To prepare minutes I recorded a not-for-profit board meeting this week - ninety minutes, soft audio, everything sensitive - and let Google’s new Eloquent convert it locally. Nothing touched a cloud server. Eleven thousand words, on-device, done.

The original Voice Memos recording on my iPhone was quite soft. Board meetings are what they are. But Eloquent handled it better than I expected - the transcript came back clean, the filler words and false starts were stripped out, and I had a working draft of the minutes within a short time. Further refinement with GPT-5.5 and the final document was done. (Yes I am flirting with other models. Anthropic token inflation is becoming an issue - a topic for another day).

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Claude Code can write native Swift good enough to ship a Mac App Store app. Anthropic’s own Claude desktop app is still built using Electron - a web browser (Chromium) wearing a costume.

Electron bundles a full Chromium browser and a Node.js runtime inside every app, so one codebase renders on Windows, macOS and Linux instead of three native builds. It’s why Slack, Discord and (until recently) Notion feel identical everywhere. It’s also why they’re memory-hungry, slow to open and never quite right: patchy keyboard shortcuts, no proper native menu behaviour, battery life your MacBook resents.

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Elon Musk built Grok as the anti-woke alternative to ChatGPT and Gemini. According to a new analysis of AI political values, it would probably have voted for Biden.

The Economist put five major AI models through a global values survey normally reserved for humans. Every model, including Grok, landed left of centre on questions about wealth, merit and inequality.

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Twenty-three minutes. That is how long it takes a social media account set up to look like a 16 to 18 year old boy to be shown misogynistic content, according to the audit Tanya Plibersek, Federal minister for social services, cites in this piece. Not sought out. Delivered.

Plibersek’s argument is blunt: young men are not choosing this content, they are being stalked by it. Everyday frustrations, rejection, loneliness, a bad week, get reframed by the algorithm as proof of a system rigged against men. Writing in The Saturday Paper, she traces how that reframing hardens into grievance, and how fast grievance gets monetised.

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Every month SBS publishes a wall of text listing what is about to vanish from On Demand. Every month it mixes Studio Ghibli classics in with season 7 of some cooking show and a documentary about sharks, all sorted by date, none sorted by whether they are any good.

As I did in previous months I leaned on Claude to build a searchable and sortable page to make it easier to figure out what I really want to watch. SBS really should do this for their audience.

I pulled the full July list, stripped out the series and the reality TV, ran every standalone film past its IMDB rating and kept the ones at 7.0 or above. That left 94 films. The result is a single sortable, searchable page you can filter by rating, genre or leaving date.

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Same hardware. Same model. Same quality output. Up to four times faster. And you don’t have to spend anything to get it.

That’s DSpark - a new text generation technique just published by DeepSeek. If you run AI models locally, this is going to matter to you.

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Text to speech (TTS) is a brilliant service for those who would otherwise be literally speechless. Lost Voice Guy on Britain’s Got Talent rather humorously demonstrated the challenge.

▶ Watch on YouTube

But TTS has broad use. DIY personal podcasts. Read some text when on a walk or in the car. Share a personal update with someone who is more of a listener than a reader.

The good news is you don’t need to pay for a service like ElevenLabs to get quite good TTS. At least not on a Mac. (Don’t ask me about Windows — that’s for someone else to untangle).

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Meta has a court order stopping Sarah Wynn-Williams from promoting her own book. She cannot talk about it, cannot criticise the company, cannot even sit near a bookshop that stocks it without risking a fine. So let me do the promoting for her.

The book is Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Wynn-Williams spent six years as Facebook’s global director of public policy. Her memoir is a first-hand account of what the company is like from the inside, and it is not flattering: allegations of sexual harassment, of courting Beijing with censorship tools, of contempt for the very users whose teenagers it studied.

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Three days after Anthropic shipped its best ever model, the US government switched it off for everyone outside America. So I went looking for the next best thing, and OpenRouter reckons it has one.

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