News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by asdfsa32 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:28AM (#50403597)
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.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by infwhispers on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:31AM (#50403613)
My bad. In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough...
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by embedding-shape on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:35AM (#50403636)
> 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!"

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by NewsaHackO on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:22AM (#50405315)
Yes, that was a weird defense; essentially, he used it for the actual interesting parts of the article.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by asdfsa32 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:35AM (#50403645)
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.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by Hamuko on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:38AM (#50403656)
So most of it?
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by nstents on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:23AM (#50403942)
Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away. Either AI will undergo a change to create more approachable material, or in general people's tastes will change as they accommodate the style and get used to it. Or some mix of the two. As young people continue to grow up reading AI generated content they will likely begin to find that person written content from before AI grates on their nerves. More, they'll even ask AI to reword documents into preferable AI-like styles.

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]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOpbTaX6HWQ

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by RunSet on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:36AM (#50404027)
It is funny to me how slop enthusiasts argue from the past and the future to deny the present state.

"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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by nstents on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:14AM (#50404309)
If you came away thinking I was enthusing about AI slop, it's probably because I was too subtle in comparing it to a food I abhor while saying there are tidbits, non-slop tidbits, that I could appreciate. Apologies for that human generated mischance!
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ChrisMarshallNY on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:46AM (#50404487)
I'm actually rather bemused to see mainly young folks, arguing against LLMs and ML, and seeing more experienced folks, embracing it.

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by masfuerte on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:32AM (#50404868)
We get it. You are saying that in the future there will only be mushrooms to eat and as a result everyone will enjoy mushrooms.

Now think about how much you hate mushrooms.

Do you see the problem with your argument?

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by bookofjoe on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:51AM (#50404133)
>Complaints of AI are like a form of friction that eventually goes away.

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by jdiff on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:41AM (#50404460)
This has not been my experience. People talk about LLM-isms (Claude-isms especially) all the time. "The absolute shape", "load bearing", "seams", "smoking gun", genuinely empty preambles, constant sloganesque phrasing. If you're seeing it less in conversation, it's not because it's improved.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by kelseyfrog on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:53AM (#50404543)
Genius-level response. And honestly, that's valid.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by jazzypants on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:13AM (#50404707)
"It's not X, it's Y" is still the most obvious one. Abuse of passive voice is another. We stopped talking about it because it gets boring to say the same things over and over.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ChrisMarshallNY on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:34AM (#50404425)
Sorry your comment got dinged. I assume the reference to age triggered that. Ageism is a very, very real thing, hereabouts.

I think it was insightful and relevant.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by otterley on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:39AM (#50404936)
I’m sorry you feel defeated, but such attitudes won’t help.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ChrisMarshallNY on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:09AM (#50405201)
Help what?
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by otterley on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:11AM (#50405214)
Help improve or restore the quality of content.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ChrisMarshallNY on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:25AM (#50405802)
Been doing that for decades. This is just another tool.

Check out my work. I don’t hide it.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by Spooky23 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:51AM (#50404525)
[delayed]
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by jdiff on Saturday November 07, 2026 @11:41AM (#50405903)
> but it may be fine for you or a small group that is familiar with the subject.

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by Spooky23 on Sunday November 08, 2026 @09:18AM (#50413583)
[delayed]
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by smallerize on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:07AM (#50404650)
It's already technically possible for LLMs to generate all kinds of styles of text. In fact older models are better at it. It's the newer models that are nearly impossible to steer. This makes me less hopeful for the future. There is apparently some incentive for Claude and ChatGPT to lock in these very recognizable patterns.
[dead]
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by rowanG077 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:59AM (#50405116)
Interesting for me it's the opposite. I care about this so I let AI do it since LLM are better writer than 99% of people. I'm not so arrogant to think I'm a writer of that caliber.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by amenhotep on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:34AM (#50405419)
You are. I promise you. Almost every single person is a better writer than an LLM. You're wilfully sabotaging yourself.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by asdff on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:38AM (#50405443)
LLM are terrible writers though. Worse than most humans unless they have some mental disability.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by InsideOutSanta on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:16PM (#50406196)
Maybe LLMs are better writers than the majority of people, but that's only because the majority of people just don't write. If you have any level of competency, you are a better writer than an LLM, because good writing requires empathy. It required thinking about what the audience knows, what they want to know, what kind of writing they are comfortable with, and so on.

LLMs fail at those things.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by JoshTriplett on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:49AM (#50404109)
It's not possible to un-AI text, only replace it wholesale.

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by amelius on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:37AM (#50403652)
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?

