Manton Reece [Unofficial]
@manton.org.web.brid.gy
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Strong winds at the front of this storm. Lost a branch of the pecan tree. Looks like minimal damage to the roof, mostly just the gutter. Whew. 🌳
about 23 hours ago
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Microsoft announced Project Solara at Build today. They’ve got a couple prototypes, including a clever badge-style device, and thoughts on UI: > We are also investing in just-in-time UI: the ability for an agent experience to adapt across devices and modalities […]
[Original post on manton.org]
1 day ago
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AI and fiber optics
I enjoyed this blog post by Om Malik about how AI models will become invisible plumbing. Nice history lesson with fiber-optic cables too: > A single strand of glass can carry only so much data at one wavelength – think of it as one lane of a highway. Wavelength Division Multiplexing, or WDM, was the insight that you could send multiple signals down that same strand simultaneously, each on a different color of light, the way a prism splits white light into its spectrum. Each color carries its own independent stream of data. One fiber becomes many. I agree with his conclusion about AI, although not exactly with his point on open-weight models. Om writes: > Commoditization is already underway. Open-weight models are compressing the advantage that closed frontier models once held. The cost of inference has fallen so fast that capability is no longer a defensible edge. The difference between “good enough” and “great” is still pretty noticeable. In my current work with local AI models, I’m using Gemma 4, a 26-billion parameter model. It needs something like a 24 GB Mac to run. The frontier models are orders of magnitude larger, likely with hundreds of billions or trillions of parameters. While you could have an open-weight model that big, how would you run it? At that scale, it is cheaper to pay OpenAI and Anthropic for tokens. Let them manage Nvidia racks with multiple TBs of memory. For the more important theme of Om’s post, yes, AI will become the fabric of many products. I hope that eventually we’ll even get to the point where we don’t need to clutter up our UI with “AI” labels everywhere. A feature that wasn’t possible before will just exist. (For now, though, AI is so divisive that it’s useful to denote it clearly, so it can be embraced or avoided.)
https://www.manton.org/2026/06/02/ai-and-fiber-optics.html
1 day ago
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Following a report from Bloomberg on Uber, TechCrunch has a post about companies putting a cap on AI spending: > AI is getting expensive, and some companies are cutting back on usage in an attempt to moderate costs. That cohort includes Uber, which recently […]
[Original post on manton.org]
1 day ago
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🚂
1 day ago
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Working more on Micro.blog 4.0 for Mac. Got a chance to rewrite all the old sidebar code, moving it from a very cluttered XIB to Obj-C code. Now feels more at home with other modern Mac apps.
1 day ago
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Getting almost too late to turn this narrative around, but OpenAI tries to make the case for data centers
in a new video about Abilene
.
1 day ago
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Demolition continues on 51st street.
2 days ago
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Kath Korevec, who works at OpenAI,
in a post on X
: > Devs do a lot more than “just coding.” They write docs, design apps, design architecture, manage devops, work with data, etc. It’s no wonder codex is so good at “all the things.” It’s because we built it for developers.
2 days ago
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Steve Troughton-Smith
in a Mastodon post
: > The best kind of WWDC is the WWDC that gives me a big grab-bag of tools to make my apps better along several axes, and doesn’t burden me with a huge amount of needless churn just to tread water.
2 days ago
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RTX Spark
With Nvidia announcing the RTX Spark today, I revisited my quick comment from last year about the DGX Spark. It appears the price went from $4k to $4700 since then. Mac Studio price hasn’t changed. No pricing yet for the RTX. It has better specs, but you’ve gotta run Linux or Windows. Of course hardly anyone needs a computer with 128 GB of RAM. I’m only interested in following this because some new things are possible when users have (let’s say) 24 GB. With memory so expensive right now, and cloud-based AI continuing to outpace everything else, local AI models will be somewhat limited. I think more apps could adopt a hybrid approach of using both cloud AI and local when possible.
https://www.manton.org/2026/06/01/rtx-spark.html
2 days ago
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A year ago
I experimented with running local AI models inside Micro.blog for Mac. I did a bunch of work on this and then threw all of the code out. It wasn’t good enough. I’ve now come back to it. With data center backlash, I think people want options that reduce our dependence on cloud models.
