The free AI al­ready on your Mac. Every Mac with Apple Silicon has a built-in LLM. Apple locked it be­hind Siri. apfel sets it free - as a CLI tool, an OpenAI-compatible server, and a chat.

The AI is al­ready in­stalled on your Mac. Apple ships it with ma­cOS. apfel just gives you a way to talk to it - from your ter­mi­nal, from your code, from any­where.

No API keys. No sub­scrip­tions. No per-to­ken billing. It’s your hard­ware - use it.

Every to­ken gen­er­ated lo­cally on your Apple Silicon. Nothing leaves your ma­chine. Ever.

Context win­dow for in­put and out­put com­bined. Enough for most sin­gle-turn tasks and short chats.

The model un­der the hood

Apple ML Research

Three ways to use it.

CLI tool, HTTP server, or in­ter­ac­tive chat. Pick the one that fits.

Pipe-friendly and com­pos­able. Works with jq, xargs, and your shell scripts. stdin, std­out, JSON out­put, file at­tach­ments, proper exit codes.

apfel “What is the cap­i­tal of Austria?”

The cap­i­tal of Austria is Vienna.

Drop-in re­place­ment at lo­cal­host:11434. Point any OpenAI SDK at it and go. Streaming, tool call­ing, CORS, re­sponse for­mats.

Multi-turn con­ver­sa­tions with au­to­matic con­text man­age­ment. Five trim­ming strate­gies. System prompt sup­port. All on your Mac.

> How do I re­verse a list in Python?

Apple built an LLM into your Mac. apfel gives it a front door.

Starting with ma­cOS 26 (Tahoe), every Apple Silicon Mac in­cludes a lan­guage model as part of Apple Intelligence. Apple ex­poses it through the FoundationModels frame­work - a Swift API that gives apps ac­cess to SystemLanguageModel. All in­fer­ence runs on the Neural Engine and GPU. No net­work calls, no cloud, no API keys. The model is just there.

But Apple only uses it for Siri

Out of the box, the on-de­vice model pow­ers Siri, Writing Tools, and sys­tem fea­tures. There is no ter­mi­nal com­mand, no HTTP end­point, no way to pipe text through it. The FoundationModels frame­work ex­ists, but you need to write a Swift app to use it. That is what apfel does.

apfel is a Swift 6.3 bi­nary that wraps LanguageModelSession and ex­poses it three ways: as a UNIX com­mand-line tool with stdin/​std­out, as an OpenAI-compatible HTTP server (built on Hummingbird), and as an in­ter­ac­tive chat with con­text man­age­ment.

It han­dles the things Apple’s raw API does not: proper exit codes, JSON out­put, file at­tach­ments, five con­text trim­ming strate­gies for the small 4096-token win­dow, real to­ken count­ing via the SDK, and con­ver­sion of OpenAI tool schemas to Apple’s na­tive Transcript. ToolDefinition for­mat.

Shell scripts in the demo/ folder. Install apfel first, then grab the ones you want.

Natural lan­guage to shell com­mand. Say what you want, get the com­mand.

Pipe chains from plain English. awk, sed, sort, uniq - gen­er­ated for you.

Explain any com­mand, er­ror mes­sage, or code snip­pet in plain English.

What’s this di­rec­tory? Instant pro­ject ori­en­ta­tion for any code­base.

Change one URL. Keep your code.

apfel speaks the OpenAI API. Any client li­brary, any frame­work, any tool that talks to OpenAI can talk to your Mac’s AI in­stead. Just change the base URL.

from ope­nai im­port OpenAI

# Just change the base_url. That’s it.

client = OpenAI(

base_url=“http://​lo­cal­host:11434/​v1”,

api_key=“un­used” # no auth needed

resp = client.chat.com­ple­tions.cre­ate(

model=“ap­ple-foun­da­tion­model”,

mes­sages=[{

“role”: “user”,

“content”: “What is 1+1?”

print(resp.choices[0].mes­sage.con­tent)

Artemis II is now on a loop­ing path that will carry the crew around the far side of the Moon and back again. It is the first time since 1972 that hu­mans have trav­elled out­side of the Earth’s or­bit.

Federal data shows the tech gi­ant filed for over 3,000 for­eign worker visas as it cuts thou­sands of American jobs.

Federal data shows the tech gi­ant filed for over 3,000 for­eign worker visas as it cuts thou­sands of American jobs.

