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There is a cer­tain kind of com­puter re­view that is re­ally a per­mis­sion slip. It tells you what you’re al­lowed to want. It lo­cates you in a tax­on­omy — stu­dent, cre­ative, pro­fes­sional, power user — and as­signs you a prod­uct. It is help­ful. It is re­spon­si­ble. It has very lit­tle in­ter­est in what you might be­come.

The MacBook Neo has at­tracted a lot of these re­views.

The con­sen­sus is rea­son­able: $599, A18 Pro, 8GB RAM, stripped-down I/O. A Chromebook killer, a first lap­top, a sen­si­ble ma­chine for sen­si­ble tasks. “If you are think­ing about Xcode or Final Cut, this is not the com­puter for you.” The peo­ple say­ing this are not wrong. It is also not the point.

Nobody starts in the right place. You don’t be­gin with the cor­rect tool and work sen­si­bly within its con­straints un­til you or­gan­i­cally grad­u­ate to a more ca­pa­ble one. That is not how ob­ses­sion works. Obsession works by tak­ing what­ever is avail­able and press­ing on it un­til it ei­ther breaks or re­veals some­thing. The ma­chine’s lim­its be­come a map of the ter­ri­tory. You learn what com­put­ing ac­tu­ally costs by pay­ing too much of it on hard­ware that can barely af­ford it.

I know this be­cause I was run­ning Final Cut Pro X on a 2006 Core 2 Duo iMac with 3GB RAM and 120GB of spin­ning rust. I was nine. I had no busi­ness do­ing this. I did it every day af­ter school un­til my par­ents made me go to bed.

The ma­chine came as a hand-me-down from my nana. She’d wiped it, set it up in her kitchen in Massachusetts. It was one soft­ware up­date away from get­ting the axe from Apple. I tor­rented Adobe CS5 the same week. Downloaded Xcode and dragged but­tons and con­trols around in Interface Builder with no un­der­stand­ing of what I was look­ing at. I edited SystemVersion.plist to make the “About this Mac” win­dow say it was run­ning Mac OS 69, which is the s*x num­ber, which is very funny. I faked be­ing sick to watch WWDC 2011 — Steve Jobs’ last keynote — and clapped alone in my room when the au­di­ence clapped, and re­built his slides in Keynote af­ter­ward be­cause I wanted to un­der­stand how he’d made them feel that way.

I knew the ma­chine was wrong for what I wanted to do with it. I did­n’t care. Every lim­i­ta­tion was just the edge of some­thing I had­n’t fig­ured out yet. It was green fields and blue skies.

I thought about all of this when I opened the Neo for the first time.

What Apple put in­side the Neo is the com­plete be­hav­ioral con­tract of the Mac. Not a Mac Lite. Not a browser in a lap­top cos­tume. The same ma­cOS, the same APIs, the same Neural Engine, the same weird byzan­tine AppKit con­trols that haven’t mean­ing­fully changed since the NeXT era. The abil­ity to dis­able SIP and in­stall some fuck-ass sys­tem mod­i­fi­ca­tion you saw in a YouTube tu­to­r­ial. All of it, at $599.

They cut the things that are, ap­par­ently, not the Mac. MagSafe. ProMotion. M-series sil­i­con. Port band­width. Configurable mem­ory. What re­mains is the Retina dis­play, the alu­minum, the key­board, and the full soft­ware plat­form. I held it and thought, “yep, still a Mac.”

Yes, you will hit the lim­its of this ma­chine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the lim­its you hit on the Neo are re­source lim­its — mem­ory is fi­nite, sil­i­con has a clock speed, processes cost some­thing. You are learn­ing physics. A Chromebook does­n’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceil­ing is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of com­put­ing but the edges of a prod­uct cat­e­gory de­signed to save you from your­self. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook does­n’t learn that his ma­chine can’t han­dle it. He learns that Google de­cided he’s not al­lowed to. Those are com­pletely dif­fer­ent lessons.

Somewhere a kid is sav­ing up for this. He has read every re­view. Watched the in­tro­duc­tion video four or five times. Looked up every spec, every bench­mark, every foot­note. He has prob­a­bly walked into an Apple Store and in­ter­ro­gated an em­ployee about it ad nau­seam. He knows the con­sen­sus. He knows it’s prob­a­bly not the right tool for every­thing he wants to do.

He has de­cided he’ll be fine.

