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0 pointsxp841y ago0 comments

This is a great observation. I've mostly thought of it, not in relation to AI, but in relation to the way Apple and to a lesser extent, Microsoft, act like they are the owners of the computers we "buy." An update will be installed now. Your silly user applications will be closed by force if necessary. System stability depends on it!

The modern OS values the system's theoretical 'system health' metrics far above things like "whether the user can use it to do some user task."

Another great example is how you can't boot a modern Mac laptop, on AC power, until it has decided its battery is sufficiently charged. Why? None of your business.

Anyway to get back on topic, this is an interesting connection you've made, the software vendor will perhaps delegate decisions like "is the user allowed to log into the computer at this time" or "is a reboot mandatory" to an "agent" running on the computer. If we're lucky we'll get to talk to that agent to plead our case, but my guess is Apple and Microsoft will decide we aren't qualified to have input to the decisions.

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ryandrake1y ago

An example of where this is going is Apple's so-called "System Integrity Protection"[1] which is essentially an access level to system files that's even higher than root. It's Apple arrogantly protecting "their" system from the user, even from the root user:

    System Integrity Protection is designed to allow modification of these protected parts only by processes that are signed by Apple and have special entitlements to write to system files, such as Apple software updates and Apple installers.

Only Apple can be trusted to operate what is supposed to be your computer.

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102149

skydhash1y ago

Which is why I love my freebsd installation (and before that Alpine Linux) and why I develop on a VM on macOS. I can trivially modify the system components to get the behavior that I need. I consider macOS as a step up from ChromeOS, but not a general purpose computer OS. Latest annoyance was the fact that signing out of Books.app signs you out of the App Store (I didn’t want epubs to be synced).

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