YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Every Mac comes with an (undocumented) family member classifier

83 points infwhispers 1 hour ago 24 comments

conartist6 54 minutes ago | parent

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

infwhispers 37 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 31 minutes ago | parent

Works on Sequoia too fwiw

infwhispers 24 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).

Hamuko 19 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 40 minutes ago | parent

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

veonik 32 minutes ago | parent

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

amelius 37 minutes ago | parent

Can we start a class action suit?

infwhispers 33 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 32 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 17 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 14 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 10 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 9 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 7 minutes ago | parent

So most of it?

amelius 8 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?

arcanemachiner 30 minutes ago | parent

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

code_biologist 25 minutes ago | parent

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

zaptheimpaler 20 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 16 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.

DSpinellis 17 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 15 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.

axismundi 14 minutes ago | parent

What about iphones?