2 days ago
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It’s wild that
the corgi
correctly predicted every game in the western conference finals. That’s a good dog. 🏀
2 days ago
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Anthropic submits draft to go public: > Today, Anthropic, PBC confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed initial public offering of our common stock. This gives us the option […]
[Original post on manton.org]
2 days ago
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Reflecting on how WWDC has changed, I still like
my blog post from 2014
. I could update it for the modern era, but I’m not inspired to do so. In a way, the best of WWDC will always be captured in those great moments from a decade ago, or even farther back. Perhaps it’s part of getting older.
2 days ago
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New Kickstarter campaign from Jason Snell and Myke Hurley
to fund a podcast series covering Apple history: > Designed in California will consist of _at least_ 30 episodes dropping over 12 months, looking at a wide range of Apple history, drawing from the best sources available.
2 days ago
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It has been a while since we bumped the system requirements for Micro.blog for Mac. Current version runs on macOS 11 Big Sur. This feels like a good stopping point. The next version (4.0) will require macOS 14 Sonoma, so it’s more modern but still fine for the Tahoe haters.
2 days ago
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Spider-Noir
is off to a great start. I didn’t realize until we queued it up over the weekend that it was a TV series, not a movie. Watched most of it in black and white. 📺
2 days ago
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Can’t believe WWDC is next week. Obviously the new Siri will the headline, but hope we get some other tweaks to Liquid Glass and general robustness. Apple will improve Xcode too. Many developers barely touch Xcode now, though, so curious how Apple will keep it relevant, or if they even need to.
2 days ago
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Codex added a profile with token usage over time. Interesting.
2 days ago
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Watched:
Marty, Life Is Short
. Surprisingly I didn’t really know that much about Martin Short’s early career. Nice the way they mixed in footage from home movies too. 📺
3 days ago
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I’ve been digging out some of the backyard. Planning for new plants, rocks, and a garden railroad. I finally get to use my copy of
RailModeller Pro
. 🚂
3 days ago
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Amazing series. Thunder kept it close, had a couple shots to get back in it late. Just a great win. Go Spurs Go! The finals are going to be fun. 🏀
4 days ago
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Let’s go, game 7! Crazy that with tonight’s game, the Spurs and Thunder have played each other 12 times this season. Feels like it might be a record in the modern NBA era. 4 regular games + the NBA cup game, and now this series. 🏀
4 days ago
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More notes on Standard.site
A couple extra things to mention on my announcement about Standard.site in Micro.blog. When you first publish a new long-form blog post, Micro.blog will create the `site.standard.publication` and `site.standard.document` records in AT Protocol. It then re-publishes your blog to update the `<link>` tags. The `<link>` tags are in the Hugo template `partials/microblog_head.html`, which was just updated today. If you’ve customized this template for your blog, you’ll need to incorporate the new changes or delete your version so it falls back to Micro.blog’s default. The latest version is always on GitHub. I wanted to roll this out quickly, and I’m still not sure on the timing of when Bluesky verifies publications (blogs) to include the new UI in the Bluesky timeline. I’m testing this live with my own blog. Expect a few tweaks here and there over the weekend.
https://www.manton.org/2026/05/30/more-notes-on-standardsite.html
4 days ago
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Standard.site in Micro.blog
I’ve updated Micro.blog with initial support for Standard.site, a set of lexicons for long-form blogging on the atmosphere. I’m a little late to the party. Thanks to Leaflet, Pckt, and others for leading the way here. Micro.blog’s cross-posting to Bluesky will create Standard.site records for blog posts that have a title. Short microblog posts (including posts without a title that need to be truncated on Bluesky) will not use Standard.site yet. I expect we may tweak this behavior over time, or add a setting for more control. Happy blogging!
https://www.manton.org/2026/05/30/standardsite-in-microblog.html
4 days ago
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John Gruber
coining the term dickover
for the annoying modals that obscure content: > A webpage should show the webpage. An email should show the email. I should not have to explain this. Couldn’t agree more. You will never see anything even remotely like this on Micro.blog or the blogs we host.
