Mac on Strathweb. A free flowing tech monologue.

Exploring Microsoft Foundry Local

Wed, 28 May 2025 07:06:14 +0000

Last week at Build, Microsoft released a public preview of Foundry Local - a new tool for running AI models locally on your machine, with a focus on privacy and security. It is a spiritual sibling to Azure AI Foundry, which is a managed Azure cloud service for building and running AI applications.

However, using Foundry Local is independent of Azure, and it can run models locally without any cloud dependencies. It is currently available for Windows x64, Windows ARM and macOS ARM.

I was involved in the private testing of Foundry Local already prior to last week’s announcement, and so I have been using it for a while now. In this post, I will share my experience with it.

Using Swift REPL from Sublime Text

Sat, 21 Jun 2014 16:58:42 +0000

Sublime Text is by far my favorite text editor. In its rich ecosystem of plugins you can find some absolute gems, and one of those is SublimeREPL which adds support for REPLs of various programming languages directly into your Sublime Text.

Swift is missing from there - but let’s add support for it!

Using Swift As General Purpose Scripting Language

Tue, 17 Jun 2014 18:27:31 +0000

One of the big advantages of Swift is that it gives you access to all Cocoa APIs and lets you use them in some very flexible ways.

One of those is the possibility to use Swift as a general OS “scripting” language - instead of bash, PyObjC or C or any other option that you might have opted for in the past. Moreover, you can do that entirely from outside of XCode - so write your Swift program in any editor and then simply use Terminal to execute it, as if it was pure script.

The obvious advantage of such approach is that you now have the same single language to handle iOS programming, OS X app programming and generic system/automation tasks that you might want to perform from the command line.

Let’s have a look.