Manton Reece

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:45:00 -0700

OpenAI announces draft S-1 in an oddly direct, brief blog post:

We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:25:21 -0700

Catching up from yesterday’s post from John Gruber about SwiftUI:

There’s something really wrong with SwiftUI. Amongst the apps I use, the best example is Apple Journal. Basic stuff that’s worked reliably for decades — some things that heretofore had worked forever — are dangerously broken.

Apple should’ve unified AppKit and UIKit years ago. SwiftUI could be purely a wrapper for the core framework, plus support for watchOS. Maybe too late to correct this now.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:44:15 -0700

Seeing this screenshot on Mastodon from Finn Voorhees, sounds like Apple doesn’t want big companies to use private cloud compute. Which means it probably won’t even work with Mac apps like mine that are distributed outside the App Store. Apple’s going to lock this down.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:02:18 -0700

I seem to be microblogging a little more than usual for the keynote, so decided to create a category on my blog for WWDC 2026 posts.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:30:47 -0700

9to5Mac confirming what I thought I heard during the keynote: 8 GB devices are out for on-device AI. I think it’s the right call… Apple’s old models were just too small. But it’s weird that my pretty expensive iPhone 16 Pro Max can’t run local AI.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:12:12 -0700

Expanding Apple Foundation Models to support image inputs and running in private cloud compute is a huge upgrade. The old models really weren’t capable enough for me, which is why I’m experimenting with bundling Gemma 4 directly in the Micro.blog app.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:07:09 -0700

I feel bad saying this for all the Apple employees who dedicated so many hours preparing for WWDC, but I lose interest after an hour. Perfect keynote length would be about 70 minutes, not 100.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:56:10 -0700

Apple didn’t try to take on too much with Siri AI. Only features they could actually ship. It looks good, but long term I still think using apps is the wrong strategy for assistants, because they can’t work well across platforms. It’ll work for now, and for privacy some people will prefer it.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:45:49 -0700

I like in these Siri AI demos that they are doing things “live” (though recorded). It’s not fast, but it seems much more clearly actually working without edits.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:26:34 -0700

A little surprised Apple is spending so much time in the keynote on safety for kids. It’s good, though! Thinking it helps set the stage for all the age-related laws from states, and we’ll return to safety and privacy during the Siri section later.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:16:13 -0700

In my apps Inkwell and Micro.blog 4.0, I put a semi-opaque view under the toolbar to improve readability on macOS 26. Maybe won’t be needed in macOS Golden Gate. Expecting we’ll need little tweaks for each OS now.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:11:19 -0700

Looks like good refinements to Liquid Glass on Mac. Also, feels almost bold to name this release Golden Gate. Maybe this’ll be a big one.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:52:13 -0700

Coffee this morning at Voltaire in San Jose. For a moment, I considered walking back to the hotel with my laptop cracked open to let AI finish what it was working on… That would be too perfectly Silicon Valley. ☕️

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:32:48 -0700

Om Malik with a great blog post exploring Anthropic’s naming for Mythos and Project Glasswing:

Project Glasswing is the same move. The name suggests something fragile and transparent, a butterfly with see-through wings. The project is opaque. Only the trusted can see it. The name performs openness so the structure does not have to.

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:05:13 -0700

Even though I tell myself I’m getting old and jaded, with more complaints about Apple than hopes, it’s an hour before the keynote and I’m excited. Most of us are developers because we believe in what might be possible through technology.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0700

For the beta of Micro.blog for Mac, I’ve decided to follow the lead of Brent Simmons, Rogue Amoeba, and others to hide Tahoe menu icons. It’s just too much clutter. There’s a secret preference “ShowMenuIcons” to get them back. I’ll document this somewhere before we ship.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:36:18 -0700

While it’s certainly not good to be down 0-2 and lose home court advantage completely, nothing in this series yet suggests the Spurs can’t win games. Up 14 in game 1. And game 2 was theirs until the final seconds. 🏀

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:27:08 -0700

Daniel Jalkut:

Forever the optimist, I think that the next several years will be an era in which opinionated, competent developers are able to run circles around projects that are overly-invested in AI. Dip into AI, maybe even let it be your first mate, but never let it be the captain.

Micro.blog 4.0 beta

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:55:43 -0700

Today I’m releasing a beta of Micro.blog 4.0 for Mac. It’s a big update and I’d like to get some feedback before finalizing it. You can download the beta here.

