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What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

eclecticlight.co

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Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#11
post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

Nope, instead you have to apply guesswork to figure out why an apt-get call accidentally uninstalled your desktop environment. :P

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#12
post #5

Remember when operating systems didn't have multi-gigabyte binary blobs performing cryptic actions with an extremely chatty online connection?

No, I don't remember a time when users were in control and actually owned Apple-made hard- and software.

However, linux is alive and well, despite some flavours attempting to force autoupdating snap stores and the like onto users.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#13
post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

Nope, instead you have to apply guesswork to figure out why an apt-get call accidentally uninstalled your desktop environment. :P

Pretty sure there was no guesswork involved in finding out why that happened, since it was resolved so quickly.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#14
post #12
post #5

Remember when operating systems didn't have multi-gigabyte binary blobs performing cryptic actions with an extremely chatty online connection?

No, I don't remember a time when users were in control and actually owned Apple-made hard- and software. However, linux is alive and well, despite some flavours attempting to force autoupdating snap stores and the like onto users.

Purging snap has so far been a 5 minute do-and-forget operation, all the way to 21.10.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#15
post #12
post #5

Remember when operating systems didn't have multi-gigabyte binary blobs performing cryptic actions with an extremely chatty online connection?

No, I don't remember a time when users were in control and actually owned Apple-made hard- and software. However, linux is alive and well, despite some flavours attempting to force autoupdating snap stores and the like onto users.

[deleted]

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#16

Jesus I hate being A/B tested without my consent. Particularly, why is Apple of all places doing this, given their otherwise strong track record of standing up for their users in regard to tracking and other bullshit by major players?!

Apple is no different - now they have more pressure to maintain their growth in bottom line, they are doing more and more of this stuff

The App Store is a joke.

All that said, it’s still currently way better than other big tech - but I am not blindly accepting their behaviour, for now its good enough for me but that can change in the future

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#17
I just looked into ~/Library/Trial on my main machine (macOS 12.2.1). I got 380MB spread over 584 files (while TFA's author got 300k???). Most if not all of them are related to com.apple.siri.asr.dictation.en_US. Close to 100% of the space is taken up by .fst files, e.g.

  $ file /path/to/msg-bigG.squeezed_quantized_acceptor.fst
  /path/to/msg-bigG.squeezed_quantized_acceptor.fst: OpenFst binary FST data, fst type: squeezed_quantized_acceptor, arc type: standard, version: 3, num states: 1237632, num arcs: 7376910
Appears be data files for OpenFST[1], "a library for constructing, combining, optimizing, and searching weighted finite-state transducers". I don't do ML so I stopped there.

[1] https://www.openfst.org/twiki/bin/view/FST/WebHome

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#18

Jesus I hate being A/B tested without my consent. Particularly, why is Apple of all places doing this, given their otherwise strong track record of standing up for their users in regard to tracking and other bullshit by major players?!

People have some well-founded respect for the procedures that medical trials have to go through, including informed consent. That’s spilling over/being misdirected to the use of the trial mechanism in other fields, even though it makes absolutely no sense.

The alternative to A/B testing in UX design is not some more rigorous trial with fully-informed consent. Instead, it‘s the older and still predominant mechanism of “let’s just change it”.

Consent in medical tests is important because it involves a ‘B’ that is a substance or procedure that has not (yet) been shown to be safe & effective. The trial is less restrictive than the alternative scenario, where it would be illegal to just treat you with ‘B’.

None of that applies: both the A and B in A/B tests are software versions, for which there are zero legal requirements. Neither version will have an impact on your health or kill you, which cannot always be said for untested pharmaceuticals. A tailor is absolutely free to suggest dark navy to one customer and anthracite to the next, even if they flip a coin to decide and/or mentally take note of what customers like.

The possible harm from A/B testing is the maximum of the harms of A and B. If you wouldn’t complain about either alternative, there is no legitimate reason to complain about the combined A/B harm.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#19
post #12
post #5

Remember when operating systems didn't have multi-gigabyte binary blobs performing cryptic actions with an extremely chatty online connection?

No, I don't remember a time when users were in control and actually owned Apple-made hard- and software. However, linux is alive and well, despite some flavours attempting to force autoupdating snap stores and the like onto users.

Linux can be chatty, but I'd recommend installing OpenSnitch to get a handle on the few phone-home calls from programs like snapd (if you choose to not neuter it, immediately) and distro-specific upsells like "ubuntu-advantage".

The biggest pay-off for OpenSnitch is if you're going to be installing and using third-party programs like VSCode and Unity, who love to talk to analytics providers.

Re: What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space?

#20
post #6

Open source is where you don't have to apply guesswork to find out what a suspicious looking piece of software is doing on your computer.

Indeed, only to learn about all the programming languages, libraries and communication protocols used in the system, and then they might understand what is happening.
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