This com­puter is not for the peo­ple writ­ing those re­views — peo­ple who al­ready have the MacBook Pro, who have the pro­fes­sional con­text, who are op­ti­miz­ing at the mar­gin. This com­puter is for the kid who does­n’t have a mar­gin to op­ti­mize. Who can’t wait for the right tool to ma­te­ri­al­ize. Who is go­ing to take what’s avail­able and push it un­til it breaks and learn some­thing per­ma­nent from the break­ing.

He is go­ing to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and ad­just every­thing he can ad­just just to see how he likes it. He is go­ing to make a folder called “Projects” with noth­ing in it. He is go­ing to down­load Blender be­cause some­one on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the in­ter­face for forty-five min­utes. He is go­ing to open GarageBand and make some­thing that is not a song. He is go­ing to take screen­shots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why. Then he is go­ing to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and Xcode all open at once, not be­cause he’s work­ing in all of them but be­cause he does­n’t know you’re not sup­posed to do that, and the ma­chine is go­ing to get hot and slow and he is go­ing to learn what the spin­ning beach­ball cur­sor means. None of this will look, from the out­side, like the be­gin­ning of any­thing. But one of those things is go­ing to stick longer than the oth­ers. He won’t know which one un­til later. He’ll just know he keeps open­ing it.

That is not a bug in how he’s us­ing the com­puter. That is the en­tire mech­a­nism by which a kid be­comes a de­vel­oper. Or a de­signer. Or a film­maker. Or what­ever it is that comes af­ter spend­ing thou­sands of hours alone in a room with a ma­chine that was never quite right for what you were ask­ing of it.

He knows it’s prob­a­bly not the right tool. It does­n’t mat­ter. It never did.

The re­views can tell you what a com­puter is for. They have very lit­tle in­ter­est in what you might be­come be­cause of one.

FARGO — A grand­mother from Tennessee is work­ing to get her life back af­ter what she says was a case of mis­taken iden­tity that nearly cost her every­thing.

Angela Lipps spent nearly six months in jail af­ter Fargo po­lice con­nected her to a bank fraud case in the metro.

It’s a crime she says she did­n’t com­mit. In fact, she said she’s never been to North Dakota.

Lipps, 50, is the mother of three grown chil­dren and has five grand­chil­dren, spend­ing nearly her en­tire life in north-cen­tral Tennessee. The ex­tent of her trav­els is lim­ited to neigh­bor­ing states.

She’s never been on an air­plane in her life.

That changed last sum­mer when po­lice flew her to North Dakota to face crim­i­nal charges af­ter fa­cial recog­ni­tion showed she was the main sus­pect in what Fargo po­lice called an or­ga­nized bank fraud case.

“It was so scary, I can still see it in my head, over and over again,” Lipps said.

It was July 14, the day a team of U. S. Marshals ar­rested Lipps at her home in Tennessee. She said she was taken away at gun­point while babysit­ting four young chil­dren. She was booked into her county jail in Tennessee as a fugi­tive from jus­tice from North Dakota.

“I’ve never been to North Dakota, I don’t know any­one from North Dakota,” Lipps said.

Lipps would sit in that Tennessee jail cell for nearly four months. As a fugi­tive, she was held with­out bail. Lipps learned, fol­low­ing a Fargo Police Department in­ves­ti­ga­tion, she had been charged with four counts of unau­tho­rized use of per­sonal iden­ti­fy­ing in­for­ma­tion and four counts of theft in North Dakota.

In Tennessee, she was given a court ap­pointed lawyer for the ex­tra­di­tion process. To fight the charges, she was told she would have to go to North Dakota.

Through an open records re­quest, WDAY News ob­tained the Fargo po­lice file in this case. In April and May 2025, de­tec­tives were in­ves­ti­gat­ing sev­eral bank fraud cases. A woman is seen us­ing a fake U. S. Army mil­i­tary I.D. card to with­draw tens of thou­sands of dol­lars.

In an ef­fort to help iden­tify the woman in the sur­veil­lance video, court doc­u­ments show Fargo po­lice used fa­cial recog­ni­tion soft­ware. The soft­ware iden­ti­fied the per­son as Angela Lipps. According to the court doc­u­ments, the Fargo de­tec­tive work­ing the case then looked at Lipps’ so­cial me­dia ac­counts and Tennessee dri­ver’s li­cense photo.

