I didn’t say that discussions about headlines aren’t allowed.

I pointed out that this thread is a discussion about the content of the article, and I prefer to discuss content in a discussion about content. I would also point out that the argument about the content of the headline is just a repeat of the argument I was rebutting. It added absolutely nothing to the discussion.

People with any knowledge of publishing know that the headline writer and the article writer are two different people with two different goals. It doesn’t make sense to use a headline written for one purpose by one author to critique the content of an article by a different author.

As to the assertion that a headline is “what people remember”, that has never been my experience. Plenty of people have asked me if I have read the piece in x publication about y topic. No one has ever asked me if I read the article headlined z. The headline is so inconsequential that many reputable publications will use multiple headlines for the same article depending on when and where it is seen.

If you weren’t aware of this, apologies for being so direct. Now you know. Stop remembering only the headlines. The article is the content, not the headline.

I very much agree with what you say on automation bias.

Certain technology just has too much potential to be misused / people repeatedly prove they can't use it properly. It also comes with risks of making authoritarian takeover easier.

However, here, it seems they used Flock a bit like a regular ANPR. The actions they took independent of Flock show there are better stories to use to criticise this technology.

How is Flock responsible in this case?? There may be cases where Flock is responsible, but I don't see it here.

Flock is not an AI. That they have AI features on certain products does not mean "Flock" is an AI. That's the fallacy of composition.

Flock does have AI components (this one seems LLM based). Basically every ANPR system will also use some level of AI.

Also, on "reality would like a word". Why not just speak normally instead of using what seems like a high-school grade comeback?

The main Flock related issue here is that officers treat results that come out of the systems as gospel. The same thing has happened with face recognition systems. There is also the broader issue of access controls to Flock, 5A, and whether places should be building up a technology so powerful (surveillance infrastructure can easily be used for evil).

What a strange strawman. You are deciding now to substitute a different complaint than what was originally sense, because it is simply true that if you don't want to use Apple Intelligence, you don't need to.

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.

The entire basis of this complaint is not understanding the difference between "duration" and "interval". And not being able to click the link that is given to you in the settings menu or just search Apple's docs for the setting ( https://support.apple.com/en-mn/guide/mac-help/mchlfc0d4779/... )

This is literally the main point of the article: "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."

I assume they're using a more candid definition where they're not counting all the countries a company may be based, but rather the primary country they're based in.

I don't think they're trying to flex this as a large number. They don't want to give an exact number, as that may change etc / is fuzzy, but also want to give you an idea of the scale.

They say "In the future, we intend to expand our geographical reach much further". I imagine this commentary is somewhat related to the concerns that AI will create an even worse "global underclass". AI developments are first accessible to Americans, then allies, and then later the whole world.

There's a comment on the GitHub thread which also mentions pinning rsync version would be a bad idea. Many of the people affected by reversions are those with workflows vulnerable to the prior CVEs.

I don't actually see much evidence the usage of AI here was an issue. I think you can obviously identify areas where the code isn't perfect. I'd blame this slightly on human prompting, slightly on AI.

But I'm not a sure a human on their own would've done better. There aren't enough resources to make the changes required.

Can you tell me any of the bugs? All claims I have seen so far of people being affected by bugs seem deeply implausible.

The current ones I see are: * Can't build on Linux < 5.6. But people aren't complaining strongly about this, since it requires a build from source / isn't a result of an update from a distribution (and people can wait for updates / implement them themselves). * An issue hit with chroot false + daemon. People running this in an automated manner (as some claims suggest) are already using it in a way fairly likely to be insecure, chroot false is strongly discouraged here, and the whole point of these commits was that they fixed CVEs impacting precisely these people.