Submit your up­dates here. ›

Oracle, the soft­ware com­pany head­quar­tered in Austin, Texas, has filed thou­sands of pe­ti­tions for H-1B visas in the past two fis­cal years, even as it lays off thou­sands of American work­ers as part of a broader or­ga­ni­za­tional shift. Federal data shows Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas in fis­cal year 2025 and 436 so far in fis­cal year 2026, to­tal­ing over 3,100 visa re­quests.

The H-1B visa pro­gram al­lows com­pa­nies to tem­porar­ily em­ploy for­eign work­ers with spe­cial­ized skills, of­ten in the tech in­dus­try. Critics ar­gue the pro­gram is used to re­place American work­ers with cheaper for­eign la­bor, while sup­port­ers say it helps fill cru­cial tal­ent gaps. Oracle’s visa fil­ings amid mass lay­offs raise ques­tions about the com­pa­ny’s mo­ti­va­tions and the broader de­bate over the H-1B pro­gram’s im­pact on the American work­force.

According to U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, Oracle America Inc. filed for 2,690 H-1B visas for fis­cal year 2025 and 436 so far for fis­cal year 2026. This comes as Oracle re­port­edly be­gan lay­ing off thou­sands of em­ploy­ees this week, with work­ers re­ceiv­ing let­ters stat­ing ‘today is your last work­ing day.’ The com­pany has not pro­vided pub­lic com­ment on the lay­offs or the H-1B visa fil­ings.

* Oracle filed for 2,690 H-1B visas for fis­cal year 2025, which cov­ers October 1, 2024 to September 30, 2025.

* Oracle filed for 436 H-1B visas so far for fis­cal year 2026, which runs from October 1, 2025 to September 30, 2026.

The full im­pact of Oracle’s lay­offs and H-1B visa fil­ings re­mains to be seen, as the com­pany has not pro­vided de­tailed pub­lic com­ment on its work­force changes and for­eign worker hir­ing plans.

The take­away

Oracle’s ac­tions raise con­cerns about the com­pany po­ten­tially re­plac­ing American work­ers with cheaper for­eign la­bor through the H-1B visa pro­gram, even as it un­der­goes a ma­jor or­ga­ni­za­tional shift. This case high­lights the on­go­ing de­bate over the H-1B pro­gram’s im­pact on the U.S. work­force and the need for greater trans­parency from com­pa­nies uti­liz­ing the pro­gram.

One US ser­vice mem­ber has been res­cued af­ter a US F-15E Strike Eagle fighter was shot down over Iran, prompt­ing a fran­tic ef­fort to lo­cate its two-strong crew, in the first such in­ci­dent since the war be­gan al­most five weeks ago.

US of­fi­cials fa­mil­iar with the sit­u­a­tion said one crew mem­ber was still miss­ing late on Friday, af­ter Iranian state me­dia re­leased im­ages of a tail fin and other de­bris ac­com­pa­nied by an ini­tial claim that an ad­vanced US F-35 had been hit by a new air de­fence sys­tem over cen­tral Iran.

Aviation ex­perts said the wreck­age pic­tured was in fact from a F-15E, from the US air force’s 494th squadron, based at RAF Lakenheath in the UK, though it could not at first be con­firmed when and where the pic­tures were taken. Markings on the wreck­age ap­peared to match those on the tips of the tail fins of Strike Eagles nor­mally based in the UK.

US of­fi­cials later con­firmed off the record that an F-15E had been brought down and the Pentagon was scram­bling to find the crew be­fore the Iranians. There was no of­fi­cial com­ment from the US mil­i­tary about the in­ci­dent.

The down­ing of a US fighter jet comes just days af­ter Donald Trump de­liv­ered a bel­li­cose na­tional ad­dress in which he claimed the US had “beaten and com­pletely dec­i­mated Iran” and the con­flict was “nearing com­ple­tion”.

“We have all the cards. They have none,” the US pres­i­dent de­clared on Wednesday.

The White House press sec­re­tary, Karoline Leavitt, said Trump had been briefed but she did not of­fer any ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion. In a brief in­ter­view with NBC News, the pres­i­dent de­clined to dis­cuss the search and res­cue mis­sion but said the in­ci­dent would not af­fect ne­go­ti­a­tions with Iran. “No, not at all,” he said. “No, it’s war. We’re in war.”

Iran’s semi-of­fi­cial Fars news agency said on Friday that Tehran had re­jected a US pro­posal for a 48-hour cease­fire, cit­ing an un­named source.