In his charg­ing doc­u­ment, the de­tec­tive wrote that Lipps ap­peared to be the sus­pect based on fa­cial fea­tures, body type and hair­style and color.

Lipps told WDAY News that no one from the Fargo Police Department ever called to ques­tion her.

Officers from North Dakota did not pick up Lipps from her jail cell in Tennessee un­til Oct. 30 — 108 days af­ter her ar­rest. The next day she made her first ap­pear­ance in a North Dakota court­room to fight the charges.

“If the only thing you have is fa­cial recog­ni­tion, I might want to dig a lit­tle deeper,” said Jay Greenwood, the lawyer rep­re­sent­ing Lipps in North Dakota.

Greenwood im­me­di­ately asked Lipps for her bank records. Once they were in hand, Fargo po­lice met with him and Lipps at the Cass County jail on Dec. 19. She had al­ready been in jail for more than five months. It was the first time po­lice in­ter­viewed her.

Her bank records showed she was more than 1,200 miles away, at home in Tennessee at the same time po­lice claimed she was in Fargo com­mit­ting fraud.

“Around the same time she’s de­posit­ing Social Security checks … she is buy­ing cig­a­rettes at a gas sta­tion, around the same time, she is buy­ing a pizza, she is us­ing a cash app to buy an Uber Eats,” Greenwood said.

On Christmas Eve, five days af­ter the in­ter­view with Fargo po­lice, the case was dis­missed, and she was re­leased from jail.

But, Lipps was now stranded in Fargo.

“I had my sum­mer clothes on, no coat, it was so cold out­side, snow on the ground, scared, I wanted out but I did­n’t know what I was go­ing to do, how I was go­ing to get home,” Lipps said.

Fargo po­lice did not cover Angela’s ex­penses to get home af­ter her re­lease from jail. Local de­fense at­tor­neys gave her money to pay for a ho­tel room and food on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

The day af­ter Christmas, F5 Project founder Adam Martin drove Lipps to Chicago so she could get home to Tennessee. Fargo-based F5 Project is an or­ga­ni­za­tion pro­vid­ing ser­vices and re­sources to in­di­vid­u­als strug­gling with in­car­cer­a­tion, men­tal health and ad­dic­tion.

“I’m just glad it’s over. I’ll never go back to North Dakota,” Lipps said.

For more than a week, WDAY News tried to arrange an on cam­era in­ter­view with Fargo Police Chief David Zibolski to dis­cuss the case. Through a spokesper­son the chief de­clined an on-cam­era in­ter­view. WDAY News brought the is­sue up on Wednesday, March 11, at Zibolski’s re­tire­ment news con­fer­ence.

“Why did no­body from Fargo Police ever speak with Angela Lipps for the five months she was in jail?” Zibolski was asked.

“Thank you, Matt (Henson), for that ques­tion but we are not here to talk about that to­day,” Zibolski replied.

Lipps is back home in Tennessee now, but is still feel­ing the im­pact from the in­ci­dent. She told WDAY News that no one from the Fargo Police Department has apol­o­gized for the in­ci­dent.

Unable to pay her bills from jail, she lost her home, her car and even her dog.

Fargo po­lice say the bank fraud case is still un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion and no ar­rests have been made.

Willingness to look stu­pid is a gen­uine moat in cre­ative workEv­ery Sunday I go to a cof­fee shop in Japantown with my lap­top to write. And I write! I have no trou­ble writ­ing. The writ­ing is­n’t the prob­lem. The prob­lem is that when I’m done, I look at what I just wrote and think this is def­i­nitely not good enough to pub­lish. This did­n’t use to hap­pen. A few years ago I used to pub­lish all the time. I’d write some­thing, feel pretty good about it, and then hit pub­lish with­out a sec­ond thought. I knew no­body re­ally cared about what I was writ­ing, so it did­n’t mat­ter if it sucked. And hon­estly, a lot of what I wrote re­ally did suck. But I pub­lished it any­way. And yet I’d some­how oc­ca­sion­ally write a good post.Fast for­ward to to­day: I have no trou­ble writ­ing, but I’ve now de­vel­oped this fear of hit­ting pub­lish. I’m older and ob­jec­tively a bet­ter writer, with sup­pos­edly bet­ter ideas. So where did things go wrong? Why’s it so much harder to share my ideas now?1.

