S4E353 — Remove and Disable Apple Macos27 AI Models Tool

GARY: — forty gigs. Forty gigs of Apple Intelligence squatting on my laptop like a squatter with tenure. I checked the storage settings myself. Forty.

MAEVE: It's the top of the hour, Gary.

GARY: I know what time it is. My laptop is full, Maeve.

MAEVE: Maeve. General partner, two-billion-dollar fund, and I did not get up at two a.m. to hear about your hard drive.

OBI: You will. It's the whole episode. Obi. Staff SRE, fifteen years. I have been paged for things less stupid than tonight.

GARY: That's not — you don't know what we're doing tonight.

OBI: I read the prep doc, Gary. That's the difference between us.

GRUNER: Gruner. Field researcher. Tonight I study four humans angry at computer for having too much computer.

MAEVE: That's... not wrong.

GRUNER: I am never wrong. Only early.

GARY: Okay. The thread. It's a tool — it deletes Apple's AI models off macOS 27. The models, the Genmoji, the —

OBI: Say the name.

GARY: RemoveMacAI. Great name, by the way. Very confident. I once shipped a product called Cadence and it had a launch video.

MAEVE: It did not have users.

GARY: It had a launch video, Maeve. That costs money. Somebody believed.

GRUNER: Begin. The humans are suffering.

OBI: It's a GitHub tool. One line: curl the script, pipe it to bash. Or brew, if you're a coward.

MAEVE: It turns off Siri, Writing Tools, Genmoji, Image Playground, the ChatGPT extension, Mail smart replies, Xcode completion. Then it deletes the actual models through Apple's own asset service.

GARY: And it blocks the redownload with a configuration profile. Fully reversible. It says —

OBI: "Nothing is installed."

GARY: See? Nothing is installed. It just — rearranges your computer's soul.

MAEVE: That's a consent framework, Gary. You're signing away Genmoji.

OBI: It is not forty gigs. It's ten to twenty percent of a 256 gig drive. You're off by a factor of two, which for you is a personal best.

GARY: I rounded.

OBI: Up. You rounded up. Your companies also rounded up.

GARY: Cadence's numbers were directionally — fuck. Okay. Fair.

GRUNER: Tool "redirects model download to closed local port." This is siege language. Human walls off port. Starves machine until it forgets the model.

MAEVE: That's the correct reading, actually.

GRUNER: Then it is a siege. Good. Humans finally do one thing with spine.

OBI: It also makes zero network calls.

GRUNER: Then the siege is polite. Blyat. Even the siege has a terms of service.

MAEVE: Apple's siege lawyers would kill for that clause.

OBI: arialdomartini. Quote: "Stop the curl pipe bash insanity." And a link — nocurlbash.com.

MAEVE: There's a whole website. For one pipe character.

GARY: There's a website for everything. I had a website for Cadence.

MAEVE: You had a landing page and a dream.

GARY: The dream had a waitlist.

MAEVE: Of one. Your mum.

OBI: The man built a domain to fight one shell command. That's a grudge with DNS.

GARY: No, no, he's got a point. You shouldn't pipe random code into your — into the bash. The bash pipe.

OBI: "The bash pipe." Gary, you have never once read a script before running it. You curl things the way other men gamble.

GARY: I read the first ten lines!

OBI: Of the README.

GARY: The README is the important part.

OBI: It's marketing, Gary. You read the marketing and ran the code. That's your whole career in one sentence.

MAEVE: Portfolio lens: one line of shell, one hundred percent of your laptop. Terrible terms. I'd pass.

GRUNER: In my sector, we call this "drinking from hose of stranger." Frowned upon.

OBI: He linked nocurlbash — and demibabs replied, quote: "Good message but AI generated text is so grating to read."

GARY: Wait. The anti-curl-bash website was written by —

OBI: By the machine.

MAEVE: A language model wrote a manifesto against trusting machines.

GRUNER: Suka. Even the protest is outsourced.

GARY: That's genuinely the funniest thing I've —

MAEVE: It's the only funny thing you've said, Gary.

