Experienced computer user. Maintains https://nitter.cf/t.co/yeGtKaD8GZ
Bay Area, CA
Joined May 2009
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I just published an article about the work I did last week bundling #WebXR apps for native with @electronjs - if you're interested in bundling your immersive web experience for native platforms, I cover the steps necessary to make that work
bai.dev/projects/webxr-elect…
It's been 84 years 🥹
HTML-in-Canvas launches in Chrome 157 to let you create UIs never before possible on the web → goo.gle/4eFO6aF
Key end-user benefits:
🔠 Keep the content fully interactable while painting into canvas, including texture for 3D scenes
♿ Fully accessible to screen readers and AI agents
🔍 Browser functionality like translation & "find in page" stay working
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James Baicoianu retweeted
Dear WebXR developers,
For the last few weeks I've been working on a way to bring my next WebXR game, Fizzlings: Chain of Pop, to the Meta Quest Store.
Not as a PWA. As a native app, with no browser and no WebView underneath.
Presenting webxr-to-native.
It's a native runtime that runs your unmodified WebXR build: V8 for the JS, WebGL2 over the device's own GLES driver (ANGLE on Metal/D3D), WebXR over OpenXR, WebAudio over the platform audio API. You add one host.json and get an APK.
Targets:
- Meta Quest (OpenXR), Fizzlings runs at 90 Hz.
- Android phones, macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS (experimental, with an emulated headset or touch controls, so flat web 3D works too)
- visionOS (experimental, simulator only so far)
Tested with @threejs + IWSDK and @WebXREngine. It doesn't know about engines; it runs the bundle Vite gives it, so others may already work.
What it gives us on Quest:
- Native Platform SDKs: entitlement, user identity, leaderboards, achievements, age category, etc.
- More headroom than the browser: ~2x the draw calls per frame of Quest Browser in my IWSDK benchmark on Quest 2, GL on its own thread
- Chrome DevTools attach to it like a normal page
- A path to platforms that don't run web tech (consoles are the goal)
Caveats: it's early, it draws no HTML/CSS (your UI must be in built in WebGL. Expect rough edges.
Try it out: github.com/Srile/webxr-to-na… (if you want to skip the build, grab the release)
Many thanks to @squareys and @felix_trz for the inspiration and their help.
James Baicoianu retweeted
I decompiled probably my favorite game ever: Battlefield 1942 and I put it on the web with multiplayer for you to play here:
👉 bf1942.pieter.com 👈
(It's the free shareware demo)
It was way harder than the other ports like Quake and DOOM I did because they already had lots of open source projects and work behind them
In case of Battlefield 1942 there was literally absolutely nothing to work on top of, nobody had ever ported it and there was no open source engine for it, nor did the makers ever open source it (like id Software did with Quake 3)
I tried it 6 months ago and essentiay gave up but I tried it today again with Opus 5.5 asking "can you try port the BF1942 demo in this folder to web"
So me and Claude Code (well let's be honest mostly Claude Code) did crazy shit today:
- it disassembled the x86 raw machine code to find 57,000 x86 functions
- it translated each x86 function into a C function (mov eax, [esi+0x110] becomes eax = READ32(esi + 0x110), I have no idea what any of this means btw)
- it outputed 100,000 lines of C
- it then compiled that to WebAsswmbly with Emscripten
- there were 300x Windows and Direct3D functions used which we had to rewrite to WebGL 2 and OpenGL to work on the web
- then we had to build our own network stack so it could connect to our multiplayer server via WebSockets
I have no idea how it did any of this but it did it and it seems to work! 😊
Come play and report any bugs here!
James Baicoianu retweeted
What's exactly Art Deco?
A friend told me: The US forgot how to make beautiful buildings after the 1930s. I didn't fully understand what he meant.
I vibe-coded a 3D procedural generator of Art Deco buildings that shows and describes each step and element that makes "Art Deco" "Art Deco" Enjoy!
diegomarcos.com/deco
Old enough to remember when "they're putting microphones in the TVs so they can spy on us" was the most crazy fringe crackpot conspiracy theory out there on the BBSes, and not just a normal unsurprising fact of our modern day economy
i own a relatively new (2025) samsung tv.
i kept getting weirdly targeted ads.
i tried reversing the firmware but it was aes encrypted and no keys unless tear it apart and do uart/jtag magic.
zero days it is. root shell on new samsung TVs!
discovered PRIVACY HORROR. write up?
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James Baicoianu retweeted
Gonna start a thread of all the cool tv hacks I’ve seen over the last 48 hrs
1.
James Baicoianu retweeted
Portal jumping through gaussian splat worlds with WebGPU. real time. sound on.
