2026-10-05 21:48:18
Parakeet has long been a fan favorite local transcription model in Quick Subtitles. Apple's is slower and not as accurate, while Whisper is a little bit more accurate, but is way slower. With the combination of high accuracy and massively better speed, why go with anything else, right?
Well, what if we could take Parakeet's already outstanding performance and accuracy, and make it faster? A lot faster…
TLDR: I've multi-threaded Parakeet in the Quick Subtitles CLI so it runs about 3x as fast as before, and is available now. The main app will get this in a few weeks, and is currently available in beta for More Birchtree subscribers.
I threw the model at the latest episode of Comfort Zone, which is 102 minutes long. Using the updated version of the CLI transcribed it in 12 seconds on the M4 Pro and 8 seconds on the M6.
Eight. Seconds.
These numbers are clearly outrageous, so how did we get here?
I was doing some investigation into how the three transcription models I use scale. It turns out Apple's model does almost all of its work on the CPU and will utilize one performance core. Parakeet behaves very similarly, also limiting itself to whatever your fastest core can do. Whisper is a bit different, doing almost all of its work on the neural engine. This is shown in the chart above, which shows power consumption over a run of transcriptions using each model.
In terms of opportunity to speed things up, I only had options on one of these. Apple doesn't allow developers to choose how many cores their transcription model runs on, so there's nothing I can do there. Whisper is powered mostly by the neural engine, which is already multi-threaded and is doing all it can. See below for what happens to transcription speed when on the Mac you force Parakeet and Whisper to run only on an efficiency core.
Parakeet is mostly powered by the CPU, though, so if I could get that running on multiple cores, we might see better speeds. I dug deeper into how Parakeet works (via FluidAudio), and actually, it's already cutting up files into 15-second chunks and transcribing each chunk sequentially. By assigning each chunk to a different core, I'm able to get through the file quicker.
However, as it goes with computers, once you unlock one bottleneck, the next one appears, and that's the neural engine. While the neural engine is not the main contributor in this process, it is part of the process, and I found in my testing that once you get past 4 cores giving data to the neural engine, it can't keep up and you stop getting meaningful benefits after that.
What’s interesting is that I do my development on an M4 Pro Mac and I know the M6 has a new neural engine with twice as many cores, so I wondered if this would be improved on that device. I did the exact same test and surprisingly the answer is no. Here are the performance numbers when using 1-8 cores on each device.
Improvements decrease with each new core, and once you get to 4 cores, you're basically capped out, as the CPU simply builds up a queue elsewhere in the system, which as far as I can tell can not presently be increased. Although let's put this into perspective, on a base M6 processor, we're transcribing up to 12 minutes of audio per second…that's pretty damn good.
I've done quite a bit of A/B testing and the results are exactly the same, so going forward, this is just how Parakeet will work in Quick Subtitles. There's no need to select a "Turbo" option, it'll just be the fastest damn version of Parakeet you can get anywhere.
It is available now in the Quick Subs CLI which you can install with…
brew install mattbirchler/tap/quicksubs
…or by upgrading if you already have it.
Those using the app will get this in the next update, which is coming in the next few weeks.
2026-10-05 01:00:00
Justine Calma: Trump finalizes rule to make cars less fuel efficient
The US Department of Transportation finalized its plans today to weaken fuel efficiency standards, calling it “among the largest deregulatory actions under the second Trump Administration.”
I just think there's something wild about Republicans in the US constantly advocating for things to get objectively worse. You want cheaper, cleaner energy? Nah, let's boost dirty, expensive energy production! You want better gas milage in your car? Nah, let's make sure car makers can make it worse. The vast majority of people want more restrictions on data centers? Nope, how about we make it easier for them to be built where people don't want them and also ensure they can be as dirty as possible.
2026-10-04 22:00:00
Brent Simmons: That About Wraps It Up for Stock Mac UI
Users have shown — again, I don’t need to prove this — that they don’t think about a stock Mac app vs. custom. Do they dislike Things for not having a toolbar at the top of the window that they can customize in the usual way? No. (The only people who think that way are longtime Mac developers like me.)
2026-10-04 21:30:52
There's a chance, slim as it might be, that things won't go the way the've gone the last 30 years with digitization the moving to rental models for everyhing.
2026-10-01 06:16:24
Birchfeed allows you to set up an email address to receive newsletters which appear as feeds in the app. However, some people (including me) would actually like to see these in their email inbox as well. Now you can enable this in the Newsletters settings in the app.
For spam reasons, you can't just forward these emails anywhere, so they go to your account's email by default, and you can change it to something else, but you need to verify ownership of that email as well.
2026-09-30 23:11:18
Birchfeed is fundamentally a backend service that you will mostly use through a third-party client, such as Unread, Reader Classic, or NetNewswire. I always want that primary use case to be really solid, and I think it is right now.
However, one of the reasons I wanted to build an RSS sync service was that I thought there was more I could do to help people have a better experience. Since launch, the most popular feature outside of the core sync functionality has been the daily briefing, which most users have enabled. This sends you a daily email with the most notable stories across your feeds, as well as a few highlights I think are worth checking out. Maybe you don't have time to go through the hundreds of posts that have come in today, but you can see the big headlines in 15 seconds.
Today, I've launched a new feature aimed at getting you caught up, which is called "catch up". This will appear when you have over 100 unread items, and it will try to find stories and individual articles that stand out from everything else and presents it in a landing page format. If Reddit's old slogan was "the front page of the internet", Birchfeed's can be "your front page of the internet".
Similar to yesterday's update to Best-o-Masto, this uses Jev to rank the interest of hundreds of recent articles. Then GPT-6 Luna groups them and writes quick summaries.
The catch-up feature is available for all users on a free trial or paid subscription. For now, I'm limiting this feature to two runs every 24 hours while I monitor costs, and will loosen it up if it makes sense to.