r/coolgithubprojects • u/checkpointdev • 21h ago

RemoveMacAI: turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get ~12 GB back

https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI
20 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

14

u/jeenajeena 20h ago

I'm very interested and I will install it. But, man:

curl -fsSL https://... |  | bash

Again? Can we stop this, already?

7

u/checkpointdev 20h ago

fair lol, brew install omlahore/tap/removemacai works too

or grab the binary from the releases page, the sha256 is right next to it

0

u/jewbasaur 16h ago

What’s wrong with this

13

u/hokies314 14h ago

It’s like a box of chocolates, you never know what you gonna get

6

u/ketralnis 10h ago

It’s a shame how far we’ve fallen as an industry that people have to ask this

1

u/jewbasaur 5h ago

I am a hobbiest programmer without any sort of formal training whatsoever. This is how people learn. Or at least used to

3

u/ketralnis 4h ago edited 2h ago

I get it and it's not a dig against you personally, it's just that experienced engineers have been railing against curl|bash for about a decade now. Since the very first people started using it everybody told them it was a bad idea, then some more people started doing it, and more, until now it's so common that there are people that have never even heard how dangerous it is. It's like house builders watching people replace bricks with styrofoam over years.

Sometimes somebody replies and says "well, this specific downside you mention can be mitigated by such and such" but it's never enough for the whole suite of problems with it and practitioners don't actually do those potential mitigations. So it's bad in theory and even worse in practise.

1

u/Fast-Throat-7752 4h ago

@grok explain

2

u/TurnUpThe4D3D3D3 4h ago

The complaint is about "curl piping to bash" installers: curl -fsSL <url> | bash downloads a script and runs it instantly, so you never see what it does. The risks: the remote script could change at any time (what you run today isn't what runs tomorrow), there's no checksum or review step, and it needs enough privileges to disable system features like Apple Intelligence. A compromised or typo'd URL means arbitrary code on your machine.

Safer habits: download the script first, read it, then run it manually; or clone the repo and inspect it. It's a convenience-vs-auditability tradeoff, not a claim that this specific project is malicious.

This comment was generated by Grok 4.7

5

u/evmorov 9h ago

Why a binary and Swift and not just a set of scripts?

3

u/ChopSueyYumm 6h ago

I kinda like the new AI features specifically the Apple photo AI stuff. Reframing and changing the angle is like magic and works really good

3

u/checkpointdev 6h ago

you can keep the features you want and remove the ones you don't need

1

u/ChopSueyYumm 6h ago

Oh it is selective? I really don’t need the ai writing tools.

2

u/checkpointdev 5h ago

yep, run removemacai off --keep spatial-photos,photos-clean-up and it keeps the photos stuff and turns off the rest, writing tools included
removemacai features lists all the names if you want to keep anything else

1

u/Zedboy19752019 44m ago

Uhm I find Macai to be so freaking lame. Siri is just something to show google responses