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ahartmetz on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:44AM (#50403698)
Why? "There is gravel in the food" is a perfectly valid contribution. You don't need to write a compelling story about it.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by amelius on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:52AM (#50403743)
Because the article itself is way more interesting than the question of with what style it was written.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ahartmetz on Saturday November 07, 2026 @06:55AM (#50403760)
It's like the saying beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. Bad AI writing makes an article "unreadable" - you'd have to force yourself to read it, and people don't get paid for reading stuff on HN. The HN value of an unpleasant to read article is basically zero.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by amelius on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:00AM (#50403790)
I really don't want to waste more words on it here.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ahartmetz on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:05AM (#50403824)
I think the difference might be that you find bad style easy to ignore and I don't.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by simonra on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:21AM (#50403923)
If the applied style is painful, can't one just take a lightweight model and have it transcribe the content in a style that one personally finds pleasurable? Even phones should be powerfull enough to chew through such a task locally these days (even across languages), and once you define the criteria for what you enjoy you'll never have to be pained again (unless you enjoy it offcourse)
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by JoshTriplett on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:51AM (#50404129)
The criteria I enjoy is "written by a human".
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by kelseyfrog on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:56AM (#50404565)
You can pay someone to rewrite it. There's loads of college students who wouldn't mind extra spending money.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by charcircuit on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:18AM (#50403899)
You don't have to leave a comment if you are too lazy to read it. It's not even if the words were written mirrored. Anyone who can read English including children can read the output of AI without needing to force anything. Maybe you need to see a doctor if you need to force yourself to read it.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by JoshTriplett on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:52AM (#50404135)
"How dare you have a preference that is not my preference?"
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by charcircuit on Sunday November 08, 2026 @12:16AM (#50410600)
Having a preference of writing style and being unable to read a writing style are not the same.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by JoshTriplett on Sunday November 08, 2026 @04:08AM (#50411590)
The comment upthread was:

> 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".

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by kelseyfrog on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:36PM (#50407334)
I wouldn't worry about the down votes. Human voice will eventually go the way of the pops, and hiss of dusty records. Eventually those raised on AI generated prose will come to appreciate it in the same way we have nostalgia for 96kbps mp3s.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by Sharlin on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:10AM (#50403845)
Its interestingness is zero if it’s so aggravating to read that you just give up.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by nekusar on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:18AM (#50403906)
> Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by jghn on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:49AM (#50404103)
I’d rather this over the very long tradition in this site if people bellyaching about site design and layout on otherwise u related comment threads
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by Ajoha on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:12AM (#50404282)
I agree. One comment constructive is enough. It feels like some guys pushing the topic away.

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by hosteur on Saturday November 07, 2026 @08:56AM (#50404561)
> Can we add a rule that if you blame someone for using AI, you _also_ have to bring something interesting to the table?

No.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by n0on3 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:04AM (#50403818)
I second this. Unfortunately you just can’t just “unslop” it, much like you can’t just “shake the dirt away” from food that fell into a bucket of… you get my point, it won’t be good to eat anyway. Bonus additional ironic parallel could magically manifest if you can guess the bucket content.

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…

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by tkgally on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:12AM (#50403862)
[delayed]
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by wpm on Saturday November 07, 2026 @05:33PM (#50408678)
Yep I cannot fathom why people feel OK shipping anything like that publicly. The headers are also all completely stupid.

> 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

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by coldpie on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:31AM (#50403996)
Yeah seriously. Article becomes unreadable immediately after the intro. I believe this author probably could actually write two years ago, it's a shame people are just giving up on that and choose to turn out stuff like this instead.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by SoftTalker on Saturday November 07, 2026 @01:30PM (#50406789)
I'm having more trouble spotting AI text these days. It used to jump out at me. I'm not sure if it's that the LLMs are better or it's just becomming so normal to see that I stop recognizing it. This one didn't scream "slop" to me other than being quite long-winded for a blog post that I admittedly did not finish on first read. Going back and scrolling deeper into the post, it does become much sloppier.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by coldpie on Saturday November 07, 2026 @01:47PM (#50406909)
> quite long-winded for a blog post

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ricardobeat on Saturday November 07, 2026 @07:56PM (#50409551)
The unnecessary detail dump is a dead giveaway. It starts in the very first section:

> 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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ecto on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:26AM (#50404829)
I disagree. Hand-authored articles can be slop too. This research is great, and your subjective feelings about word cadence don't affect the information. I guarantee you read AI output every day and don't know it.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by otterley on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:36AM (#50404914)
The criticism can be restated, then, as “you used AI to write it and unlike others who use AI to write things, you did a bad job as an editor.”
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ProllyInfamous on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:22AM (#50405320)
This comment is not directed at you, but this is the best place I could find to insert my thoughts on this "nO LLm slOP" distraction:

----

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).

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by otterley on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:31AM (#50405381)
We know there’s interesting information in there. That’s not the point.

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?

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ProllyInfamous on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:32AM (#50405388)
>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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by otterley on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:33AM (#50405407)
Well, good for you for not caring, I suppose. The vast majority of society does.

> I am smart enough

Knock yourself down a peg, kid.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ProllyInfamous on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:37AM (#50405438)
I will, sure, but I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic, despite being a bluecollar electrician.

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by otterley on Saturday November 07, 2026 @02:03PM (#50407062)
> I've been writing about this for almost a decade; and I know more than most people about this topic

> 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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by pjscott on Saturday November 07, 2026 @05:55PM (#50408823)
> always-running daemon

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.

Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by ahartmetz on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:47AM (#50405514)
Hand-authored engagement or clout (LinkedIn) farming articles and corporate press releases are usually slop, most others aren't. I'd be surprised if corporate press releases today weren't largely AI-written - no one would know the difference.
Re:Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member clas... by burnte on Saturday November 07, 2026 @03:42PM (#50407860)
Agreed, I haven't read most of it because it's poorly written: too verbose, points are buried, it's three times longer than it should be. I still don't know what this database is used for and don't want to go through that writing to find out.