Ilia's Corner

AI-Generated Metal Kernels Deliver 87% Speed-Up on Apple Silicon

Your PyTorch models just got a turbo boost on MacBooks and iPads. Researchers fed frontier models a simple prompt: "write an optimized Metal kernel for this op," and in seconds generated GPU code that outperformed hand-tuned Apple libraries—without a single human-written shader. The takeaway: you can now prototype on Apple devices and keep the same model when you deploy. Grab the open-source kernels at https://gimletlabs.ai/blog/ai-generated-metal-kernels and watch your inference times drop while your laptop battery lasts longer.

hacker_news · 7 min read

OpenAI Swallows the Best iOS AI Coding Agent

If you build iPhone or Mac apps, your new super-coder just arrived. The Alex team—who shipped the only production-grade AI agent that understands Xcode, SwiftUI, and App Store rules—has been quietly acqui-hired by OpenAI. Expect their Apple-domain expertise to land inside ChatGPT and the API soon, meaning you’ll soon chat with an AI that can generate, test, and submit a complete Swift app from a napkin sketch. Follow the transition at https://www.alexcodes.app/blog/alex-team-joins-open-ai

hackernews · 4 min read

Zed Editor Opens Beta for Claude Code with Live Agent Protocol

Zed’s new Claude Code integration isn’t just another inline assistant—it’s a proving ground for the open Agent Client Protocol (ACP). The beta lets any LLM agent plug into your editor via JSON-RPC, so you can hot-swap models or even wire your own fine-tuned bot without touching Zed’s codebase. If you’re building dev tools, this is your chance to test-drive the emerging standard before everyone else. Join the beta at https://zed.dev/blog/claude-code-via-acp

hackernews · 5 min read

Microsoft Gifts Developers 6502 BASIC Source Code

The interpreter that powered the Apple II and Commodore PET is now yours to dissect, fork, or embed. Microsoft released the complete 6502 BASIC 1.1 source under an open license, giving retro-computing fans, security researchers, and embedded engineers a pristine 1970s-era VM in well-commented assembly. Compile it for a $5 Raspberry Pi Pico and you’ve got a pocket Altair. Clone the repo at https://github.com/microsoft/BASIC-M6502

reddit · 6 min read

Neovim Pack: Zero-Config Plugin Management

Tired of plugin managers that fight your runtimepath? Neovim now ships with native packages. Drop plugins into the start folder for auto-load or opt for lazy-loading—no external tooling required. Ideal for Docker dev images or locked-down CI runners where you can’t install anything beyond Neovim itself. Docs: https://neovim.io/doc/user/pack.html#vim.pack

Minimal Dev Containers & CI Pipelines

Lua · 147 stars

B612: Airbus Cockpit Font Goes Open Source

Designing HUDs, automotive dashboards, or safety-critical UIs? Airbus just open-sourced B612, the font family proven in fighter-jet cockpits. It’s tuned for pixel-perfect legibility under vibration, glare, and low-light—exactly the stress tests your next hardware project will face. Grab the TTFs and CSS at https://github.com/polarsys/b612

Critical UI & IoT Displays

CSS · 51 stars

Build a Bitemporal DB with SQLite and 200 Lines of Clojure

Need audit-trail-grade data without the cost of Datomic? One developer shows how a single append-only fact table in SQLite plus a Clojure wrapper gives you full valid-time vs. transaction-time queries. Perfect for fintech side-projects or compliance features in bootstrapped SaaS. Tutorial: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/poor-mans-time-oriented-data-system/index.html

Research · 12 min read

TinyDrop: Cut Vision Transformer Compute by 30%

Running ViTs on edge devices? TinyDrop uses a miniature “teacher” model to predict which tokens your big transformer can safely ignore—no retraining required. The paper reports 30 % throughput gain on ARM CPUs with <1 % accuracy loss. Arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03379

Research · Z. Li et al. · 8 min read