Comment by ProllyInfamous
5 hours ago
Keep adding to your list, friend:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50071310#50078574> [Spotlight's "helpfulness," which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)]
Apple's OS is toxic, at this point.
My two newest Macs are entirely offline (air-gapped) and used primarily for LLM – maybe Apple's secret (all along) has been to get people like me to purchase twice as much hardware (as would be necessary in a privacy-respecting world)?
> which cannot be disabled (viaGUI)
Are you sure? I've just inspected my macOS 27.2 machine with my firewall and I couldn't find requests to smoot.apple.com while typing in spotlight(show related content and help improve apple search are both disabled).
I am certain only up to Sequoia; there is a new mini with Tahoe on it sitting here so let me replicate that behavior (if hostname isn't smoot., it'll be something). I've been meaning to update to GoldenGate (since buying it last week it has been used for just 2 hours, playing with LLMs on the default Tahoe); so I'll do this too and then see what the latest macOS's behavior is.
While I'm doing that, pull up your *.apple.com outreaches.
If you are not seeing <security.apple.com> on any Silicon's boot, you are not seeing full logs (all Silicon, and macs since T2, do this reach-out pre-post).
Well fuck.
Just dug my old Xeon workstation out of the cupboard and am installing Debian on it.
My main desk has three Apple Silicons (two entirely airgapped, and am typing on third); sitting next to it is my beautiful 27" iMac (2009), with full Adobe CS4 (also offline); just purchased a pristine MacPro5,1 – seventeen year old computer! – for my main online Apple experience (using OS 10.14 from a decade ago), mostly because it cannot AI/LLM/Siri, even if it wanted to. Then I will have three offline Silicons.
Since the beginning of this year, I am now primarily running (online) a 9800X3D with a 5070Ti – Linux - which is only possible with LLM tutorials/help (mostly offline, on my own Silicon LLM).
----
Happy restomodding!