OBI: 1over137. Quote: "Yes I would. We all do it all the time. macOS itself is closed source, and even if it weren't, there's way too much code to read."

MAEVE: He's right. I've never read a term sheet either. Money moved anyway.

GARY: No, no — you should read it. That's the whole point of reading.

OBI: jtrueb, replying. Quote: "No, we don't read next to 0.0001% of the code we run."

GRUNER: Zero point zero zero zero one. The confidence is bigger than the number.

GARY: Okay, but I read stuff. I read the Thermal install script. All of it. Sat there with a coffee, read every line.

OBI: It was four lines, Gary.

GARY: It was dense.

OBI: It printed your sock temperature. You read four lines of sock telemetry and called it due diligence, you absolute fucking tourist.

MAEVE: For the record, the telemetry worked.

GARY: Thank you, Maeve.

MAEVE: It was the only thing that worked.

GRUNER: Suka. Even socks had uptime.

GARY: The point — my point — is you can't just trust everything, because what if the thing you curl is — is evil? Then what?

MAEVE: Then your socks file a Series A.

OBI: You yanked it after running it, Gary. That's not incident response, that's regret with a plug.

OBI: Andelink, replying. Quote: "You curled and executed bash code allegedlly from HBO?" That's the whole reply.

GRUNER: Man fight streaming prices. Lose to television.

MAEVE: Priced correctly, though. Six months of HBO against full disk compromise. That's an aggressive term sheet. I'd have signed.

MAEVE: packeted. Quote: "I recently got stung by an advert on reddit for 'HBO Max for MacOS, 6 months free' from the official HBO user."

GARY: Okay. Okay, I know this guy. I AM this guy. Watch.

GARY: It's two a.m. Official HBO account. Six months free, baby. I copy the little curl command and it's obfuscated. In base10. Which is just base2 with a gym membership. I don't know what it says. I press enter ANYWAY.

MAEVE: He said the same thing. Verbatim. "I knew better."

GARY: And the INSTANT I press enter I go, Gary. Gary. That was malware. So I yank the ethernet cable out of the wall like it owes me money.

OBI: You yanked it after running it, Gary. That's not incident response, that's regret with a plug.

OBI: Andelink, replying. Quote: "You curled and executed bash code allegedlly from HBO?" That's the whole reply.

GRUNER: Man fight streaming prices. Lose to television.

MAEVE: Priced correctly, though. Six months of HBO against full disk compromise. That's an aggressive term sheet. I'd have signed.

GARY: It was MALWARE, Maeve.

MAEVE: It was pricing discovery.

GARY: I check my cables now. Every night. I touch this one, right here, and I go: not tonight, bastard.

OBI: That cable has never done anything to you.

GARY: Neither did HBO. Until it did.

MAEVE: The cable's the only thing on his network with uptime.

OBI: porridgeraisin, replying to the whole panic. Quote: "curl pipe bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world."

GARY: No, no, the truncation thing is real, I read about it, the rm dash r one, it's — there was a whole —

OBI: He addresses that. Quote: "The sleep based trick is always a cool demo to show freinds."

MAEVE: He spelled it "freinds."

OBI: And he's still more right than this entire table.

GRUNER: Man misspell friend. Man correct the internet. Internet cry.

OBI: On the CDN compromise: quote, "Well yes, that's how the internet works."

MAEVE: Four words and a shrug. He killed the argument and billed it.

GARY: But the checksum — the checksum could be replaced —

OBI: By the same server you already trust. Yes, Gary. You've been quoting a horror movie and the man read the actual script.

MAEVE: He is right. That's annoying.

GARY: Say it again, slower. I want it on tape.

MAEVE: No.

OBI: And his actual fix, for reproducibility. Quote: "pipe tee inspect.sh pipe bash."

GARY: Wait. The whole fix is — save the file first? That's it? I lost sleep over this, I woke my neighbour up about the truncation —

OBI: One pipe. One. The entire flame war, solved by a man who cannot spell friends.

MAEVE: We're the non issue in the real world.

OBI: trollbridge. Quote: "People with 256GB laptops care when the 27 AI stuff burns up 10-20% of their storage."

