Every Mac since macOS 13 (allegedly) ships a pair of daemons whose only purpose in life is to build a graph about who you are, whom you know, how those people are related to you and to each other, how you communicate with them, where you go, what you do and when. In this post, we look into how this system works and give you a tool to peek into your own graph.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2026
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Just a PSA: the entire article is AI generated
Is it? I know there's ai in the domain, but I don't get that vibe from the style, and I just checked out the claimed authors and am confident they're real people who've been writing since before LLMs could do it well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50403613
The author says it's mostly AI. "In my defense, only the technical parts are AI. But, thanks for the feedback; I thought I had unsloped it enough..."
Also at Git, in the readme for the tool to explore the data, "iKnow is fully LLM-generated and may not be 100% accurate."
so this whole story is bullshit?
No, it is definitely there and real, I deleted the databases and blocked them from being rebuilt on my mac yesterday. People can use LLMs to do useful work, especially if they already know what they are doing.
Maybe so, but if someone can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it.
seriously. I can deal with an inept overly techy writer, but if you use the lying machine to mediate your communication, I can't trust anything you say.
Automated messaging systems that send us important or relevant information have been around for quite a while now. Ignoring a message simply because of the way it was created is rarely wise.
Automated messaging systems have been deterministic but indeed, if more than just a short notice have been routinely ignored by most since the rise of e-mail and automated spam.
How does one do this?
Delete ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform (or back it up to a different directory if you're worried about things breaking and want to be able to put it back) then make an empty file in place of the directory with touch ~/Library/IntelligencePlatform
Good advice. Also for passer-bys if you get hit with the Operation not permitted bullshit, just make sure the app you're using has Full Disk Access since this is considered a "protected folder".
The AI accent has progressed and Claudespeak is essentially this. There's no blatant tells but my brain has been fried from seeing too much ai content that I can detect it now. This is a surprisingly deslopped version but it still feels pretty ai generated to me (not to mention the website design).
Yup, your LLMdar is better than mine, as the other reply to me links to the author admitting it on HN. I'd like to be better at detecting it, but if the price is having to read loads of mediocre prose then the price is too damn high.
We know Amazon's doing practically the same thing, and Google, Facebook, etc. are doubtless doing it too.
The difference—for better or worse—is that Apple’s using your own machine instead of their servers.
The difference—for better or worse—is that Apple’s using your own machine instead of their servers.
And this is why I trust Apple the most out of all the big corps.
I mean, I still don’t trust them very much, but as a large corp they have demonstrated the fewest and least damaging psychopathic/abusive behaviours against users.
They also use these data points for some useful features with auto suggesting map directions if it has a pattern figured out. Or to get directions to mom’s house or other shortcuts.
I know you cou add this info to the contacts and search for locations with voice, but it’s handy to just 2 clicks to directions to a weekly soccer practice or whatever.
Wow, what the f... That's remarkably invasive.
I'm just gonna talk about the 4-way fork of the knight. White's a doofus for not eating the knight with a pawn
I looked through the whole article and did not find chess.
It's the thumbnail of the article.
Oooh. Haha. I have small thumbnails so I didn’t even catch it. Thought this was some anarchychess throwback.
Ew gross. I’m going to find a way to block this.
I got you. Just add this to your hosts file:
127.0.0.1 8rank.ai
Would a crontab running every minute to kill the relevant deamons work?
Just switch to asahi linux.