5 days ago
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Finished reading:
Moonbound
by Robin Sloan. Truly bizarre, and I mean that in a good way. 📚
5 days ago
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Seriously underestimated how long this db migration was going to take, leading to a deployment blunder that introduced a temporary cross-posting glitch. I’ve been juggling too much this week, making careless mistakes. Getting a lot done, though!
5 days ago
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Last week’s
Sharp Tech about data centers
is really good. Misinformation, the lost opportunity with nuclear power, and SpaceX craziness. The most compelling point: it’s possible that the demand for intelligence has almost no limit. If so, a lot of the insane scale starts to sound reasonable.
5 days ago
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Finished watching
Hacks season 5
this week. Great series. Each season had its own theme and arc, and they knew when to call it, not drag on past the story they set out to tell. 📺
5 days ago
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Federico Viticci blogs about RemCTL, a command-line tool he built for Reminders: > So I decided to take matters into my own hands and build the Reminders CLI of my dreams with Codex. After about two months of work and everyday tests, the result is RemCTL (short […]
[Original post on manton.org]
5 days ago
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Feels like a great, tight series even with a couple blowouts like tonight. As a Spurs fan, that run in the 3rd quarter was fun to watch. Expecting game 7 to be close, though, maybe more like OT in game 1. 🏀
6 days ago
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Anthropic released
Opus 4.8 today
. GPT-5.6 is probably soon. Which is better seems increasingly subjective. It’s hard to notice small steps forward when you’re already at really good. People will stick to the tools they are comfortable with. The next big advance will be a new app, not a new model.
6 days ago
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Jill Biden says
she wondered if Joe Biden was having a stroke during the presidential debate. One of the great _what ifs_ to think what would’ve happened if the debate had been a week earlier or a week later. 🇺🇸
6 days ago
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Bluesky
is now showing Standard.site info
in the timeline: > Starting today, Standard.site links will have an enhanced render in the Bluesky app, with extra, actionable metadata about the post, including the publication and author. Very cool. Support for Standard.site in Micro.blog coming soon.
6 days ago
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Making good progress on Micro.blog 3.7 for iOS. You can follow along with the
beta version on TestFlight
. The blog post text editor has been rewritten. Getting rid of Obj-C hacks that I bolted on in previous versions.
6 days ago
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AI's hand in creativity
Thinking about this perspective from Alan Jacobs about AI and people wanting to be recognized: > Millions of people _desperately_ want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music, but they want people to believe that they have done so. We should be thinking often about the intensity of the need to be recognized, to be thought not _basic_ but _special_. I’m conscious of this when using AI to help me with anything creative. AI can be a great sanity check for writing, for example, but because it is trained on all the world’s knowledge, it also tends to water down any uniquely sharp edges in your work. Sometimes that’s exactly what I want. In my post yesterday about the pope’s encyclical, I ran my first draft through ChatGPT and it had some good suggestions that softened a few phrases that I probably couldn’t stand behind. The final draft was better. But also, I’m not inspired by writing a bland opinion that everyone has already heard. The best writers, painters, and maybe even coders are doing something that goes slightly against the grain. For blogging, I’m often drawn to writing a contrarian take outside the accepted narrative from social media. Of course there’s a more profound theme in Alan’s post about our need to be special that goes beyond AI. I just like the irony that we’re _unlikely to actually get there_ if AI has too strong a hand in the creative work.
