Equirect – a Rust VR video player
This is almost entirely created by Claude, not me. I know some people aren't into that. I was one of them 3 months ago. Since the beginning of the year I finally started getting more serious about trying out AI. The company I work for also had an AI week with lots of training. All I can say is I'm pretty blown away. My entire life feels like it changed over the last month from someone who mostly writes code to mostly someone that prompts AI to write code. And just for a tiny bit of context, I'm 60yrs old and have been coding since 1980. I get all the concerns, and I review all AI code at…
In plain words
Equirect is a VR video player written in Rust. It plays equirectangular format videos, which are spherical videos designed for virtual reality viewing. The player is built to handle the specific technical requirements of displaying panoramic video content in VR environments. It is intended for users who want to watch immersive 360-degree videos on VR headsets.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
This is almost entirely created by Claude, not me. I know some people aren't into that. I was one of them 3 months ago. Since the beginning of the year I finally started getting more serious about trying out AI. The company I work for also had an AI week with lots of training. All I can say is I'm pretty blown away. My entire life feels like it changed over the last month from someone who mostly writes code to mostly someone that prompts AI to write code. And just for a tiny bit of context, I'm 60yrs old and have been coding since 1980. I get all the concerns, and I review all AI code at work and most AI code for personal projects. This one in particular though, not so much. I get that's frowned on but this is a small, limited scope, personal project. Not that I didn't pay attention, Claude did do some things in strange ways and I asked it to fix them quite often. But, conversely, I have zero rust experience, zero OpenXR experience, zero wgpu expericence, next to zero relevant Windows experience. I'm guessing I spent about ~30 hours in total prompting Claude for each step. I started with "make a windows app that opens a window". Then I had it add wgpu and draw hello triangles. Then I had it add OpenXR and draw those triangles in VR. That actually took it some time as it tried to figure out how to connect a wgpu texture to the surface being drawn in OpenXR. It figured it out though, far far faster than I would have. I'd have tried to find a working example or given up. I then sat on that for about a month and finally got back to it this weekend and zoomed through getting Claude to make it work. The only parts I did was make some programmer art icons. I can post the prompts in the repo if anyone is interested, and assming I can find them. Also in the last 2 weeks I've resurrected an old project that bit-rot. Claude got it all up to date, and fixed a bunch of bugs, and checked off a bunch of features I'd always wanted to add. I also had Claude write 2 libraries, a zip library, an rar decompression library, as well as refactor an existing zip decompression library to use some modern features. It's been really fun! For those I read the code much more than I did for this one. Still, "what I time to be alive"!
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
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Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
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Launched alongside, April 2026
the whole month →
- AG
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · jaso1024.com
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Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
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- BC
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · sam-burns.com
- IB
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
AI · Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app