GeekyBear

He also had that computer configured to download system updates automatically, but not to install them.

On the plus side, at least he didn't run the AI agent on the computer with all of his personal data.

The full disk access permission is something you give to backup software.

If you give full-disk access to Meta software running on your main computer, Meta is not going to respect your privacy.

> Friday’s [full-disk access] announcement comes two weeks after tech columnist Jason Aten said that Meta’s new general-purpose AI agent Muse sent him an unsolicited notification referencing a thread between him and a co-worker over Apple Messages. Aten said he never granted Muse permissions to read his messages and had assumed they were off-limits. Social media last week blew up with masses of people who agreed and said the incident showed that AI assistants given access to calendars, emails, messages, shopping accounts, and other resources are akin to a skill saw or other power tool. While potentially useful, they can do real damage if not used carefully.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/apple-changes-full-...

If you want to know why Apple is suddenly not happy about the way the full-disk access permission is being abused, look no further.

> Reminds me of all the de-crufting you've always needed to do when you install Windows.

To be like Windows, Apple would have to constantly change the OS so that the workarounds no longer function.

How many times did users find a way to enable local user accounts on Windows, only to have Microsoft force online accounts on them again?

Chrome downloads a large LLM without warning or permission.

Frankly, the only company attempting to create websites that only work in Chrome is Google.

So don't install Chrome.

Microsoft's business model has always included making programming languages and software for third party computers.

That has never been something Apple does.

> a proprietary browser is a major deal-breaker

If this was a real issue for most, people would look at Google closing up Android and shipping laptops that are locked to the Play Store and refuse to have anything to do with Chrome or Chromium.

The company making locked down laptops is Google.

TFA:

> Some developers are using Full Disk Access in ways that could put users at risk, exposing everything on their systems—including files, mail, messages, and even browsing history—without users’ full knowledge and understanding.

If you think an app from (say) Facebook can be trusted with unrestricted access to your whole machine, you're at least a bit naive.

There is no technical reason for the lack of a Linux version of Microsoft Office, which is a much bigger deal.

If you want to create a custom pass for your business, just rent access to a Mac online, if you don't want to buy one.

You introduced the word "unilaterally" as a strawman argument.

If a minor can get a sex change with parental consent they should also be allowed to marry with parental consent.

> I think it's saying that Micron would be better off increasing supply themselves (and thus lowering prices) than waiting for a competitor to come and provide more supply to meet the higher demand.

It's a bit too late. Chinese manufacturers have finally started making DDR5 and have raised enough cash in an IPO to start ramping up production in a major way.

> Shares of chipmaker Changxin Technology Group soared nearly 466% Monday in their debut on Shanghai’s tech-heavy STAR Market, making CXMT the most valuable China-listed company.

The Hefei-based firm had raised 57.92 billion yuan ($8.6 billion) after pricing its IPO at 8.66 yuan per share, making it Asia’s biggest so far this year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/27/cxmt-china-market-debut-chip...

If a parent can't give consent for marriage, they shouldn't be able to consent to gender-affirming care, right?

> The California Department of Health Care Services, a branch of Newsom’s administration, said Friday that state dollars will be used to reimburse providers of gender-affirming care for youth covered by Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid...

Gender-affirming care includes medical treatments that help align a person’s physical characteristics with their gender identity. Care typically begins with therapy and may progress to puberty-blocking medicine and hormone treatments, and in rare cases for adolescents, surgeries.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/2026/09/29/california-to-fund-...

How about puberty blockers?

Should people who are still legally defined as children be allowed to make a decision on those?

> Sex-reassignment surgery (or whatever we are calling it these days) requires parental consent in California if the person seeking it is a minor.

So why shouldn't you be allowed to get married with parental consent in the same state?

I'm OK with a state deciding it either way, but I'm looking for a little consistency.

As long as your definition of "child" is any person who is not yet legally an adult.

The issue isn't just the amount of memory, but also the memory bandwidth.

They slightly bumped the memory bandwidth from 256 GB/s to 273 GB/s, but are competing against 1,228.8 GB/s on the M5 Ultra.

More information here:

> The product comes in Apple's standard gray aluminum finish and includes a USB-C port for power. The screen sits above a metal, round base with multiple rings of perforated speaker holes and connects to it through a polished metal arm. Users can manually tilt the display forward or backward. And the base has a rubberized bottom to help it stay on a table.

Apple has also developed a second version, code-named J491, designed to be mounted on a wall. It has a thin, square-shaped base beneath the display that houses the speakers and microphones. The base sits flat on the wall below the screen. This version also must remain connected

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/30/apple-home-hub-imac-g4-...

The point is that customers who bought an iDevice knew in advance that they were buying into a walled garden ecosystem with a web browser.

It was Google that lied to the public about Android being an "open" ecosystem that allowed you to do anything you liked without interference.

Apple made it perfectly clear that iDevices would be a walled garden when they released the SDK for third party applications.

Apple never claimed to be an open ecosystem that allowed users to install anything they liked without interference.

Offline speech recognition (using an open weights model like Whisper) is a good example of a feature that you can run on your NPU.

Local speech recognition is something useful that runs well on a (power efficient) NPU.

Dragon Naturally Speaking used to cost real money and wasn't as accurate as an open model like Whisper.

> On one hand it is kinda radioactive for a former Apple engineer to work on this

If this were the case, then Wine and its forks like Proton would have the same issue.

Former Microsoft employees have contributed to Wine in the past.

The speed with which we went from pearl clutching that Apple hasn't added as many AI features as Google and Microsoft have to pearl clutching that they have finally done so is amusing.

Meanwhile, Google just announced "laptops" that are locked down to the Play Store, and the sound of crickets is palpable.

> Google has confirmed to Ars that Googlebooks will enforce developer verification requirements for apps similar to Android phones. Under this system, only apps from developers who have verified their identities with Google will be eligible for installation

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/googlebook-laptops-l...

It is a few paragraphs down on the linked page:

> The following features are known not to work: suspend, display out on the USB-C ports (HDMI works), and Thunderbolt/USB4. Additionally, power consumption may be higher than expected (not very relevant for a desktop); we have set conservative limits for max speaker volume for safety reasons; and shutdown/reboot are flaky (you can just use the power button anyways). Every feature not listed here works and has been tested.

The issue is that the moment you want to run the more capable models that will no longer fit in a single 5090's memory, performance falls off a cliff.

The M5 generation added tensor instructions to the GPU cores.

> What exactly the M7 improvements are who knows.

> Apple's planned M7 Ultra chip is being designed to support up to 1.5 TB of unified memory and to push AI performance toward the class of Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ap...

The next Ultra, supposedly on deck in 2028:

> Apple's planned M7 Ultra chip is being designed to support up to 1.5 TB of unified memory and to push AI performance toward the class of Nvidia's Blackwell accelerators, according to a new Bloomberg report published by Mark Gurman...

Apple plans to release a base M6 chip this fall for entry-level Macs... a base M7 in the first half of 2027, M7 Pro and M7 Max at the end of 2027, and the M7 Ultra in 2028.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/ap...