Jared

What up, nerds?

I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 26th, 2026.

This year's Northern Lights show went on tour and has even been visible as far south as California.

We got a peek at it from our back deck somewhere in middle America, but our experience paled in comparison to airline pilot Matt Melnick, who captured some astounding shots from 37,000 feet on his route from Calgary to London.

Links to Matt's photos are in the newsletter.

Okay, let's get into this week's news.

Cloudbot triggers a run on Mac minis.

Cloudbot, an open-source, personal AI assistant that runs on your own hardware, has many developers excited.

Quote, developers aren't just impressed, they're calling it an iPhone moment, comparing it to early AGI, and in some cases, letting it run their entire companies.

End quote.

What's all the excitement about?

Quote, End quote.

Yes, but can it blend?

Okay, okay, where do all the Mac minis enter the story?

Quote, While Cloudbot can run on any computer, Mac minis have emerged as the preferred choice, and for good reasons that go beyond Apple fandom.

Apple Silicon's unified memory architecture is exceptionally efficient for AI workloads.

Instead of the CPU and GPU communicating over a slower connection, the memory sits directly on the chip package.

This means the full memory bandwidth is instantly available to AI models, making local inference significantly faster than on traditional x86 systems with equivalent specs.

End quote.

Click through for more hardware options, accounts of wild things people are doing with this, and a word of caution to those going all in.