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System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

system.surf

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Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#13

What got you to build this? It seems ok but I can’t think of when or why I would want this, feels like something iOS has natively through Siri and it syncs to Mac via iCloud

(Not the OP, but...) have...have you tried Siri before? It is completely and totally ridiculous. Completely and utterly useless for anything other than setting a timer and turning HomeKit devices on or off (and even there it's entirely hit or miss).

Siri continues to be the most embarrassing Apple product on the market by a long shot.

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#14
post #8
post #3

Anything where an LLM has access to the shell on my personal laptop isn’t “secure” even if you do some hand waving around a split architecture.

Nothing more like playing Russian roulette with your own machine, hoping that when it needs to delete, move or rename a file, you sure hope it doesn't begin running either (especially do not run with --dangerously-skip-permissions): rm -rf ~/ rm -rf / mv ~/ ./ Or even creating a faulty symbolic link and above your home directory and suggesting to remove it, then it actually removes everything in that folder including…

Or it decides to rsync your drive along with keys to who knows where

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#15
post #13

What got you to build this? It seems ok but I can’t think of when or why I would want this, feels like something iOS has natively through Siri and it syncs to Mac via iCloud

(Not the OP, but...) have...have you tried Siri before? It is completely and totally ridiculous. Completely and utterly useless for anything other than setting a timer and turning HomeKit devices on or off (and even there it's entirely hit or miss). Siri continues to be the most embarrassing Apple product on the market by a long shot.

I get your point, that said, you can make it useful it just requires ... some plumbing. Shortcuts and Automations would be your best friends there to achieve this. The OP's project mentions Raycast as a dependency, with Raycast on iOS now + shortcuts you go even further.

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#16
post #13

What got you to build this? It seems ok but I can’t think of when or why I would want this, feels like something iOS has natively through Siri and it syncs to Mac via iCloud

(Not the OP, but...) have...have you tried Siri before? It is completely and totally ridiculous. Completely and utterly useless for anything other than setting a timer and turning HomeKit devices on or off (and even there it's entirely hit or miss). Siri continues to be the most embarrassing Apple product on the market by a long shot.

At least Siri guarantees the privacy of my data and uses a local model directly on my device, alternatively a private cloud - instead of a globally shared one.

And you can still ask Siri to ask ChatGPT if you need someone to talk to.

Also, you’d be surprised what cool things you can do when using Shortcuts with Siri. Especially now that Shortcuts can make use of LLMs (“Use model” action).

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#17
love how clearly vibecoded this is. the cloudflare worker architecture + the ascii diagram is a dead giveaway. nothing wrong with that, it's just really obvious.

the split architecture offers absolutely zero security benefits outside of not exposing a server process on your mac to the open internet (assuming you only let it connect to cloudflare) - it's just a convenient place to spin up a thin JS layer that calls model APIs and connects to your mac.

anyways i think this is a neat weekend vibecoding project but IMO it needs a lot more design thought to really be useful and not be a huge security issue.

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#18
post #8
post #3

Anything where an LLM has access to the shell on my personal laptop isn’t “secure” even if you do some hand waving around a split architecture.

Nothing more like playing Russian roulette with your own machine, hoping that when it needs to delete, move or rename a file, you sure hope it doesn't begin running either (especially do not run with --dangerously-skip-permissions): rm -rf ~/ rm -rf / mv ~/ ./ Or even creating a faulty symbolic link and above your home directory and suggesting to remove it, then it actually removes everything in that folder including…

This gives me bad memories from when I switched from Windows and somehow created a folder named '~' and then deleted it.

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#19
Seems like it needs higher level stuff, although that's a bit too sci-fi. Captain Picard can just ask "Computer, where is Commander Riker?" and the computer answers him, he doesn't need to say "Computer, launch people finder app" and "Computer, input 'Commander Riker' in the people finder app"...

I use Google Assistant for things like "add a reminder", "set an alarm", which is natural language processing but doesn't seem to need so many neurons as LLM. And faster than this Gemini crap, anyway.

I saw a social media clip of a woman in the passenger car of a Chinese car (her - presumably husband - is driving) asking the car "Has there been a woman in this car other than me?". The car seems to have an LLM app, because it responds saying "I can't see that", and then start giving tips how to find out (check the recent addresses list in th navigation, check the trips log if there has been long trips, see if the car is cleaner than he usually maintains it), and ending with talking about trust and communication in a relationship...

Hah, in our imagination we'd get KITT from Knight Rider. In reality...

Re: System: Control your Mac from anywhere using natural language

#20
post #8
post #3

Anything where an LLM has access to the shell on my personal laptop isn’t “secure” even if you do some hand waving around a split architecture.

Nothing more like playing Russian roulette with your own machine, hoping that when it needs to delete, move or rename a file, you sure hope it doesn't begin running either (especially do not run with --dangerously-skip-permissions): rm -rf ~/ rm -rf / mv ~/ ./ Or even creating a faulty symbolic link and above your home directory and suggesting to remove it, then it actually removes everything in that folder including…

The tool explicitly has an allow list for commands and block list for sensitive paths[1].

Though it's not enough, stuff like `grep "" .e?v` can still end up sending your sensitive keys to LLM providers.

[1]: https://github.com/ygwyg/system/blob/b5adfe526da7470cade61f7...

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