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

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

#21

Post by lathiat »

oefrha wrote: post #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: squee…

I have a big directory here too (100s of thousands of files) however I am enrolled in the beta program. Perhaps the super large versions of the directory is only for the beta program but the non beta participates have the small version.

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

#22

Post by kergonath »

bartvk wrote: post #4

Howard Oakley is such a prolific writer on newly appearing macOS issues. Take for example this piece. It's collecting new information and trying form a picture, and that's how the community starts learning. Awesome content.

Indeed. He deservedly get to the homepage here regularly these days. His coverage of the M1s has been very useful.

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

#23

Post by kergonath »

lathiat wrote: post #21
oefrha wrote: post #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: squee…

I have a big directory here too (100s of thousands of files) however I am enrolled in the beta program. Perhaps the super large versions of the directory is only for the beta program but the non beta participates have the small version.

It could also well be the daemon not cleaning up after itself properly in some obscure circumstances. These things happen way too often.

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

#24

Post by jeroenhd »

okamiueru wrote: post #14
cabirum wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sadly, Ubuntu is moving Firefox to snap in the upcoming 22.04 release. I think I'll be switching to either Manjaro or plain Arch before 21.10 becomes unsupported.

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

#25

Post by KarlKemp »

math-dev wrote: post #16
mschuster91 wrote: post #8

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

You’re associating A/B testing with the practice on the web, where it is often used close to users’ spending decisions.

From what we can tell, This here is not a trial connected to revenue. It’s connected to Siri and other ML-frameworks, but not to, say, the Apple Store or Music applications.

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

#26

Post by mschuster91 »

KarlKemp wrote: post #18
mschuster91 wrote: post #8

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…

A/B tests suck if you are in the test group and suddenly, completely unannounced, a functionality you have been relying on stops working or gets changed and you are now stuck with the problem.

> None of that applies: both the A and B in A/B tests are software versions, for which there are zero legal requirements.

There should be, that is my point.

All that A/B testing and the constant other changes even in minor patch versions only lead to update hesitancy in people, which in turn leads to security issues because people don't update their software because they don't want to be disrupted in their workflows.

Not to mention that most A/B testing is essentially pseudoscience at best if not outright fraud that's being peddled by people wanting to sell A/B testing "solutions", or the implications on user privacy because of the mandatory phone-home.

FWIW this is what made Microsoft so big in the corporate world: for decades you could expect that nothing major would change, you would not need to re-train your employees or buy new software. That changed with Windows XP (although it was easy to roll back at least the optical changes) and got exponentially worse with the utter crap that is Windows 11.

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

#27

Post by jeroenhd »

KarlKemp wrote: post #18
mschuster91 wrote: post #8

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…

The alternative to A/B testing is paying people to test your software and learning from their direct feedback. Alternatively, you can provide people with a choice to test the changes you're considering.

If I pay for a product, I expect to be treated with respect. Being turned into a guinea pig to save on feedback cost isn't being respectful. Doing so without notice or consent is even worse.

There's no law against it, of course, but that doesn't mean it's good or even okay.

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

#28

Post by StreamBright »

sdfjkl wrote: 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.

Yeah my mother really likes checking out what is going on with these pesky opensource services. She sometimes goes to Github to read the code, while at it she quite often finds bugs, sometimes even security bugs. I am so glad we have a way to understand what is going on using opensource software.

On the other hand all my blackhat friends have a really bad time with closed source software. This is the primary reason black box security testing is dying.

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

#29

Post by BluSyn »

oefrha wrote: post #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: squee…

I checked mine, and I see lots of mention of "Siri" (TEXT TO SPEECH, FIND MY, etc). Seems most likely this is A/B testing for ML models, such as those for Siri and Photos analysis?

That's my best guess. Since Siri and Photos now processes more locally (especially on M1's dedicated ML cores), all the training improvements and testing probably happen locally as well.

It makes sense it would regularly download updates for ML models. I'm more curious about what data gets uploaded back to Apple...

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

#30

Post by mschuster91 »

KarlKemp wrote: post #25
math-dev wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You’re associating A/B testing with the practice on the web, where it is often used close to users’ spending decisions. From what we can tell, This here is not a trial connected to revenue. It’s connected to Siri and other ML-frameworks, but not to, say, the Apple Store or Music applications.

Apple has been known to gradually implement new features, to first roll them out and refine for private usage and then once the feature is stable make it available as a public API.

Mark my words in two or three years Apple will ban developers from using third party A/B testing frameworks and require them to use the Apple-provided solution based on triald.

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