Details of the res­cue mis­sion were few but it is likely to have been a high-risk op­er­a­tion with res­cue air­craft po­ten­tially ex­posed to fire from the ground. The sta­tus of the sec­ond crew mem­ber was un­clear, with res­cue ef­forts con­tin­u­ing as evening fell in Iran.

Subsequent footage filmed in Iran showed a US C-130 Hercules and a HH-60 Pave Hawk he­li­copter fly­ing low in south-west Iran, and at one point re­fu­elling to­gether dur­ing their res­cue op­er­a­tion.

An Iranian busi­ness­man of­fered to pay a re­ward worth $60,000 (£45,000) to any­one cap­tur­ing the crew mem­bers alive. And a pre­sen­ter on an Iranian TV chan­nel, based in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province, a moun­tain­ous re­gion in the south-west of the coun­try, urged res­i­dents to hand over any “enemy pi­lot” to po­lice and promised a re­ward for any­one who did.

That gave a clue to the lo­ca­tion of the in­ci­dent. Geolocated footage of low-fly­ing res­cue air­craft in­di­cated planes fly­ing near Behbahan, in the neigh­bour­ing province of Khuzestan, around 30 miles from the Gulf coast.

The Iranian par­lia­ment speaker, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf , ridiculed the US, post­ing on so­cial me­dia: “After de­feat­ing Iran 37 times in a row, this bril­liant no-strat­egy war they started has now been down­graded from ‘regime change’ to: ‘Hey! Can any­one find our pi­lots? Please?’”

No US troops have so far been taken pris­oner by Iran. Thirteen American ser­vice per­son­nel have been killed and 300 wounded dur­ing a cam­paign in which more than 12,300 tar­gets in Iran have been bombed by the US alone.

A so­cial me­dia ac­count claim­ing to be linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards posted a pic­ture of an ejec­tor seat in a desert land­scape, which ap­peared to be con­sis­tent with the ACES II type used in F-15Es. Justin Bronk, an avi­a­tion ex­pert from Rusithe Royal United Services Institute (Rusi), said: “If gen­uine, it would sug­gest that at least one of the two air­crew did eject safely.”

Iran’s Tasnim news agency re­ported that the pi­lot of the jet had been taken into cus­tody, con­tra­dict­ing Tehran’s ini­tial claim that the pi­lot had prob­a­bly died in the in­ci­dent. But noth­ing then emerged to ver­ify the re­vised Iranian state­ment.

The New York Times re­ported that a sec­ond US air force com­bat plane crashed in the Persian Gulf re­gion on Friday, but the lone pi­lot was safely res­cued.

The A-10 Warthog at­tack plane went down near the strait of Hormuz at roughly the same time as the air force F-15E was shot down over Iran, ac­cord­ing to two US of­fi­cials. Iranian state me­dia said its air de­fence sys­tem had tar­geted an “enemy” A-10 air­craft in south­ern wa­ters near the strait of Hormuz.

Up to now no US fighter jets had been lost over Iran dur­ing the five-week-long con­flict, though three F-15Es were shot down by a Kuwaiti air de­fence sys­tem in a dra­matic friendly fire in­ci­dent on 1 March.

The to­tal cost to the US air force of lost and dam­aged air­craft, which also in­cludes 16 un­crewed Reaper drones, has been es­ti­mated at more than $3bn by the spe­cial­ist news site Airforce Technology. An F-15E cost $31m when de­liv­ered in the late 1990s; newer mod­els cost closer to $100m.

Meanwhile, pow­er­ful blasts rocked north­ern Tehran, as Israel said it had launched a new wave of strikes on the Iranian cap­i­tal and Beirut.

The Associated Press also re­ported, cit­ing an Israeli of­fi­cial, that Israel had sus­pended airstrikes in ar­eas “relevant” to the res­cue op­er­a­tion in Iran.

Late on Thursday, the US pres­i­dent re­it­er­ated his threat to bomb Iran’s in­fra­struc­ture, hours af­ter he claimed credit for an at­tack on a newly built 136-metre-high (446ft) sus­pen­sion bridge be­tween Tehran and Karaj that killed eight peo­ple and in­jured 95.

“Our Military, the great­est and most pow­er­ful (by far!) any­where in the World, has­n’t even started de­stroy­ing what’s left in Iran. Bridges next, then Electric Power Plants!” he posted on so­cial me­dia, re­peat­ing a threat to de­stroy Iran’s elec­tric­ity net­work.

