What is triald and why is it taking so much disk space? • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by mschuster91 » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:35 AM UTC

yborg wrote: post #38

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?!

Maybe you should contain your outrage until it's based on something other than uninformed speculation.

The fact that Apple once again delivers bananaware ("ripens at the customer") to their users is outrage-worthy on its own, particularly if the software in question does not even provide any benefit to the user. Bad enough that Spotlight and TimeMachine have had issues for years (which, to Apple's "credit" have now been largely solved), but these at least provide useful functionality. Apple is a filthy rich company, they should be able to afford QA for their software or at least ask users prior to deploying unstable software.

Users, particularly those who paid thousands of dollars for the hardware, are not guinea pigs.

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

#42

Post by vetinari » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:39 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #35

jeroenhd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can just manually install the official Firefox linux release. I've always done this since the Debian Iceweasel days and it works without issue.

The distro-provided versions can be slightly different than the Mozilla build.

For example, Fedora build is ruled by these principles: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/1518, while the Mozilla build is not.

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

#43

Post by Cockbrand » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:44 AM UTC

I was never aware of this, and while poking around I came across

~/Library/Trial/Treatments//factorPacks//assets/com.apple.siri.asr.dictation.*/etiquette.json

These files do contain an impressive amount of swear words, some of which I had never heard.

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

#44

Post by can16358p » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:44 AM UTC

Brian_K_White wrote: post #36

zibzab wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vscode lets you turn off analytics in the settings (IMO it should be off by default, untill a crash is detected). Isn't that enough?

Of course not?

Why? (Assumimg Vscode respects the setting)

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

#45

Post by Brian_K_White » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:49 AM UTC

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #35

jeroenhd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can just manually install the official Firefox linux release. I've always done this since the Debian Iceweasel days and it works without issue.

If you have to fight against your distro, you have a bigger problem than one package, and working around that one package doesn't fix the larger proble which is that they tried, and will try again, and will always be trying.

You need your tools goals to be aligned with your own, and reject any that aren't, not cater to them.

Working around the FF package by installing from elsewhere is no answer.

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

#46

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:50 AM UTC

Ah, so the article mentions “A/B testing” but doesn’t realize that Apple has actually been rolling out IAP trials for macOS features. Subscriptions baked right into the OS, with feature flags to make sure they are extracting maximum profit. Eddy Cue is personally overseeing this because services revenue is so critical to Apple that they’re willing to hurt the user experience to get some money out of this.

Ok, seriously, y’all need to tone it down with the speculation. Spotting the word “trial” and immediately jumping to the worst conclusion is dumb and how misinformation spreads. As some commenters have mentioned below, triald manages CloudKit asset packs for Siri to allow it to change its local behavior independent of an OS update. That’s all it is. I don’t really have a problem with “oh let’s poke into this thing on my computer and figure out what it does” but I am kind of sick of just looking at log entries and coming to a misleading conclusion without really understanding what’s going on behind the hood. Yeah, it uses space on your disk and Apple could describe what it is better, but it’s not secret spyware or a plot to fill up your disk for no reason.

(Fun fact: a lot of the assets in the ~/Library/Trial directory are transparently compressed at the filesystem level using a new “LZBITMAP” compressor type in macOS Monterey. Without this it would take more space, so they are definitely aware of the disk usage at Apple.)

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

#47

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:50 AM UTC

[deleted]

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

#48

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:52 AM UTC

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.

You do know that you can peek at closed source binaries and figure out what they do? It’s not even all that hard in this case and it would quickly tell you what the software does, assuming it’s not intentionally trying to cloak its behavior, which it is not in this case.

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

#49

Post by pram » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

"Trial" will gather and store the voice samples if you have "Improve Siri & Dictation" turned on in the Privacy settings. This showed up in Big Sur and is probably the exact same thing from iOS. If you have Siri and that disabled the folder should be pretty small.

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

#50

Post by saagarjha » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 9:56 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #30

KarlKemp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are seriously misunderstanding what triald does.