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.

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:

• Blocking specific crawlers. The robots.txt file is still good for this. Micro.blog checks robots.txt when it’s running tasks that are crawl-like, such as archiving web pages.
• Declaring what content can be used for AI training. There are proposals to solve this. Micro.blog never trains on user data, so mostly not an issue for us.
• Turning off AI in applications. Micro.blog has a global checkbox to disable any feature that uses an LLM.

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.

Recently I was drafting a post and had to catch myself as I almost inserted a jab at someone else, a callback to something from a while ago that no longer matters. That kind of post is not me. I sometimes brainstorm reactionary posts that I wish I could write, but always think better of it, staying away from extremes.

I think I’ve been listening to the pessimists too much. It’s true that some things are bad, and I’ve blogged about many of them, but the only way out is hope. Otherwise we get stuck, caught in a spiral of outrage, never moving forward.

When I quit Twitter in 2012, I was outspoken in my worry about developer-hostile, centralized platforms. I paired the dissent with advocacy for open formats and eventually built my own social network. Complaints should lead to progress, not paralysis.