Fresh footage on Friday showed that the $400m bridge, on a high­way be­tween the Iranian cap­i­tal and a city to the north-west, had been sev­ered in three places by the bomb­ing, in­creas­ing the cost of its even­tual re­pair.

More than 100 in­ter­na­tional law ex­perts signed a joint state­ment on the Just Security web­site warn­ing that state­ments made by Trump and other se­nior US of­fi­cials, and the con­duct of US forces “raise se­ri­ous con­cerns about vi­o­la­tions of in­ter­na­tional hu­man rights law and in­ter­na­tional hu­man­i­tar­ian law, in­clud­ing po­ten­tial war crimes”.

A par­tic­u­lar con­cern, they said, was threats made by the US to Iran’s en­ergy in­fra­struc­ture. “International law pro­tects from at­tack ob­jects in­dis­pens­able to the sur­vival of civil­ians, and the at­tacks threat­ened by Trump, if im­ple­mented, could en­tail war crimes.”

A power and de­sali­na­tion plant in Kuwait was dam­aged in an at­tack on Friday, though Iran blamed Israel for the at­tack. The Mina al-Ah­madi re­fin­ery in the Gulf coun­try was also closed af­ter a drone strike from Iran, while the UK an­nounced it had agreed to send a counter drone team to help the coun­try in its de­fence.

Israeli me­dia re­ported that the US had told Israel it did not want Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, to be killed be­cause Americans wanted to have at least one se­nior po­lit­i­cal fig­ure avail­able who could ne­go­ti­ate a peace agree­ment.

Iran’s regime, how­ever, has so far shown lit­tle de­sire to stop fight­ing. Sirens sounded re­peat­edly in Israel, as mis­sile at­tacks from Iran and Lebanon con­tin­ued but ca­su­alty num­bers were small, with 12 peo­ple treated for phys­i­cal in­juries by the coun­try’s emer­gency med­ical ser­vice in the past 24 hours.

Israel also car­ried out fresh strikes on south Beirut af­ter is­su­ing an evac­u­a­tion or­der for the area, which has largely been emp­tied of res­i­dents amid re­peated raids.

Every time I ut­ter the phrase “Samsung Magician,” a fully formed plan for re­in­stat­ing the Inquisition is pre­sented to me, whose sole goal is to burn this Magician at the stake.

What kind of fuck­ing name is that any­way? “Samsung Magician” - for a disk util­ity? Who green­lit this? Who sat in a meet­ing and said “yeah, Magician, like it does magic” ?

The ac­tual steps are at the end, now sit back and let me take you on a won­der­ful jour­ney full of won­der way down into the Samsung shit­ter. We will find ex­actly what we ex­pected, but more of it.

I needed to set an en­cryp­tion pass­word on my T7 Shield SSD portable drive. To take ad­van­tage of the dri­ve’s hard­ware en­cryp­tion en­gine, I needed to use Samsung’s Magician soft­ware. I in­stalled it. It did­n’t work. I wanted it gone. So I started to look at how to re­move this soft­ware.

First, there’s no unin­staller. Samsung - a tril­lion-dol­lar com­pany - ships Mac soft­ware with no unin­stall but­ton. No drag-to-trash. Nothing.

So I’ve dug around and found a cleanup script buried six fold­ers deep in­side the app bun­dle. Let’s try to run it:

It ran. And my kitty ex­ploded. Sweet kitty over­flowed. Hundreds - lit­er­ally hun­dreds - of lines of chown: Operation not per­mit­ted. The scrip­t’s grand strat­egy for unin­stalling it­self is to change the own­er­ship of every sin­gle file, one by one, so it can then delete them. Except ma­cOS blocks every sin­gle at­tempt. Five hun­dred chown er­rors. The script does­n’t stop, does­n’t catch the er­rors, does­n’t try plan B. It just keeps slam­ming its head into the wall for every file and then fin­ishes like “yep, all done boss.” So, at this stage the files are all still there.

