Spatial computer. Ex-Apple, Meta. Author of “Metal by Example”
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2008
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This resonates especially hard for me because I first joined Apple in 2013. Those first 14 months I worked harder than I ever had in my life. To prove myself, sure, but also because I was surrounded by so many brilliant, passionate people. Back when we all wrote code by hand, it was a point of pride to do it well, to craft something that behaved well, that respected the user’s intellect and their aims.
Years later, Gary interviewed me when I was a candidate to join the Human Interface team. One of the things he impressed on me, since I was applying to build internal design tools, was the importance of not narrowing the set of possibilities too early in the process, of not “working thin.” A good, correct, fitting design only emerges when you allow yourself to rattle around in possibility space for a while, maybe longer than seems reasonable.
I didn’t stick around long enough to see the apotheosis of the vision we had for some of those projects, but I’ll always carry that consideration with me. And I think now—especially right now—when the bots write most of the code, there’s still an awful lot that humans can and should have a say in what the future of software looks like. I will forever esteem my colleagues at Apple for keeping the Human at the forefront of human-computer interaction.
It's unfortunate that in 2026 it's still so hard to get ImGui to play nice with sRGB render targets. Fortunately, I developed a couple of novel techniques to work around it.
New on Metal by Example: Dual-Source Blending
metalbyexample.com/dual-sour…
Kicking around ideas for custom spatial accessories for Vision Pro. Seems like prototyping with the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense + an IR LED driver could get you a long way cheaply, since it comes with BTLE 5 and an IMU out of the box. Might need to re-flash to get to BTLE 5.3 tho?
Built a VGA adapter for my Apple //e so I could finally play Oregon Trail in color – at San Francisco, CA
Coming in visionOS 27: GaussianSplatComponent enables native rendering of splats with RealityKit. Splats compose together with other entities and can be manipulated with gestures
Video: GLTFKit2 will soon support splats in glTF assets, with runtime conversion to RealityKit
Warren Moore retweeted
Neon effect animation
SwiftUI + Metal with metalforge.xyz
New on Metal by Example
Bismuth: A Prototype Scene Graph Language
metalbyexample.com/bismuth/
New on Metal by Example: Slug
The patent on the Slug text rendering algorithm has been donated to the public domain, so I implemented it in Metal and wrote a bit about it
[article and sample code links in reply]
Blog: metalbyexample.com/slug/
Source: github.com/metal-by-example/…
Warren Moore retweeted
New supply chain attack this time for npm axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300M weekly downloads.
Scanning my system I found a use imported from googleworkspace/cli from a few days ago when I was experimenting with gmail/gcal cli. The installed version (luckily) resolved to an unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if I did this earlier today the code would have resolved to latest and I'd be pwned.
It's possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings e.g. release-age constraints, or containers or etc, but I think ultimately the defaults of package management projects (pip, npm etc) have to change so that a single infection (usually luckily fairly temporary in nature due to security scanning) does not spread through users at random and at scale via unpinned dependencies.
More comprehensive article:
stepsecurity.io/blog/axios-c…
🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages.
The latest [email protected] now pulls in [email protected], a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise.
This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M+ weekly downloads. Every npm install pulling the latest version is potentially compromised right now.
Socket AI analysis confirms this is malware. plain-crypto-js is an obfuscated dropper/loader that:
• Deobfuscates embedded payloads and operational strings at runtime
• Dynamically loads fs, os, and execSync to evade static analysis
• Executes decoded shell commands
• Stages and copies payload files into OS temp and Windows ProgramData directories
• Deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence
If you use axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lockfiles. Do not upgrade.
exhibit one billion of “who could’ve possibly seen this utterly inevitable thing coming”
Now that KHR_gaussian_splatting has entered the RC phase, I've drafted a PR that adds support to cgltf. Support in GLTFKit2 is also on the roadmap, pending ratification.
github.com/jkuhlmann/cgltf/p…
We're excited to announce a release candidate for the KHR_gaussian_splatting baseline extension. This extension enables storing 3D #Gaussian splats in #glTF 2.0, the most widely adopted 3D asset delivery format.
Learn more: khr.io/1mp
This Thursday (1/8) I’ll be speaking on L-Systems at the inaugural South Bay meetup of the Swift Language User Group at Netflix!
Happy holidays everyone! We’re excited to announce our first-ever South Bay event, hosted by our friends at Netflix. Join us on January 8, 2026 to kick off the new year with the Bay Area Swift community.
RSVP here:
luma.com/gx81vj3l
This talk by Ed Catmull was a highlight of SIGGRAPH this year, and it’s now available in full on YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=q1Uq8b2o…
From 'Toy Story' to Pixar and beyond! 🌟 Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull took the stage as the #SIGGRAPH2025 Pioneers Featured Speaker, sharing behind-the-scenes stories of the world’s first fully computer-generated feature film.
🎥 Watch the full talk: youtu.be/q1Uq8b2ooVk?si=68Lk…