The first thing you’ll notice is that we’ve updated the design with a bunch of little improvements. The sidebar and toolbar better fit with modern macOS. Spacing has been tweaked and UI quirks have been fixed. Blog category editing has been added.

I’ve been using this version all week and it’s much better. It’s not a redesign. More of a fine-tuning.

The other big change is support for local AI running on your Mac. In the preferences window, you’ll find two checkboxes:

A global opt-out checkbox that stops Micro.blog servers from using AI anywhere for your account. That checkbox has been on the web for a while. Now it’s conveniently on the Mac too.
A new checkbox to enable local AI models. This is only available on M1 or later Macs with at least 24 GB of RAM. The requirements are high because I didn’t want local AI to be a step back in quality.

When enabling local AI, Micro.blog will download Gemma 4 26B. The model takes up about 14 GB on disk. The feature is off by default and completely optional. If you enable the feature and then later disable it, Micro.blog removes the local files.

To avoid problems with increased memory usage, we only load the AI model when needed. When Micro.blog goes to the background, even if the app is still running, we unload the model. My goal is for you not to notice it’s there.

For the initial release of 4.0, local AI use is fairly minimal. When attaching a photo to a blog post, if you click on the photo, it will use the local model to generate accessibility text that you can edit. Without local AI, Micro.blog will upload the photo to its servers to generate accessibility text.

The feature is the same whether you have local AI enabled or not, so you aren’t missing anything if your Mac doesn’t meet the requirements. The only difference is where the AI runs.

You’ll also notice some text in the preferences window:

Your Mac can be used with local AI models when possible for your own data, as well as to process public posts that are available to multiple Micro.blog users, reducing reliance on cloud AI services for everyone.

What does that mean? This is an experiment to take some of the work that would usually be sent to centralized services like OpenAI and instead offload it to Macs. For example, we spend a lot of time just summarizing blog posts, or figuring out the best keywords for them. This is data that a Mac could process as it sits there idle.

AI is a divisive topic, and a special point of contention is data centers. By leveraging Macs, we could reduce some of the dependence on data centers, effectively using a little bit of energy at the edge of the network, in a way that benefits all users.

Here’s how this might work in practice:

Let’s say you are a Micro.blog Premium customer who uses Inkwell’s Reading Recap feature.
For the feeds you subscribe to, there would occasionally be new posts that need to be processed. Some of them would be sent to your Mac, where local AI would run.
The result would be contributed back to the platform, where the data could be surfaced for other users who subscribe to those same feeds.

There might be other uses, not just for the feeds you subscribe to, but it would always follow this pattern of only using public blog data that is the same for multiple users, to avoid leaking any private information.

We’re going to go slowly. While the checkbox is present in the current build, the server-side work is not yet enabled for any users. The code is also careful to only run when your Mac is plugged into power and idle. The client code is open source so it can be inspected.

Thanks for your support! I’m happy to hear feedback during the beta, and we’ll adjust as necessary.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:14:40 -0700

Got all my geeky tech shirts packed for WWDC.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:45:38 -0700

Is the day before WWDC a terrible time to release software that has a brand new on-device AI model, or the perfect time? No idea what Apple is going to release for developers tomorrow, but maybe it says something about my low expectations.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 08:30:06 -0700

For the next Micro.blog for Mac, I also updated the movies pane a little, adding profile icons and the blog (or Letterboxd) domain name. Nice thing about a major new version is it’s an opportunity to go through the entire app looking for improvements to make.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 15:42:35 -0500

Enjoyed this post from Cory Doctorow: Refining humanity:

Computers don’t just clarify what we know and how we organize our society: they also clarify what we are.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:46:03 -0500

Notus reporting:

Senior U.S. officials have held preliminary discussions with major artificial intelligence companies about the potential for the federal government to acquire some shares in their firms…

Sort of says something about the potential bipartisan response to AI that Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Sam Altman all generally agree that the public should own a piece of AI. Separately, I think there should be public AI just like there are public libraries. But maybe you do that and a system of dividends.

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:03:26 -0500

In prep for WWDC, reading up on some things I should’ve learned about Apple Foundation Models a year ago. I think I had dismissed it quickly because the on-device models are so small by frontier AI standards.