There’s this un­for­tu­nate pat­tern that hap­pens when some­one wins a Nobel Prize. They tend to stop do­ing great work. Richard Hamming talks about this in You and Your Research:When you are fa­mous it is hard to work on small prob­lems. This is what did Shannon in. After in­for­ma­tion the­ory, what do you do for an en­core? The great sci­en­tists of­ten make this er­ror. They fail to con­tinue to plant the lit­tle acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that is­n’t the way things go. So that is an­other rea­son why you find that when you get early recog­ni­tion it seems to ster­il­ize you. In fact I will give you my fa­vorite quo­ta­tion of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opin­ion, has ru­ined more good sci­en­tists than any in­sti­tu­tion has cre­ated, judged by what they did be­fore they came and judged by what they did af­ter. Not that they weren’t good af­ter­wards, but they were su­perb be­fore they got there and were only good af­ter­wards.Be­fore the Nobel Prize, no­body re­ally cares who you are. But af­ter the Nobel Prize, you’re a Nobel Prize win­ner, and Nobel Prize win­ners are sup­posed to have Good Ideas. Every idea, every pa­per, every talk at a con­fer­ence is now be­ing eval­u­ated against the stan­dard of your Nobel Prize-winning work. Everyone is ask­ing, “is this wor­thy of a Nobel lau­re­ate?” It’s a high bar to clear. So in­stead of try­ing and oc­ca­sion­ally fail­ing, they just… stop try­ing. The fear of mak­ing some­thing bad is worse than pro­duc­ing noth­ing at all.¹2.

Many good ideas come from young and un­proven peo­ple. The Macintosh team’s av­er­age age was 21. Most re­searchers at Xerox PARC were un­der 30. Some of the best re­search work I’ve seen at OpenAI has come from sur­pris­ingly young peo­ple. I don’t think young peo­ple are smarter than old peo­ple. I don’t think they work that much harder ei­ther. It mostly just seems that no­body re­ally ex­pects much of young peo­ple, so they’re free to fol­low their cu­rios­ity into weird, silly, and seem­ingly-bad-but-ac­tu­ally-good ideas. They’re not afraid of look­ing stu­pid. Good Ideas, and I mean this in the broad­est sense — re­search di­rec­tions, startup ideas, premises for a novel — al­most al­ways sound stu­pid at first. They of­ten make the per­son who came up with them look stu­pid. So if a truly Good Idea al­ways starts out by look­ing un­se­ri­ous, then the only way to have one is to get com­fort­able pro­duc­ing stu­pid things.3.

A few weeks ago my friend Aadil and I were at Whole Foods buy­ing a birth­day cake for a friend. We wanted to write some­thing clever on the cake but could­n’t re­ally think of any­thing. We stood around think­ing for a few min­utes be­fore Aadil said “Let’s just say a bunch of bad ideas out loud so we can get to the good ones.” And it worked! We all said a bunch of ter­ri­ble ideas, and even­tu­ally we landed on a good one — a pretty clever pun based on our friend’s long­time email ad­dress.This sounds silly, but I think it cap­tures the en­tire cre­ative process well. You start by com­ing up with bad ideas. You will prob­a­bly look stu­pid. That’s in­evitable. But once you’re com­fort­able look­ing stu­pid, you can pro­duce the bad ideas which will even­tu­ally lead to the good ones. If you don’t have the courage to look stu­pid, you’ll never reap the re­ward of hav­ing good ideas.It feels like there’s some­thing like a con­ser­va­tion law at work here: the amount of stu­pid­ity you’re will­ing to tol­er­ate is di­rectly pro­por­tional to the qual­ity of ideas you’ll even­tu­ally pro­duce. I’ll call this Aadil’s Law.4.