James Baicoianu retweeted
In July we open-sourced a dynamic graph of everything a child learns in primary school. 1,590 concepts, 3,221 dependencies.
Now we’re turning every concept into interactive experiments kids can play and learn from.
First one, age 7: heat and water.
Everything that used to be a boring textbook can now be an engaging experience, potentially tailored to every child.
Kids education just got a massive upgrade.
James Baicoianu retweeted
The ideal outcome for science isn't a couple of labs using proprietary models and millions of dollars to crack trophy problems, it's to have millions of AI-aided human scientists who follow their curiosity and become way more ambitious
James Baicoianu retweeted
💾 Two years ago I started working on these crazy nostalgia projects, kind of randomly, because I was bored and wanted to do something different than just build another SaaS or AI app/website
I wanted to try to run Windows 3.1 inside a web browser, and to do that properly already took me months
When that worked well enough, I wanted to build a dial up internet connection so it could browse the web, with the basic levels of AI back then, that was VERY hard, and I'd just go around in circles forever. Finally I had to find the only person in the world who got that working @bai0 and beg him to help me make it work, and we did it!
Then I started hosting classic games like Quake with full multiplayer, porting them to WASM, or if not already like Quake III by @lukathedev and hosting those with a full multiplayer server ready-to-go in your browser
And then I spent 6 months trying to reverse engineer Windows XP to run on v86 by @copy_sh, very difficult (because it's so big) and only possible because modern AI like Opus 5.5 is good enough to figure that out
For the last two years pretty much nobody cared about any of these projects, I'd tweet them into the void, which was fine because I thought it was very fun just for myself
But now with this wave of AI-assisted reverse engineering WASM ports of games and apps to web they're finally taking off, pretty much anything is portable to WASM on web now, and if you add server to it via WebSockets, people can instantly play with each other, or interact inside apps you host, it's super cool
Every game and app I have on @pieter now is full or almost full to the limit, yesterday 80,000 people played around in Windows 3.1 or Windows XP inside their browsers chatting to MSN and AOL Messenger AI bots and playing 3D Pinball or playing Quake etc.
And that was my idea for @pieter: a non-commercial preservation project, kinda like an online computer museum but interactive!
The most cool thing to pay respects to these old games, apps and OSes I think is to keep them alive by making them easily and freely accessible, playable on mobile so old and new generations of people can jump back in the past interactively
This is one of my first projects to take off that does not, can not and will not make money because it's non-profit, and that's fine
Every time I tweeted about these projects would always ask me "but why?"
Because it's really fun! 🤩
This quoted post is unavailable.
James Baicoianu retweeted
> discussing future of mankind
> someone asks "is it a human problem or an engineering problem?"
> nobody understands
> explain dichotomy of technically enforced authority vs human emotional desire for freedom
> laughs, "it's an engineering problem, sir"
> it was a human problem
James Baicoianu retweeted
Every developer that I've seen going for custom SDF rendering in their games, ends up using them for terrains.
Volumetric nerds, hear me out: do not understimate the potential of this amazing medium for puzzles!
Last night, I set a /goal for claude to do some work on a 3d model in Blender. I woke up this morning to find my computer had rebooted, and claude had uninstalled itself.
Guess I've had jobs like that too.
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James Baicoianu retweeted
Just a reminder Im still working on SelfReflect. My latest build has an offline & wired mode using a RiiDraw Adapter. It sends data out via MIDI-USB and the adapter converts to serial.
I may or may not have used the new multicam capture mode for a new video shipping soon...
James Baicoianu retweeted
Classic 3D videogame shadow techniques - Pekka Väänänen
30fps.net/pages/videogame-sh…
James Baicoianu retweeted
For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.
AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.
Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.
The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.
images.nvidia.com/pdf/Open-W…
James Baicoianu retweeted
I just released an all-in-one tool that lets you extract textures from any perspective, turn them into seamless textures, and use them on your 3D models.
#gamedev #indiedev #gamedevtools #itchio #indiegame
James Baicoianu retweeted
Around this time the majority of compute at Stability AI was being used on building open LLMs but:
1. We didn’t do the easy thing of training GPT-J / Neo-X more (pre chinchilla!)
2. Couldn’t make it safe / tried to do too many changes to formula (Pile 2, Reddit crawls etc)
We succeeded in building sota/frontier models of other all types that worked on the edge; but LLMs really were difficult to get working in consumer hardware then & even harder to do “right”
In the end Mistral & Meta got the first wave of good quality open LLMs before the Chinese took over
I honestly think OpenAI, Anthropic etc should have released really good quality edge open models with community interaction focused on how best to align these
Lots of lessons to learn & Sam is right that it would almost have been safer given the better underlying datasets they had by then plus early RL.
Also that it would have dried up some of the funding environment but..
