2026-02-25 09:29:02
Mark Gurman reports about upcoming touchscreen Macs:
…the Mac will gain a refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input, said the people.
I hope that for developers who have already adopted Liquid Glass in some way, there won’t be major changes needed for touch in the next macOS. Apple’s yearly update schedule tends to create too much busywork for developers.
2026-02-25 04:07:07
We rolled out some improvements for uploading audio in blog posts, including a new Record button for Micro.blog Studio subscribers. When a blog post has an MP3 attached, Micro.blog automatically adds it to your podcast RSS feed. Here’s a quick video showing how it works.
2026-02-24 23:16:35
From MacStories:
Apple announced today that it is expanding its manufacturing operations in Houston, Texas where it will make Mac minis. The company also said it will expand its AI server production and training in Houston later this year.
Sounds good to me. Also perfect timing with many OpenClaw enthusiasts buying Mac minis to run personal agents.
There’s a great discussion on SharpTech about thin vs. thick clients in the age of AI. Just a year ago, it seemed reasonable to expect that AI would move from the cloud to devices. Our phones would have more RAM, making good, private AI feasible. That now seems quite far away as cloud-based AI has gotten significantly better, now requiring loads of RAM and the best GPUs.
I mention this in the context of Mac mini production because Apple’s plan (before partnering with Google) was to have private cloud compute powered by Apple’s own chips. Back to Apple’s press release today:
For more than two decades, users around the world have relied on the incredibly popular Mac mini for the tremendous power it packs into its ultra-compact design. With its next-level AI capabilities, it has become an essential tool for everyone from students and aspiring creatives to small business owners.
I think “next-level AI” is objectively false. The Mac mini currently tops out at 64 GB RAM. That is not enough to run OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b, a relatively old model. But the Mac Studio can have a whopping 512 GB RAM! I wonder what specs Apple will choose for their AI servers. Maybe somewhere in the middle.
2026-02-24 05:50:11
As AI is used in more tools, I’m thinking about consent from bloggers who don’t want AI to process anything in their writing. I couldn’t find a convention for this outside of model training. Once text is out on the web, visitors are going to use web browsers and other tools to act on that text — summarizing, translating, annotating.
That’s a good thing. Imagine if blogs were so locked down that you couldn’t copy a passage to quote in your own post. The open web is at its best when we can share other writing we’ve discovered, or build tools to help people manage blog subscriptions, bookmarks, and notes.
Those personal uses of AI tools have a very different scope than large-scale training and data collection. As a small example, Cory Doctorow blogged recently about using lightweight models to check his writing, even though he has concerns about the AI industry. I think that’s a reasonable balance that avoids the extremes.
So excluding the kind of overly broad “don’t let AI touch anything”, we’re left with a few practical capabilities that bloggers should have:
Taken together, this feels like a comprehensive checklist for consent. I blogged last month about our strategy for AI in Micro.blog. This is the complement to that post, making sure that we have a defined list to compare new features against.
2026-02-24 00:21:02
A new philosophy for travelers called digital silence, to avoid sharing exactly where you were, via Kottke:
We have stopped traveling to feel. We now travel to prove we were there.
Only wish this was a blog post and not a series of Instagram photos.
