Blog

Notes on Mac software, privacy, networks, and the craft of building tools.

August 1, 2026

Twenty years on a shelf
Dave Nanian designed what was meant to be SuperDuper 3.0 in 2007, decided the systems of the day couldn’t carry it, and put the notebook on a shelf for nearly twenty years. SuperDuper 4 is that design, finally built — a ground-up rewr…

Taking your Mac's updates back into your own hands
Howard Oakley has written the reference we wish Apple shipped: a plain, complete account of driving macOS updates from the command line with softwareupdate. It exists because the built-in documentation doesn’t. The man page claims a l…

App Store chaos, without the gold
The App Store is being flooded like it hasn’t been in years. John Voorhees, reading Kalley Huang’s New York Times reporting, pulls the number that captures it: new app releases doubled to roughly 560,000 in the first half of thi…

The friction is where the letters change
Kottke points to a piece on AI and type design that lands a line worth keeping: “A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.” …
The web you can fix, and the apps you can't
Cory Doctorow’s latest Pluralistic post runs through the browser-side ways a user can push back on a site that’s gotten hostile — blockers, overrides, extensions, small acts of taking your experience back. Then comes the catch t…
Nativ, and the quiet case for keeping the model on your Mac
Prince Canuma, who wrote the excellent MLX-VLM library, has wrapped MLX in a real macOS app called Nativ — a chat interface, a model manager, a performance dashboard, and a localhost server that speaks the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs, all run…

The Siri agent Apple hasn't shipped yet
Federico Viticci reviews Open Minis, an iPhone and iPad chatbot he describes as “getting a preview of Siri AI’s agentic future, today.” The twist that makes it work: rather than being one more model wrapper, it wires a fro…

The Zilog Z80 turns fifty
Hackaday marks fifty years of the Zilog Z80, the humble 8-bit processor that launched in July 1976 and went on to run home computers, arcade cabinets, industrial controllers, and a great many people’s first programs. Littelfuse, which…

Europe pries open Android for rival AI
The European Commission has handed Google two sets of binding specification measures under the Digital Markets Act, adopted July 16 and enforceable immediately. The first says rival AI assistants must get the same system-level Android integ…

Apple Intelligence gets its China licence — on Alibaba and Baidu models
Chinese regulators have granted Apple a licence to ship Apple Intelligence on iPhones in China, with Alibaba’s Qwen and Baidu as technical partners — reported by the South China Morning Post (owned, as John Gruber notes, by Alibaba) a…
Legibility of effort in the LLM age
Jason Kottke points to a sharp little essay, “Legibility of Effort,” on something we’ve been circling as we build with AI: software and writing are losing their legibility of effort — the ability to tell at a glance whethe…

From building with agents to building the systems around them
The clearest signal from this year’s AI Engineer World’s Fair, in Latent Space’s recap, is a shift in where the engineering happens: from building with agents to building the systems around them. Richard MacManus frames it…
Which of our actual problems would React solve?
We keep coming back to one move in Kore Nordmann’s write-up of building a sensitive learning-analytics platform without a frontend framework. Instead of asking “why not React?”, the team inventoried the application first, …
The quiet death of the Mac icon silhouette
Louie Mantia’s history of the Mac app icon is a small elegy for craft. Mac OS X icons wore distinct silhouettes — a tool poking past the frame, a translucent sidebar edge, an organic character shape — and that variety did real work: i…

You can't sue your way to a product
Ben Thompson’s read on Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI is that the trade-secrets claim, whatever its merits against one departed employee, mostly reads as lashing out — the move of a company whose real problem is its own position…
AI's slowest phase is the one that matters
Arvind Narayanan’s ICML keynote, “What will be left for us to work on?”, makes an argument we keep coming back to: AI is transformative on the scale of electricity, but its impact arrives through the slow phases — diffusio…

The privacy you shouldn't have to audit
John Gruber has a sharp piece on Apple’s slow slide into the advertising business, and the line that stuck with us is about where trust actually comes from. What gave Tim Cook’s 2014 privacy letter its weight, Gruber points out,…

Markdown gets a system UTI in Apple's OS 27
Apple’s third OS 27 developer beta quietly gave Markdown something it never had: a built-in system Uniform Type Identifier. The identifier is net.daringfireball.markdown, conforming to public.utf8-plain-text — which means John Gruber&…

When better models get worse at your tools
Simon Willison flags a finding from Armin Ronacher that’s worth sitting with if you build software with AI in the loop: the newest, most capable Claude models are getting worse at one specific thing — calling a custom tool whose schem…