Yesterday, I vis­ited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and could not stop think­ing about the jel­ly­fish ex­hibit. They are se­ri­ously weird crea­tures. Jellyfish have no bones, brains, teeth, or blood. Some are bi­o­lu­mi­nes­cent for rea­sons we don’t fully un­der­stand. They’re pretty much sacs of jelly con­tained within a thin mem­brane, drift­ing aim­lessly at the mercy of ocean cur­rents. Yet some­how, jel­ly­fish have been around for over 500 mil­lion years. So by most de­f­i­n­i­tions of evo­lu­tion­ary suc­cess, jel­ly­fish are a great idea.But how was evo­lu­tion able to get to the jel­ly­fish? The evo­lu­tion­ary process is pretty sim­ple: gen­er­ate a ton of ran­dom mu­ta­tions and then let nat­ural se­lec­tion fil­ter them. The over­whelm­ing ma­jor­ity of mu­ta­tions end up be­ing harm­ful or neu­tral. An ex­ceed­ingly small frac­tion are ben­e­fi­cial. If you could some­how give evo­lu­tion a sense of em­bar­rass­ment, so if every time it pro­duced a fish with no fins or a bird with no wings, it felt a deep sense of shame and promised to be more care­ful next time — evo­lu­tion would no longer work. It needs to be able to ex­plore the fit­ness land­scape with bad traits in or­der to pro­duce good traits, and this ex­plo­ration re­quires a will­ing­ness to pro­duce un­fit or­gan­isms. The only way evo­lu­tion could get to the jel­ly­fish was by be­ing will­ing to pro­duce the count­less jel­ly­fish-ad­ja­cent or­gan­isms which went ex­tinct.5.

There might be a good rea­son why smart peo­ple want to avoid look­ing stu­pid. I’ve spent a long time think­ing about what this rea­son could be. The only plau­si­ble ex­pla­na­tion is that our egos are frag­ile, and by not shar­ing any work at all, we never have to risk our egos be­ing dam­aged. If we never share any­thing, then noth­ing bad can ever hap­pen to us. But the flip side to pro­tect­ing our egos is that we never end up mak­ing any­thing worth­while.I think there are two very dif­fer­ent fail­ure modes here, each at an op­po­site end of the spec­trum:Over­share, but look stu­pid: You have lots of ideas, and you share them in­dis­crim­i­nately. You look stu­pid be­cause you don’t re­ally care about what you share, and peo­ple even­tu­ally learn to tune you out.Un­der­share, but never do any­thing in­ter­est­ing: You have lots of ideas, but share al­most none of them. You’re afraid of look­ing stu­pid, so the ex­ceed­ingly few ideas that you do share end up be­ing in­cred­i­bly bland. You never look stu­pid, but this comes at the ex­pense of never do­ing any­thing in­ter­est­ing ever again.Know­ing my­self, I’m def­i­nitely more at risk of un­der­shar­ing my work. I’d also bet that the most peo­ple read­ing this blog post are prone to un­der­shar­ing as well.6.

So where do we go from here? I think the an­swer is ac­tu­ally in that Whole Foods story. Aadil’s im­plicit goal was to “think of some­thing clever to write on this cake” but none of us could do it be­cause clev­er­ness was the stan­dard and none of our ideas met it. But when Aadil said “Let’s just say a bunch of bad ideas,” he changed the frame en­tirely. We were now play­ing a game where the only way to lose was by say­ing noth­ing at all.I think that’s the key here. Your goal should­n’t be to share some­thing good. It should just be to share some­thing at all. Even if it is­n’t good. A half-baked blog post. A silly demo. A weird pro­ject. I’ve been do­ing too much se­lec­tion, and not enough pro­duc­tion.7.

I keep think­ing about the ver­sion of me from a few years ago. He was worse at al­most every­thing. Worse writer, worse thinker, worse at mak­ing things. Nobody re­ally knew him and no­body re­ally cared what he had to say. And yet he had so much more courage. He’d write some­thing in an af­ter­noon and pub­lish it that evening and go to bed feel­ing good about him­self. He was­n’t per­form­ing for any­one. He was just a guy with a blog, putting his thoughts out into the world, mostly for him­self. I miss that guy.Evo­lu­tion did­n’t get to the jel­ly­fish by be­ing care­ful. Aadil did­n’t come up with a good cake idea by try­ing to be clever. I think it’s just about over­com­ing fear. Not a mat­ter of tal­ent, taste, or in­tel­li­gence. Just this: are you will­ing to look stu­pid to­day? That’s it. That’s all there is to it.¹ My fa­vorite coun­terex­am­ple to this is that Alec Radford (the re­searcher be­hind GPT-1) is still writ­ing pa­pers on clean­ing pre­train­ing data, ar­guably the most unglam­orous thing you could work on in ML re­search in 2026.Most peo­ple will spend decades in chronic pain to avoid a few min­utes of acute pain.Maybe mak­ing is about mat­ter­ing­Want­ing to mat­ter might be the most hon­est rea­son to cre­ate any­thing.Some­times the peo­ple who need in­vi­ta­tions most are the ones who al­ways de­cline them.The mod­els are pow­er­ful as is. But where are the tools?

