Thread

macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage

240 points · 123 comments · ano-ther

hbn · 1790009859 · focus · HN ↗
I'll say they definitely need to let people disable/offload the model, but if you haven't tried the new Siri, it's been great. Obviously it's not a state of the art LLM, but it's good enough, and the fact that it can search and take actions on your local data makes it incredibly useful. I definitely use it more on my iPhone where it's slower to get things done the traditional way, but I use it all the time now.
"What was the quote for my insurance claim?" - it'll look through your emails and pull the number with the source email so you can jump right to it.
The other day I asked "when did I arrive and leave Mexico City on my trip at the end of 2024?" and it nailed it based off my flight receipt.
Since learning Spanish I get a lot more Spanish stuff in my feeds, and if I e.g. don't understand a meme I'll just ask "explain the joke here" and it reads the screen and explains it.
You can have an article open in Safari and say "remind me to read this tonight" and it'll make a reminder with the link. Or you can modify reminders - "move my reminder to get groceries to tomorrow at the same time". Yesterday I told it to make me a reminder and it did, but I worded it in a clunky way so I followed it with "reword that to sound more natural" and it did it.
We've been trained for a long time to think Siri can't do anything but I urge you to try it once you're on the new one, it's quite good. And I'm sure I've barely touched all the things it can do. David Pogue published a pretty thorough test other day:
<a href="https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri" rel="nofollow">https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri
1. brailsafe · 1790050416 · focus · HN ↗
  I get that these are things you might do regularly and feel more empowered to use Siri for them... but they're rather banal and could be done with literally a one or two step process previously, especially if you're already using Apple's first-party apps which seem to be a requirement here. In both email cases, Spotlight handles searches like that just fine, and moving a calendar event only requires clicking and dragging.
  I'm here wondering why so much extra space is warranted, or how to take it back, not so much how I can find a document with specific text in it or use Siri to do something else that was already very easy.
  One task I'm wondering about is for example, asking Siri (on the mac) to analyze a huge dump of arbitrary PDFs that may or may not have non-OCRed text in them, and efficiently reorg and rename them based on what the documents should be. This also seems like a mundane task, but requires a little more than just a standard search and would allow someone to take their entire paper archive of private business documents and create a digital archive without too much risk or work. This is something that all local models I've tried so far really struggle with.
  1. hbn · 1790085107 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know which Spotlight search you've been using but it certainly has not been consistent and reliable in years.
    And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
    Not to mention these are tasks I'll be able to do in winter while wearing gloves.
    brailsafe · 1790671427 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't use spotlight to search for mail or use Apple Mail at all, so mileage may vary. I'm normally doing string searches for file contents or names which it handles perfectly fine.
    > And I don't find manually searching for emails to find something like flight dates that easy. I've flown to/from Mexico city 6 times in the past couple years, and the airline tends to send like 12 emails pertaining to every trip I book, so asking Siri is much faster.
    Fair enough, and I did just try Siri on the mac to find them which was... sort of convenient, but ultimately took longer than simply opening Calendar, CMD+F typing "flight" into the text field.

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