I rm -rf every Samsung folder I could find. The Preferences. The Caches. The LaunchAgents. The LaunchDaemons. The ker­nel ex­ten­sions. The crash re­ports. I run eight, nine, ten sep­a­rate rm -rf com­mands tar­get­ing dif­fer­ent cor­ners of the filesys­tem where nor­mal ap­pli­ca­tions would usu­ally be:

Then I run find / -iname “*samsung*magician*” to check. 27 files STILL THERE!!! After the cleanup script. After nine man­ual delete com­mands, 27 files are still on my ma­chine, scat­tered across lo­ca­tions like:

* Kernel ex­ten­sions in /Library/StagedExtensions/ (dead dri­vers that ma­cOS won’t let you touch)

* The same ker­nel ex­ten­sions AGAIN in /System/Volumes/Data/Library/StagedExtensions/ (because ma­cOS mir­rors them,

so you get to see them twice)

* Package re­ceipts in /private/var/db/receipts/ (Samsung left its re­ceipts be­hind like a bur­glar leav­ing a bunch

of turds in the liv­ing room)

* Cached processes in /private/var/folders/7v/ (yes, Samsung is in there too)

* A crash re­porter list (because of course it crashed at some point)

* And a Samsung Magician folder in Application Support that some­how sur­vived every­thing

I ran find one fi­nal time and eight files re­mained.

And so at last, Samsung Magician per­forms its fi­nal and great­est trick. Behold, ladies and gen­tle­men! Step right up! Watch in awe as four dead files defy dele­tion, sur­vive every com­mand thrown at them, and take up per­ma­nent res­i­dence in the deep­est, most pro­tected vault your op­er­at­ing sys­tem has. sudo rm -rf? Pathetic. These files aren’t go­ing any­where.

Now, I can’t stand any trace of it, you see. I want it gone.

I shut down my Mac. Held the power but­ton. Booted into Recovery Mode. Opened Terminal. Ran csru­til dis­able. Rebooted. Opened Terminal. Deleted the ker­nel ex­ten­sions. Ran find to con­firm they’re gone. Shut down AGAIN. Booted into Recovery Mode AGAIN. Ran csru­til en­able. Rebooted AGAIN. All this just to delete four dead files and their mir­rors from a disk util­ity.

In other words, two re­boots into Recovery Mode to re­move four dead files from a disk util­ity that did­n’t even fuck­ing work in the first moth­er­fuck­ing place.

The most in­sane thing was­n’t the ab­surd dif­fi­culty of re­mov­ing it. It was the Magician’s in­sides.

Samsung Magician comes with frame-by-frame PNG an­i­ma­tion se­quences. For a spin­ning cir­cle. There are over 150 in­di­vid­u­ally num­bered PNG files called things like Circle mo­tion_00001.png through Circle mo­tion_00149.png just to show you a lit­tle an­i­ma­tion that says “Health: Good.” That’s not a joke. A team of Samsung en­gi­neers built this, a pro­ject man­ager ap­proved it, QA tested it (allegedly), and at no point in that en­tire chain did a sin­gle hu­man be­ing raise their hand and say: “hey, should a disk util­ity re­ally ship with 150 hand-num­bered PNGs of a spin­ning cir­cle?”

And it gets bet­ter. There’s a sep­a­rate set of 150 PNGs for “Health: Critical.” And an­other set for a “gamer” theme. And an­other set for fin­ger­print progress an­i­ma­tions. And fin­ger­print suc­cess an­i­ma­tions. We’re talk­ing about hun­dreds upon hun­dreds of in­di­vid­ual PNG files for dec­o­ra­tive an­i­ma­tions in a DISK UTILITY.

* An en­tire Electron frame­work - yes, they em­bed­ded a full Chromium browser en­gine to show you a pie chart of your disk space

* Squirrel frame­work - an auto-up­date frame­work, be­cause what if this night­mare were to end too early?

* Custom Samsung fonts in mul­ti­ple weights (200, 300, 400, 450, 500, 600, 700, 800) be­cause ap­par­ently sys­tem fonts

aren’t good enough for dis­play­ing “128GB free”

* Localization files for every lan­guage on Earth - Korean, Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Italian, Russian,

Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Urdu, Swahili, Filipino,

Afrikaans - Samsung re­ally wanted to make sure every­one on the planet could ex­pe­ri­ence this suf­fer­ing equally

* Banner ad­ver­tise­ment JPGs (banner_1.jpg through ban­ner_5.jpg) - that’s right, the app that you in­stalled to man­age

your hard­ware shows you ads

* Help doc­u­men­ta­tion with 40+ screen­shots in 10 lan­guages

Samsung Magician is an in­fes­ta­tion. It’s a mon­u­ment to bloat, a love let­ter to un­nec­es­sary soft­ware and cor­po­rate bull­shit, and a huge meaty mid­dle fin­ger to every user who just wanted to set a pass­word on their portable drive.

Look for an unin­stall but­ton in the app. There is­n’t one.

Run it. Watch 500 chown: Operation not per­mit­ted er­rors wa­ter­fall down your ter­mi­nal. Nothing is re­moved.