https://www.manton.org/2026/05/28/ais-hand-in-creativity.html
6 days ago
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More details from Mark Gurman about the upcoming Siri redesign: > Apple has redesigned Siri for modern iPhone hardware, making it live inside the Dynamic Island as an always-on agent that can help users get things done across the operating system and within apps […]
[Original post on manton.org]
6 days ago
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Spurs vs. Thunder tonight, game 6. It has taken all my restraint not to buy tickets. Feeling really lucky that I’ve been able to go to a couple playoffs games this year. And just in case this is the last game of the season, what an amazing season it has been, even if we want more. 🏀
6 days ago
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Looking forward to resuming my Texas state parks visits, including eventually the new Silver Lake State Park under development. It will be the state’s second-largest park at 54k acres: > The new park has limestone cliffs rising above rolling hills covered in live […]
[Original post on manton.org]
6 days ago
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Now that Jony Ive is done with the Ferrari, I hope he and OpenAI get to shipping the AI assistant hardware. I don’t think it’s a distracting side quest like Sora was. A new device could be one of their most important products. Few companies have the design talent and infrastructure to pull it off.
7 days ago
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Continuing to work through the upgrade to our books database in Micro.blog. We now have metadata for over 30 million books. Next up is a rewrite of the search, and more code to self-heal book records and covers from other sources.
7 days ago
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On the 23rd anniversary of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg writes an emotional and personal blog post about the ongoing WP Engine saga: > Silver Lake, you have already extracted all your pounds of flesh. I missed my Mom’s knee surgery. If you wanted me to suffer for my […]
[Original post on manton.org]
7 days ago
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Magnifica Humanitas
I’ve read several big sections of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas — _magnificent humanity_. The whole thing is essentially a book at 40k words. It’s fascinating and at times even great. Some of the most interesting parts of the text aren’t really about AI, but more about what it means to be human and to care for others. There is also a theme of concentrated power and who will control AI: > In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors. These entities effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities for participation. When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities. The encyclical also argues that we can’t accept better alignment without oversight: > We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few. I found it a little discomforting that the pope appeared alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah, as if this was a political event where the most influential lobbyist was granted a privileged role in framing the discussion. It feels like something this significant should be above corporate needs and beyond current politics. If we are talking about decentralization, as I’ve blogged before OpenAI has attempted to do more with open models and broad access to their API. Anthropic worries so much about the ill effects of AI and yet they trust no one but themselves with the power, turning safety into a marketing pitch. It rings more and more hollow for me. Still, Anthropic clearly has people who are thinking deeply about what intelligence and consciousness mean, and I appreciate that.
https://www.manton.org/2026/05/27/magnifica-humanitas.html
7 days ago
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Now that we have
Inkwell
1.0 through app review, Apple doesn’t seem quite as picky. Hopefully. 🤞 They’ve approved 1.0.1 with some fixes and restoring the ability to save highlights in text. The plan is to roll out a couple more minor releases that bring the app forward to what we expected for 1.0.
7 days ago
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At the beginning of the 4th quarter, I thought the Spurs might come back, but just not their night. Wish there were a couple days off before game 6. This series has been amazing but exhausting. 🏀
8 days ago
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Wandering around Half Price Books yesterday, flipped to the current day in this reflections book, Sunset Gratitide. Good day for books, also stopped at First Light and picked up a copy of
Homebound
. 📚
8 days ago
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The New York Times on Victor Wembanyama’s love of reading and its influence on San Antonio: > Turquoise, pink and orange words mount an exhibit of books immediately noticeable when patrons walk into San Antonio’s Central Library, the bright red building in the […]
[Original post on manton.org]
8 days ago
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Did a little more research on the Utah data center, because the numbers seem unbelievable. But the scope really is that big, at least over time. Another missed opportunity to require investment in clean energy. And Kevin O’Leary is the perfect villain. I feel like he played himself in Marty Supreme.
8 days ago
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