; this work should not contain any AI-written content." That'll turn it into a very good check that doesn't take your voice away.
Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?
> Bad AI writing makes an article "unreadable" - you'd have to force yourself to read it
That doesn't literally mean "unable to read", it means it's unpleasant. I don't think anyone in this thread has literally meant "I could not possibly read it", just "it's painfully unpleasant".
Criticism is a valid 'something interesting'. And growing numbers of us also don't want to feed the US mega-companies LLM training sets.
More and more people are keeping human-generated stuff to themselves, cause of that.
It annoys me as it takes my attention with them so with all respect: user aharmetz (and others) please keep it in one post that you’d prefer non-AI text. Point.
Thank you.
No.
Anyway, it’s a shame, this could have been excellent work. Instead, I find reading it unpleasant and part of my attention rots away wondering if you even checked what the LLM wrote for you. You probably did, and I could also do it myself, but still…
> Every node as a list — the graph is not the only way in
> Family, as the scorecard has it
> Reachable, exactly as stored
Oh good I was worried it was going to show me something altered
> WHY RESOLVABLE MATTERS
Oh fuck off. This isn't Axios! I hate these pathetic brainrot stupid phrases Why it matters What Happened What Changed, how patronizing. Instaclosed, instakilled python, what a fucking waste of my time and a waste of an article too
That's actually exactly what does it for me. After the intro, it gives you way too much specific detail. No one cares about the exact file path or whether that path is TCC Full Disk Access protect. What does that even mean? why is this important enough to be in the first sentence of the section? Who says stuff like "triple store?" It uses bizarre language with far too much detail, and your eyes start to glaze over. Slop.
A human would've said something like "It's a database in Library/IntelligencePlatform with three columns" and left all the rest of it out or maybe in some extreme details footnote.
> a directory of SQLite databases (fifty-one databases)
> It is a triple store written in a vocabulary of 181 entity classes and 278 predicates
It continues describing the DB in excruciating detail - no human would have the attention span to write all of that down for a blog post.
----
The research is jaw-dropping enough for the average reader to comprehend (e.g: I am not a techie, but a former IBEW datacenter wiretwister).
It could be covered in pube-sprinkled-turds and would still be worth reading.
To me the "slopLOL" crew is akin to people who'll take their time to correct others' their/they're/there usage:
Just read the fucking sentence (LLMs can and do and aren't so poopy-you-suck-for-asking-questions).
How news is delivered matters. If you don’t believe that, why would news outlets compete with each other? Even if the facts are the same, would you prefer to get them from a good or bad writer?
I am smart enough to not need perfection. I just want the data. Write however tf you want, the original facts matter most (to me).
And so will LLMs.
I'll suggest adaptation.
>why would news outlets compete with each other?
My suggestion would be: competition for the masses' con$umption$. It generally works; shouldn't have to obfuscate the `man` pages for this always-running daemon.
> I am smart enough
Knock yourself down a peg, kid.
Also, my IQ scares even me; I've chosen bluecollar so I don't have to be evil as much with it.
Companies do not give two shits about most users, with (e.g:) AMD saying the quiet part out loud, recently, with their recent gamers-last announcement.
Also see: Apple's invasive attempts to categorize all local data, by default; if you want to opt-out (some service, like OP's, you cannot!), it takes dozens of clicks for each new software – intentional dark-patterns to make opting-out cat-and-mouse.
> Also, my IQ scares even me
Oh, brother.
I mean this with the best of intentions and care: have you been psychiatrically evaluated lately? The language you’re using is consistent with friends I know who are off their stabilizing medications.
This is completely tangential to your point, but I'd bet that this daemon isn't always running. Apple is fond of putting as much system functionality as possible into daemons that (a) can be spun up quickly when needed in response to Mach IPC messages, (b) can be killed safely at any time to free up memory, including with SIGKILL if necessary, and most importantly (c) operate in the tightest, most locked-down sandbox they could devise.
For background computational tasks like this one, it can also be helpful for getting thread prioritization right. If some computation doesn't need to happen quickly, a daemon can easily make sure that it gets assigned to efficiency-optimized CPU cores, tell the OS scheduler to give priority to more important stuff, reduce precision of timers to coalesce wakeups, and make sure that any thermal throttling affects the background stuff before it slows down anything the user will notice. It's a pretty slick system.
I found the topic fascinating, but eventually I started skimming and then gave up on it.
A lot of these statistics aren't very useful for mining insights from the graph, from a technical standpoint of how the graph works or from a personal standpoint of how the graph is interacting with my personal data.
(I hate that a discussion on the OP has been hijacked by a discussion on AI writing; the substantive questions are all at the bottom. I wish mods would 'detatch and move' that subthread.)
The data I see from iKnow is a sloppy clusterfuck, I suspect from botched syncs and lazy bookkeeping on my part, and the fluctuating quality of Apple's "services" over the years. My Mac settings probably go back to the 1990s and Apple periodically did a bad job. Pain points I remember: Google contacts being separated and then with a new phone not syncing correctly, Mac address book burping on contact avatar images, importing lists of contacts from short-lived 3rd party apps, shared Photos fucking shit up, the iPhotos upgrade fiascos, transient contact info for my kids, moving onto/off of Gmail, etc.
If the FBI got ahold of my (and others'?) iKnow data, a lot of people might end up in a sloppy jail with a sloppy judge sloppily applying a sloppy law...
So my questions regarding security implications of running your code, my LLM friend reviewed the code and expressed possible concerns over (a) malicious browser extensions now get to see what they couldn't before; (b) you are not using https. There was bunch more but they can all be addressed on my end. Your thoughts?
That is certainly true, and it is equally true that that possibility places a responsibility on you to put that in a section in your readme.
So yeah, I may have a bad extension but that thing never had access to the possibly aptly named 'IntelligencePlatform' that's keeping tabs on my digital activities, until I ran your code. Correct?
My evil extension|browser may know what porn I watch or which sites I am visiting or possibly lift some bits it is not supposed to have. But it does not have access to Apple's comprehensive graph of my digital activities on their devices. Only Apple Inc. has that access.
So in fact the OP needs to put in the readme that "malicious browser extensions are a potential attack surface."
You acknowledge the threat is real yet say it is "niche".
And frankly, given that Apple can not possibly 'iKnow' more about me than myself, it seems running your 'niche critical but whocares' python server can only be informative to potential 3rd parties locked out of my Apple machine because they do NOT have been give permission by me to have "Full Disk Access".
This is akin to some medicine saying that if paired with another specific medicine, you won't get desired results, and you are upset that it doesn't include a warning against combining the medicine with cyanide because you might die. The pairing with cyanide is irrelevant to the medicine and is just a side effect of cyanide.
It's a shame because I really appreciate your work here. Could be resolved as trivially as providing a copy of your writing style and having it adapt to that.