Run find. Discover 27 files still re­main­ing across six dif­fer­ent sys­tem di­rec­to­ries.

Manually delete the SECOND Samsung Magician folder in Application Support (yes, there were two).

Run find again. Eight ker­nel ex­ten­sion files re­main, pro­tected by SIP.

Shut down Mac. Boot into Recovery Mode AGAIN. Re-enable SIP. Reboot AGAIN.

Appearing on the Founders pod­cast this week, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist Marc Andreessen made the rather ex­tra­or­di­nary claim that - go­ing back four hun­dred years - it would never have oc­curred to any­one to be “introspective.”

Andreessen ap­par­ently blames Sigmund Freud and the Vienna Circle with hav­ing some­how “manufactured” the whole prac­tice of in­tro­spec­tion some­where be­tween 1910-1920. He sum­marised his own ap­proach to life thus: “Move for­ward. Go.”

Host David Senra, ap­par­ently de­lighted, con­grat­u­lated Andreessen on de­vel­op­ing what he called a “zero-introspection mind­set.”

Marc Andreessen was right about web browsers.

But he has since been wrong about a great many things.

And he is en­tirely wrong about in­tro­spec­tion.

If we ac­cept that in­tro­spec­tion is a Viennese in­ven­tion of the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury, we have to ex­plain away…well, rather a lot.

Socrates made the ex­am­ined life a con­di­tion of the life worth liv­ing, and he ar­guably died for it. The Stoics built an en­tire philo­soph­i­cal prac­tice around self-ex­am­i­na­tion: Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a pri­vate ex­er­cise in catch­ing him­self fail­ing to live by his own prin­ci­ples, and he did this while run­ning the Roman Empire, which sug­gests he did­n’t find the two ac­tiv­i­ties in­com­pat­i­ble. Augustine’s Confessions, writ­ten around 400 AD, of­fer a sus­tained and search­ing ac­count of his own in­te­rior life that pre­dates Freud by about fif­teen cen­turies, give or take.

In Chinese phi­los­o­phy, Mencius de­scribes the con­cept of in­tro­spec­tion as “seeking the lost heart,” the re­cov­ery of some­thing in­nate that gets buried un­der the noise of or­di­nary life. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play about what hap­pens when you’re con­sti­tu­tion­ally un­able to stop ex­am­in­ing your­self and start act­ing, and the fact that Elizabethan au­di­ences im­me­di­ately rec­og­nized this as a prob­lem im­plies they were al­ready some­what fa­mil­iar with the prac­tice be­ing sat­i­rized; you can’t par­ody a con­cept your au­di­ence has never en­coun­tered.

Andreessen’s novel idea that Freud in­vented in­tro­spec­tion is an in­ver­sion of the record. What Freud ac­tu­ally did was sys­tem­atize cer­tain ideas about the un­con­scious that were al­ready cir­cu­lat­ing in European in­tel­lec­tual cul­ture and put them into a clin­i­cal frame­work. Half of those ideas were them­selves wrong; but “Freud was of­ten wrong” is a very dif­fer­ent ar­gu­ment from “people had no in­ner lives worth ex­am­in­ing be­fore 1910.”

Andreessen is no stranger to the writ­ten word. His Techno-Optimist Manifesto quotes Nietzsche, he ref­er­ences the Italian Futurists with ad­mi­ra­tion and he’s not un­fa­mil­iar with the Western philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion. So the his­tor­i­cal re­vi­sion­ism can’t be called ig­no­rance; this is, on some level, a cal­cu­lated move. The claim that in­tro­spec­tion is a mod­ern pathol­ogy serves a spe­cific rhetor­i­cal func­tion by dele­git­imiz­ing an en­tire mode of en­gage­ment with hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence, clear­ing it off the table, and leav­ing only ex­ter­nal ac­tion as the proper re­sponse to ~being alive.

Andreessen and his cronies are mak­ing large claims about what hu­man be­ings want and need. His stated per­sonal phi­los­o­phy is ex­plic­itly a vi­sion of hu­man flour­ish­ing: abun­dance, growth, the elim­i­na­tion of ma­te­r­ial con­straints etc. These are claims about what will make peo­ple’s lives go well. But you can’t eval­u­ate those claims with­out some ac­count of hu­man in­ner life, be­cause hu­man in­ner life is where the ques­tion of whether a life is go­ing well ac­tu­ally gets an­swered. You can mea­sure GDP. You can mea­sure life ex­pectancy. You can mea­sure the num­ber of trans­ac­tions per sec­ond your pay­ment proces­sor han­dles. But none, not one sin­gle of these mea­sure­ments will tell you whether the peo­ple whose lives they de­scribe feel that their lives are worth liv­ing, whether they find their work mean­ing­ful, whether they wake up with some­thing that re­sem­bles pur­pose.