We’re thrilled to an­nounce the sta­ble re­lease of Vite 8! When Vite first launched, we made a prag­matic bet on two bundlers: es­build for speed dur­ing de­vel­op­ment, and Rollup for op­ti­mized pro­duc­tion builds. That bet served us well for years. We’re very grate­ful to the Rollup and es­build main­tain­ers. Vite would­n’t have suc­ceeded with­out them. Today, it re­solves into one: Vite 8 ships with Rolldown as its sin­gle, uni­fied, Rust-based bundler, de­liv­er­ing up to 10-30x faster builds while main­tain­ing full plu­gin com­pat­i­bil­ity. This is the most sig­nif­i­cant ar­chi­tec­tural change since Vite 2.

Vite is now be­ing down­loaded 65 mil­lion times a week, and the ecosys­tem con­tin­ues to grow with every re­lease. To help de­vel­op­ers nav­i­gate the ever-ex­pand­ing plu­gin land­scape, we also launched reg­istry.vite.dev, a search­able di­rec­tory of plu­g­ins for Vite, Rolldown, and Rollup that col­lects plu­gin data from npm daily.

Play on­line with Vite 8 us­ing vite.new or scaf­fold a Vite app lo­cally with your pre­ferred frame­work run­ning pnpm cre­ate vite. Check out the Getting Started Guide for more in­for­ma­tion.

We in­vite you to help us im­prove Vite (joining the more than 1.2K con­trib­u­tors to Vite Core), our de­pen­den­cies, or plu­g­ins and pro­jects in the ecosys­tem. Learn more at our Contributing Guide. A good way to get started is by triag­ing is­sues, re­view­ing PRs, send­ing tests PRs based on open is­sues, and sup­port­ing oth­ers in Discussions or Vite Land’s help fo­rum. If you have ques­tions, join our Discord com­mu­nity and talk to us in the #contributing chan­nel.

Stay up­dated and con­nect with oth­ers build­ing on top of Vite by fol­low­ing us on Bluesky, X, or Mastodon.

Since its ear­li­est ver­sions, Vite re­lied on two sep­a­rate bundlers to serve dif­fer­ent needs. es­build han­dled fast com­pi­la­tion dur­ing de­vel­op­ment (dependency pre-bundling and TypeScript/JSX trans­forms) that made the dev ex­pe­ri­ence feel in­stant. Rollup han­dled pro­duc­tion bundling, chunk­ing, and op­ti­miza­tion, with its rich plu­gin API pow­er­ing the en­tire Vite plu­gin ecosys­tem.

This dual-bundler ap­proach served Vite well for years. It al­lowed us to fo­cus on de­vel­oper ex­pe­ri­ence and or­ches­tra­tion rather than rein­vent­ing pars­ing and bundling from scratch. But it came with trade-offs. Two sep­a­rate trans­for­ma­tion pipelines meant two sep­a­rate plu­gin sys­tems, and an in­creas­ing amount of glue code needed to keep the two pipelines in sync. Edge cases around in­con­sis­tent mod­ule han­dling ac­cu­mu­lated over time, and every align­ment fix in one pipeline risked in­tro­duc­ing dif­fer­ences in the other.

Rolldown is a Rust-based bundler built by the VoidZero team to ad­dress these chal­lenges head-on. It was de­signed with three goals:

* Performance: Written in Rust, Rolldown op­er­ates at na­tive speed. In bench­marks, it is 10-30x faster than Rollup match­ing es­build’s per­for­mance level.

* Compatibility: Rolldown sup­ports the same plu­gin API as Rollup and Vite. Most ex­ist­ing Vite plu­g­ins work out of the box with Vite 8.

* Advanced fea­tures: A sin­gle uni­fied bundler un­locks ca­pa­bil­i­ties that were dif­fi­cult or im­pos­si­ble with the dual-bundler setup, in­clud­ing full bun­dle mode, more flex­i­ble chunk split­ting, mod­ule-level per­sis­tent caching, and Module Federation sup­port.

