Rui Carmo
Portuguese engineer and blogger; writes Tao of Mac, a personal site with entries going back to 2003, on Apple hardware, Linux, home labs, programming and AI coding agents. His Bluesky profile lists him as a principal at Microsoft.
Rui Carmo did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsI feel we're coming to another plateau of decreasing returns, because even as models keep getting (arguably) smarter, what you can do with them beyond flashy demos hasn't really gelled into useful outcomes yet.
↗Sep 30th 2026 · 2 min readtaoofmac.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
AI is unlikely to be much help with managing personal life processes beyond removing toil.
Their wordsAnd I think AI is not going to be much help with that, other than remove toil (yes, it will sort out your inbox for you and research your travel itinerary).
↗Sep 30th 2026 · 2 min readtaoofmac.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsI think there's a pretty decent chance that the idea of a Her-like assistant, however seductive, neither fits the way most people think about AI nor the sales and advertising business models that I can glimpse just underneath the surface.
↗Sep 30th 2026 · 2 min readtaoofmac.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 8 days earlier
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Our reading
Apple's failure to build a competitive frontier model is due to a fundamental impedance mismatch.
Their wordsAnd yet, I think there is a more fundamental issue that industry pundits keep harping on and circling around, which is that Apple really doesn't know what to do with AI-it's like some sort of fundamental impedance mismatch.
↗Sep 22nd 2026 · 7 min readtaoofmac.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Apple's current approach to AI features fails to account for how regular people will perceive them.
Their wordsThen there's the literal tone deafness about things like the Watch's newfound always-on transcription features, and the fact that Apple has pretty much failed to read the room regarding how regular people will think about these new AI features.
↗Sep 22nd 2026 · 7 min readtaoofmac.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd that is, at a personal level, the thing where I wish Ternus would make allowances, especially now that Apple has stupidly powerful personal hardware-more capable hardware makes those restrictions harder to defend, and app-signing rules need to change.
↗Sep 22nd 2026 · 7 min readtaoofmac.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
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Our reading
Models do not possess a hidden planner and instead react to the conversation and tool list.
Their wordsModels don't plan They look at the conversation, scan the tool list, and grab whatever looks more probable. That's it. There is no hidden planner.
↗Apr 29th 2026 · 6 min readtaoofmac.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Smaller models require explicit breadcrumbs in responses to successfully follow tool chains.
Their wordsThe big ones will plan a chain from a tool list and a goal; the wee ones won't-they grab the first plausible tool and stop. The fix is stupid simple: every response ends with a breadcrumb dictionary of hints to follow.
↗Apr 29th 2026 · 6 min readtaoofmac.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIndividual tools passing their tests tells you very little about whether a model will use them correctly together, and that is, I think, why chaining MCP calls has remained somewhat of a dark art.
↗Apr 29th 2026 · 6 min readtaoofmac.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 7 weeks earlier
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Their wordsNone of these things are really "local" in any meaningful sense-the gap between local and cloud models is huge, and even tens of thousands of dollars in hardware won't get you close to frontier capabilities.
↗Mar 8th 2026 · 5 min readtaoofmac.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsAnd there is an almost weekly hype cycle around local models that I think is totally unwarranted in practice.
↗Mar 8th 2026 · 5 min readtaoofmac.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsSome languages are inherently better for agents-not in terms of popularity (any agent can do decent Python), but because strong types and annotations help models understand intent and self-correct.
↗Mar 8th 2026 · 5 min readtaoofmac.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 9 years earlier
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Their wordsI am fascinated by the number of opinions out there on the kind of technology, skill sets and even the kind of data required to make a data science team successful, because there's actually very little hard data on which of those are the critical factors.
↗Jul 23rd 2017 · 6 min readtaoofmac.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe first mistake organizations (and managers) make is thinking that the data scientists reporting to you are your whole team.
↗Jul 23rd 2017 · 6 min readtaoofmac.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
In practice, 80% of a data science team's time is spent wringing meaning out of the data.
Their wordsIn practice, what generally happens is that: 80% of your team's time will be spent wringing meaning out of the data: hunting down datasets, doing ETL and doing initial feature selection.
↗Jul 23rd 2017 · 6 min readtaoofmac.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 16 months earlier
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Their wordsNone of these are actually true - although, of course, human ingenuity, knowing no bounds, is sure to provide critics with enough data points on any of these dimensions to provide for some healthy argument.
↗Apr 4th 2016 · 3 min readtaoofmac.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsMicro-services require scalable, resilient scaffolding (i.e., the ability to be automatically run on multiple machines, or having multiple instances on each machine to take advantage of multiple CPU cores), and that is not something you usually get out of a conventional SOA framework (or ESB) - although some are beginning to tackle that problem, even as they are bound by their own conventions.
↗Apr 4th 2016 · 3 min readtaoofmac.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsDocker will be a part of that story in due time (it's already the gold standard for packaging and re-using "conventional" services, but it's still acquiring the degree of fine-grained control and self-healing that's required).
↗Apr 4th 2016 · 3 min readtaoofmac.com 3rd of 3 in this piece