The only ac­cess any­one has to those ques­tions is through some­thing like in­tro­spec­tion: ei­ther their own, or some­one else’s hon­est re­ports of their ex­pe­ri­ence, or the ac­cu­mu­lated tes­ti­mony of lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy about what it’s like to be a liv­ing, breath­ing, doubt­ing, hurt­ing, in­ter­nally-scream­ing hu­man be­ing float­ing on a God-forsaken rock in a God-forsaken void. Strip that out and you’re left with a very thin the­ory of hu­man flour­ish­ing. It ba­si­cally runs to more is bet­ter, faster is bet­ter, big­ger is bet­ter with noth­ing else added or sub­tracted or at­tempted.

Perhaps, you find this to be a de­fen­si­ble po­si­tion; but you still have to ac­tu­ally ar­gue for it. You can’t just claim that the ques­tion of what peo­ple find mean­ing­ful is a Viennese in­ven­tion and move on.

The re­sponse to Andreessen’s in­ter­view that keeps cir­cu­lat­ing is that “he hath no soul.”

This is, of course, wrong.

Andreessen al­most cer­tainly has a rich in­ner life. He has en­thu­si­asms and anx­i­eties and aes­thetic pref­er­ences and tribal loy­al­ties and all the rest of it. The prob­lem is­n’t that there’s noth­ing in­side; the prob­lem is that he’s cho­sen not to ex­am­ine what’s there, and has de­vel­oped an elab­o­rate post-hoc jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for that choice by claim­ing that ex­am­i­na­tion is it­self the pathol­ogy.

This is a rec­og­niz­able pat­tern. The Victorian vi­tal­ists who viewed mas­tur­ba­tion as phys­i­cally de­bil­i­tat­ing were wrong about the phys­i­ol­ogy, but they were also en­gaged in mo­ti­vated rea­son­ing: they al­ready knew they wanted to pro­hibit some­thing, and the sci­en­tific-sound­ing jus­ti­fi­ca­tion came later. Andreessen al­ready knows he wants to move fast with­out ex­am­in­ing him­self, and the his­tor­i­cal ar­gu­ment that in­tro­spec­tion is a Freudian man­u­fac­ture serves ex­actly that same func­tion.

The prac­ti­cal con­se­quences of an un­ex­am­ined in­ner life at scale are not the­o­ret­i­cal. The so­cial me­dia plat­forms built by peo­ple who be­lieved be­hav­ioral data was a re­li­able sub­sti­tute for un­der­stand­ing hu­man psy­chol­ogy pro­duced a decade of en­gage­ment met­rics while user well­be­ing de­clined and our en­tire so­cial or­der de­cayed. The en­gi­neers who built these sys­tems weren’t ma­li­cious; they were op­ti­miz­ing for things they could mea­sure, be­cause they’d im­plic­itly ac­cepted the view that mea­sur­able out­puts were a suf­fi­cient model of hu­man flour­ish­ing. Goodhart’s Law ex­acted its toll: the mea­sure be­came the tar­get, and the tar­get was not what any­one would have cho­sen if they’d been forced to ac­tu­ally spec­ify what they were aim­ing for.

Andreessen’s ad­vice to him­self, and ap­par­ently to oth­ers, is di­rec­tional with­out be­ing spe­cific. Forward, he says. Forward to­ward what? His man­i­festo ob­sesses over abun­dance, over the elim­i­na­tion of ma­te­r­ial suf­fer­ing, and a fu­ture in which tech­nol­ogy has lifted con­straints that cur­rently limit hu­man pos­si­bil­ity. These are goals I can get be­hind. But “forward” pre­sup­poses that you know where you’re go­ing, and know­ing where you’re go­ing pre­sup­poses that you know what you want, and know­ing what you want does­n’t hap­pen with­out ex­actly the ex­am­i­na­tion the man has ruled out.

Andreessen’s model of hu­man be­ings is thin. He can ob­serve be­hav­ior. He can track pref­er­ences as ex­pressed through mar­ket choices. He can mea­sure what peo­ple click on and buy and use. What he can’t do, with­out some­thing like in­tro­spec­tion, is un­der­stand why, and the why is where most of the im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion lives.