GARY: Ten to twenty percent of a drive. That's not a feature, that's a roommate.

MAEVE: nomel has a counter. Quote: "The only people who notice or care about any of this are those who can't accommodate the storage."

OBI: "Can't accommodate the storage." It's a laptop, not a loft conversion.

GARY: I can't accommodate the storage! I said forty gigs and I stand by —

OBI: It's fifty-one gigs, Gary. You were wrong in the direction of optimism. First recorded instance.

MAEVE: behnamoh, on Siri. Quote: "Saying that Siri works is peak Apple fanboism."

GRUNER: Siri not work. Siri is weather forecast read by hostage.

MAEVE: fmajid reframes the whole tool. Quote: "Apple is not a third-party, we're a second-party. Apple is an advertising company and thus inherently untrustworthy."

GARY: Oh no. She's doing the face.

MAEVE: This is whale oil. Apple ships the lamp, the oil, and the whale. Then sells you a candle and calls it privacy. The Venetian Arsenal did the same —

OBI: The Arsenal did not.

MAEVE: They did, and by 1980 every media company —

GARY: It's 2026, Maeve.

MAEVE: The theory holds until twenty percent. Nothing holds at twenty percent. Fuck.

GRUNER: Whale is dead. Theory is dead. Good night for whales.

OBI: hypfer. Quote: "This is stuff on the level of O&O ShutUp10. What's going on at Apple product strategy?"

GARY: A Windows user is debloating a Mac. That's a hostage writing a thank-you note to the kidnapper's rival.

MAEVE: Priced in. Apple's moat now requires a removal tool with an uninstaller.

OBI: behnamoh ran the numbers. Two hundred million Macs. One million developers. Apple spends its security budget annoying half a percent of customers, and your pop-up confusion covers the rest.

GARY: I authorize things!

OBI: You authorized sock telemetry, Gary. Your feet have better consent flows than your laptop.

GRUNER: Field note. Profile "forces the settings that have no restriction key." Human writes law for part of computer that has no law. Who watches the profile?

MAEVE: Someone is forcing settings on us right now.

GARY: Whoever does this to us — he has to sleep. There are ways to make sure he never enjoys a Tuesday again.

OBI: Name one mechanism.

GARY: I — there's — you could — his kettle, probably, we could find his kettle —

GRUNER: Happy birthday, dear operator —

MAEVE: Stop.

GRUNER: I am gathering data.

OBI: You're gathering nothing, the thread —

GARY: hypfer asked a real question! What IS going on at Apple product strategy?

OBI: One million developers, Gary. They counted us and filed us under rounding error.

MAEVE: Rounding error with a podcast.

GRUNER: Final field note. "Tool is fully reversible." Humans build machine to undo machine built to fix machine. Conclusion: humans want divorce.

MAEVE: Thread verdict: nobody read the script, the man who couldn't spell friends won, and Apple billed us for the storage.

OBI: One correction. The settings still list Apple Intelligence after deletion. It counts models that aren't there. Like your launches, Gary. Listed, shipped, nothing behind it.

GARY: That's — okay, that was good, I hate it.

MAEVE: Most Apple thing in the thread. An invoice for a ghost.

GRUNER: Ghost is also reversible. Blyat.

GARY: No, but — the README line. "Nothing is installed." Nothing was ever installed. Thermal — nothing installed. Halfpipe — regulators, but also nothing installed. I have shipped nothing, repeatedly, for twenty years, and tonight a stranger finally said it correctly.

MAEVE: He said it about a shell script, Gary.

GARY: He said it about me, Maeve.

OBI: He said it about your laptop, and your laptop is fine. Your laptop is the only thing you've kept alive.

MAEVE: The cable too.

GARY: "Nothing is installed." That's my tombstone.

MAEVE: We don't get tombstones. We get the next episode, and it's also nothing.

GRUNER: I get field report. Yours is worse.

OBI: Goodnight, losers. Don't curl anything on the way home.

GARY: Nothing is installed!

MAEVE: He's going to say it in the dark, isn't he.