Mihai Parparita's Avatar

Mihai Parparita

@persistent.info.bsky.social

Engineer at Sierra, formerly of Tailscale, Slack, Quip, Google Chrome and Google Reader.

898 Followers  |  135 Following  |  19 Posts  |  Joined: 24.04.2023  |  2.3549

Latest posts by persistent.info on Bluesky

Yes, you can use a disk image URL (if it’s not from an already-allowed domain, let me know and I can add it)

13.07.2025 05:16 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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infinite-mac/Library at main Β· mihaip/infinite-mac A classic Mac loaded with everything you'd want. Contribute to mihaip/infinite-mac development by creating an account on GitHub.

Though most of the software is from the Macintosh Garden, so downloading it directly from there to your 9.2.2 machine may be even easier. You can browse around github.com/mihaip/infin... and see where items are loaded from.

12.07.2025 21:26 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
BlueSCSI Bytes #1 - Infinite Mac
YouTube video by BlueSCSI BlueSCSI Bytes #1 - Infinite Mac

Not directly (over the internet). Best option is to copy what you want to Saved HD and export that to a BlueSCSI image. www.youtube.com/watch?v=caHs... explains how.

12.07.2025 21:25 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Infinite Mac Construction Set

And for a behind the scenes look, there's a blog post: blog.persistent.info/2025/07/infi... (spoiler: Marcin was the instigator for all this, conducted over a months-long 100+ message email thread)

09.07.2025 15:57 β€” πŸ‘ 11    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1
Emulated System 1.0 instance running MacPaint 1.0. It is being controlled by the OpenAI computer-use model, and attempting to draw a pelican riding a bicycle.

Emulated System 1.0 instance running MacPaint 1.0. It is being controlled by the OpenAI computer-use model, and attempting to draw a pelican riding a bicycle.

Another demo is my Infinite Monkey: infinitemac.org/monkey/

It lets OpenAI's or Anthropic's computer use models control an emulated Mac, based on your chat instructions.

This means that it's possible to run @simonwillison.net's "draw me a pelican riding a bicycle" test in 1984's MacPaint 1.0.

09.07.2025 15:57 β€” πŸ‘ 41    πŸ” 8    πŸ’¬ 4    πŸ“Œ 3
Infinite Mac embedding dialog, allowing parameters of a instance to be customized and the resulting HTML to be copied. It uses the Platinum appearance from Mac OS 8.

Infinite Mac embedding dialog, allowing parameters of a instance to be customized and the resulting HTML to be copied. It uses the Platinum appearance from Mac OS 8.

Infinite Mac can now be embedded into any website: infinitemac.org/embed

For a demonstration of what this can enable, see @aresluna.org's amazing "Frame of preference" article: aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

09.07.2025 15:57 β€” πŸ‘ 55    πŸ” 12    πŸ’¬ 3    πŸ“Œ 2
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Frame of preference A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways?

aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

08.07.2025 23:37 β€” πŸ‘ 311    πŸ” 87    πŸ’¬ 23    πŸ“Œ 30
Infinite Mac OS X

blog.persistent.info/2025/03/infi... is a blog post with technical details (two separate emulators are involved) and the complete collection is at infinitemac.org?filter=macosx.

24.03.2025 14:28 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Mac OS X 10.1 running under Infinite Mac, showing the Finder, NetNewsWire Lite and Terminal.

Mac OS X 10.1 running under Infinite Mac, showing the Finder, NetNewsWire Lite and Terminal.

Mac OS X was released on this day 24 years ago. On this anniversary, here it is on the web: infinitemac.org/2001/Mac%20O...

(technically 10.1, but that’s the first release that actually worked acceptably)

24.03.2025 14:28 β€” πŸ‘ 11    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

More seriously, it's been great to be at Sierra from the start and get to influence the engineering culture in such a fundamental way. I know tech company blog posts can paint overly rosy pictures, but Gardening Week is genuinely one of my favorite parts about working here.

13.03.2025 17:11 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Gardening Week: Evergreen Engineering At Sierra, we value intensity and craftsmanshipβ€”Gardening Week is an investment in the long-term quality of our software.

New company, new corporate blog for me to post on. sierra.ai/blog/gardeni... describes an engineering team ritual that we've developed. You can tell that it was not ghost-written because I got to cram in a lot of links to obscure articles.

13.03.2025 17:11 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Holy Hyrum's Law

26.01.2025 06:03 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Slack Canvas In The Streets, Quip In The Sheets

The turducken phase was certainly a mind-bender. I wrote up a few more details at blog.persistent.info/2023/07/slac...

20.11.2024 20:40 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

.patch also works if you need to email your change to a mailing list like it’s 1994 (more usefully, you can use `git apply` with it if you don’t want to be bothered with syncing remote branches)

09.11.2024 05:31 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Video thumbnail

Infinite Mac now has a β€œMacintosh Garden” drawer that allows one-click loading of any of the 20,000 items archived by that site.

I wrote up a brief post with some behind-the-scenes details: blog.persistent.info/2024/11/infi...

04.11.2024 16:09 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Thanks for continuing to experiment with this. I just listened to your Flipboard podcast interview -- I hadn't realized the "nerd HOA" contingent of the Fediverse went after you. The episode also reminded me check whether I was opted into Mastodon search (surprise, I was not).

05.05.2024 16:19 β€” πŸ‘ 3    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

Did @bradfitz.com and Maisem run out of Cyrillic letters for their views codegen shenanigans?

01.03.2024 16:55 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

I see the Sneakers Easter eggs have continued.

17.02.2024 17:01 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Slack Canvas In The Streets, Quip In The Sheets

I’m still team β€œif you didn’t blog it, it didn’t happen”. So here’s a post about how much Quip technology is in Slack canvas (spoiler: a lot): https://blog.persistent.info/2023/07/slack-canvas-quip.html

06.07.2023 16:14 β€” πŸ‘ 5    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Battery life instrumentation We’ve added instrumentation and taking a more systematic approach to investigating battery life issues in the Tailscale mobile clients.

https://tailscale.dev/blog/battery-life describes battery life work we're doing at @tailscale.com. It's been a fun few months going beyond just Darwin spelunking to also hack on the Go standard library and explore different aggregation and visualization options.

25.04.2023 20:20 β€” πŸ‘ 15    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1

@persistent.info is following 20 prominent accounts