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Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

apfel.franzai.com

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Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#141

Post by jasomill »

troyvit wrote: post #86
btucker wrote: post #71

I hacked this together last fall to let you use Apple Foundation Models with llm: https://github.com/btucker/llm-apple . To enable that I built python bindings with Claude Code: https://github.com/btucker/apple-foundation-models-py Unfortunately, I found the small context window makes the utility pretty limited.

Yeah I think you hit on the head a good way to use it though. I'm not on MacOS but KDE has a little tool called krunner[1] that lets you perform simple tasks from a small pop-up on your desktop. It would be cool if I could do slightly agentic things from there with a local model like ask what the capital of Austria is, or what's the current exchange rate between two currencies. Then save the heavy lifting for the big…

I've used Alfred[1] for many years on macOS, and more recently the PowerToys Command Palette[2] on Windows.

Both are easily extensible, so you could certainly wire either up to the local (or hosted) LLM of your choice.

Side note: I just noticed the extension example in the Command Palette demo reel searches HN.

[1] https://www.alfredapp.com/

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/command-...

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#142

Post by bombcar »

gigatexal wrote: post #133
xp84 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ATP episode where he talked about this was incredibly fascinating. Marco is such a role model to me - he has a complete immunity to fads and trends, and just does things the way he wants to. He adopts the 'new and cool' things only when they have a real benefit.

I largely subscribe to the use boring tech ethos ... but php? come on man. and yet... successful people have used it to build really successful things: Facebook, Tumblr (I think), the things Marco's been involved with. I just dunno outside of meta should we really be pushing php with all its flaws? or is it still flawed and I need to update my priors?

There’s something major to be said for going to war with the tools you have.

And living with decisions made 15 years ago may be much more successful than trying to change horses mid-stream.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#143

Post by CharlesW »

reaperducer wrote: post #96

apfel "How many shopping days until Christmas?" To determine how many shopping days until Christmas, you'll need to know the current date and the date of Christmas. Christmas is on December 25th, so you can subtract the current date from this date to find the number of shopping days. If you provide the current date, I can help you calculate that. apfel "How many shopping days until Christmas? Today is April 3rd." To…

This isn't a good test for any model since LLMs can't math (even though frontier models can sometimes correctly simulate mathing), which is why one would always use a tool for this.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#144

Post by andy_xor_andrew »

I find the branding to be a little odd. Like, it should be a github page with a README that says "here's how to use this." Like, the full explanation of this project is right there in the HN title: "The free AI already on your Mac."

I guess LLMs have made it too simple to instantly build startup landing page slop, which causes this? Like, do we need to see the github star count chart? Do we need all the buzzwords and stuff? You'd think this was a startup trying to get a billion dollar evaluation. It feels disingenuous.

Maybe I'm just being a hater.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#145

Post by halJordan »

reaperducer wrote: post #100
frontsideair wrote: post #94

> Apple locked it behind Siri. apfel sets it free This doesn't feel truthful, it sounds like this tool is a hack that unlocks something. If I understand it correctly, it's using the same FoundationModels framework that powers Apple Intelligence, but for CLI and OpenAI compatible REST endpoint. Which is fine, just the marketing goes hard a bit. > Runs on Neural Engine Also unsure if this runs on ANE, when I tried Appl…

[flagged]

Using soft or unsure wording doesn't obviate the factualness of the contribution. The op is correct on both accounts- it's ok to be unsure when putting it forward.

You on the other hand contributed literally nothing to the topic

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#146

Post by mrbonner »

This is great. I think Apple bought Kuzu, a in memory graph database in late 2025 to support RAG in combine with their FM like this. Even with such as small model, a comprehensive context of our personal data in graph RAG would be sufficient for a PA system. Do we know if we can have access to this RAG data?

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#148

Post by newman314 »

Saw this in an another thread previously and immediately installed it.

I have a new prompt to test LLMs much like simonw's pelican test.

"What is 9:30am Taiwan time in US, Pacific?" For some reason, the answers are quite inconsistent but all wrong.

  ./apfel "what is 9:30am Taiwan time in US, Pacific?"
  Taiwan is 12 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM Taiwan time would be 9:30 PM Pacific Time.
  Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 10:30 PM in the Pacific Time Zone.
  Taiwan is in the China Standard Time (CST) zone, which is 12 hours ahead of the Pacific Standard Time (PST) zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 9:30 PM in the Pacific.
  Taiwan is typically 11 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 8:30 PM in the Pacific Time Zone.
  Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of the Pacific Time Zone. Therefore, 9:30 AM in Taiwan is 10:30 PM the previous day in the Pacific Time Zone.

Re: Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac

#149

Post by sebastiennight »

lukewarm707 wrote: post #44
convexly wrote: post #29

I like the approach of running everything locally. I'm strongly of the opinion that the privacy angle for local models is going to keep getting stronger and more relevant. The amount of articles that come out about accidents happening because of people handing too much context to cloud models the more self reinforcing this will become.

local is best for privacy, but i personally think you don't need to go local. anthropic, google, openai etc, decided that their consumer ai plans would not be private. partly to collect training data, the other half to employ moderators to review user activity for safety. we trust that human moderators will not review and flag our icloud docs, onedrive or gmail, or aggregate such documents into training data for llms…

> anthropic, google, openai etc, decided that their consumer ai plans would not be private. partly to collect training data, the other half to employ moderators to review user activity for safety.

That's two halves of "why", sure.

Another interesting half would be that those companies have US military officers on their boards, and LLMs are the ultimate voluntary data collection platform, even better trojan horses than smartphones.

Yet another "half" could be how much enterprise value might be found by datamining for a minute or two... may I suggest reading a couple of Martha Wells books.

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