Four hun­dred years ago, the peo­ple Andreessen imag­ines were bliss­fully un­self­con­scious were read­ing Augustine and Montaigne and ar­gu­ing about Stoic phi­los­o­phy. They were writ­ing di­aries and let­ters that ex­am­ined their own mo­tives with con­sid­er­able care. They were not, in fact, just mov­ing for­ward with­out ask­ing where they were go­ing. That habit is not a pathol­ogy Freud in­tro­duced into an oth­er­wise healthy civ­i­liza­tion. It’s one of the things that makes civ­i­liza­tion pos­si­ble, and pre­tend­ing oth­er­wise does­n’t make you a builder. It just makes you some­one who’s never looked at the blue­prints.

Explore and share your ob­ser­va­tions from the nat­ural world.

Every ob­ser­va­tion can con­tribute to bio­di­ver­sity sci­ence, from the rarest but­ter­fly to the most com­mon back­yard weed. We share your find­ings with sci­en­tific data repos­i­to­ries like the

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to help sci­en­tists find and use your data. All you have to do is ob­serve.

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Help sci­en­tists and re­source man­agers un­der­stand when and where or­gan­isms oc­cur.

Connect with ex­perts who can iden­tify the or­gan­isms you ob­serve.

Find a pro­ject with a mis­sion that in­ter­ests you, or start your own.

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What Europe does bet­ter

EU com­pa­nies are sub­ject to the world’s strictest en­vi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tions. European prod­ucts are de­signed for longevity — less throw­away cul­ture, more re­spon­si­bil­ity.

Made in Europe has stood for top qual­ity and dura­bil­ity for decades. Strict stan­dards guar­an­tee fair work­ing con­di­tions, while shorter sup­ply chains mea­sur­ably re­duce CO₂.

EU providers are sub­ject to the GDPR — the strictest data pro­tec­tion law world­wide. Your data be­longs to you, not ad­ver­tis­ing net­works. Note: US soft­ware can be com­pelled by the CLOUD Act to sur­ren­der data to US au­thor­i­ties — even if servers are lo­cated in Europe.

A grow­ing num­ber of NHS staff are re­port­edly re­fus­ing to work on the Fed­er­ated Data Platform (FDP) due to eth­i­cal con­cerns with its US-based provider, Palantir. The US tech­nol­ogy com­pany was awarded a £330 mil­lion con­tract in 2023 to col­late op­er­a­tional data, in­clud­ing pa­tient in­for­ma­tion and wait­ing lists. However, Palantir’s in­volve­ment in the US de­fence sec­tor and its lead­er­ship’s po­lit­i­cal af­fil­i­a­tions have made the part­ner­ship con­tentious.

Senior health of­fi­cials and data an­a­lysts have de­scribed a “workplace ad­just­ment” where em­ploy­ees of­fi­cially refuse to en­gage with the soft­ware. Some staff mem­bers re­port­edly work as slowly as pos­si­ble when pres­sured to use the plat­form, while oth­ers avoid it en­tirely, cit­ing bet­ter al­ter­na­tives. Despite this re­sis­tance, 123 of 205 hos­pi­tal trusts in England are cur­rently us­ing the FDP, and the pro­ject has re­ceived a high rat­ing for on-time and on-bud­get de­liv­ery.

The gov­ern­ment is cur­rently un­der pres­sure from MPs and med­ical unions to eject the com­pany from NHS sys­tems. Reports sug­gest that min­is­ters have sought ad­vice on trig­ger­ing a con­tract break clause. While Louis Mosley, the ex­ec­u­tive vice-chair of Palantir in the UK, main­tains that such cam­paigns are ide­o­log­i­cally mo­ti­vated and could harm pa­tient care, the level of dis­sent un­der­scores a sig­nif­i­cant di­vide over the com­pa­ny’s suit­abil­ity to man­age na­tional health data.

Training Announcement: The IAPP Certified Information Privacy Technologist (CIPT) is a pri­vacy-fo­cused pro­fes­sional IT cer­tifi­cate from the IAPP that ad­dresses data pro­tec­tion re­quire­ments and con­trols within com­plex tech­no­log­i­cal en­vi­ron­ments. It ex­plores the data life­cy­cle, pri­vacy risk mod­els and frame­works, the prin­ci­ples of Privacy by Design, and the role of pri­vacy-en­hanc­ing tech­nolo­gies within the or­gan­i­sa­tion. Find out more.