The mi­gra­tion to Rolldown was de­lib­er­ate and com­mu­nity-dri­ven. First, a sep­a­rate roll­down-vite pack­age was re­leased as a tech­ni­cal pre­view, al­low­ing early adopters to test Rolldown’s in­te­gra­tion with­out af­fect­ing the sta­ble ver­sion of Vite. The feed­back from those early adopters was in­valu­able. They pushed the in­te­gra­tion through real-world code­bases of every shape and size, sur­fac­ing edge cases and com­pat­i­bil­ity is­sues we could ad­dress be­fore a wider re­lease. We also set up a ded­i­cated CI suite val­i­dat­ing key Vite plu­g­ins and frame­works against the new bundler, catch­ing re­gres­sions early and build­ing con­fi­dence in the mi­gra­tion path.

In December 2025, we shipped the Vite 8 beta with Rolldown fully in­te­grated. During the beta pe­riod, Rolldown it­self pro­gressed from beta to a re­lease can­di­date, with con­tin­u­ous im­prove­ments dri­ven by the test­ing and feed­back of the Vite com­mu­nity.

During the pre­view and beta phases of roll­down-vite, sev­eral com­pa­nies re­ported mea­sur­able re­duc­tions in pro­duc­tion build times:

For large pro­jects, the im­pact can be es­pe­cially no­tice­able, and we ex­pect fur­ther im­prove­ments as Rolldown con­tin­ues to evolve.

With Vite 8, Vite be­comes the en­try point to an end-to-end tool­chain with closely col­lab­o­rat­ing teams: the build tool (Vite), the bundler (Rolldown), and the com­piler (Oxc). This align­ment en­sures con­sis­tent be­hav­ior across the en­tire stack, from pars­ing and re­solv­ing to trans­form­ing and mini­fy­ing. It also means we can rapidly adopt new lan­guage spec­i­fi­ca­tions as JavaScript evolves. And by in­te­grat­ing deeply across lay­ers, we can pur­sue op­ti­miza­tions that were pre­vi­ously out of reach, such as lever­ag­ing Oxc’s se­man­tic analy­sis for bet­ter tree-shak­ing in Rolldown.

None of this would have been pos­si­ble with­out the broader com­mu­nity. We want to ex­tend our deep thanks to the frame­work teams (SvelteKit, React Router, Storybook, Astro, Nuxt, and many oth­ers) who tested roll­down-vite early, filed de­tailed bug re­ports, and worked with us to re­solve com­pat­i­bil­ity is­sues. We are equally grate­ful to every de­vel­oper who tried the beta, shared their build time im­prove­ments, and re­ported the rough edges that helped us pol­ish this re­lease. Your will­ing­ness to test the mi­gra­tion on real pro­jects helped make the tran­si­tion to Rolldown smoother and more re­li­able.

Vite 8 re­quires Node.js 20.19+, 22.12+, the same re­quire­ments as Vite 7. These ranges en­sure Node.js sup­ports re­quire(esm) with­out a flag, al­low­ing Vite to be dis­trib­uted as ESM only.

Beyond the Rolldown in­te­gra­tion, Vite 8 in­cludes sev­eral no­table fea­tures:

* Integrated Devtools: Vite 8 ships de­v­tools op­tion to en­able Vite Devtools, a de­vel­oper tool­ing for de­bug­ging and analy­sis. Vite Devtools pro­vide deeper in­sights into your Vite-powered pro­jects di­rectly from the dev server.

* Built-in tscon­fig paths sup­port: Developers can en­able TypeScript path alias res­o­lu­tion by set­ting re­solve.tscon­fig­Paths to true. This has a small per­for­mance cost and is not en­abled by de­fault.

* emit­Dec­o­ra­torMeta­data sup­port: Vite 8 now has built-in au­to­matic sup­port for TypeScript’s emit­Dec­o­ra­torMeta­data op­tion, re­mov­ing the need for ex­ter­nal plu­g­ins. See the Features page for de­tails.

* Wasm SSR sup­port: .wasm?init im­ports now work in SSR en­vi­ron­ments, ex­pand­ing Vite’s WebAssembly fea­ture to server-side ren­der­ing.

* Browser con­sole for­ward­ing: Vite 8 can for­ward browser con­sole logs and er­rors to the dev server ter­mi­nal. This is es­pe­cially use­ful when work­ing with cod­ing agents, as run­time client er­rors be­come vis­i­ble in the CLI out­put. Enable it with server.for­ward­Con­sole, which ac­ti­vates au­to­mat­i­cally when a cod­ing agent is de­tected.

Alongside Vite 8, we are re­leas­ing @vitejs/plugin-react v6. The plu­gin uses Oxc for React Refresh trans­form. Babel is no longer a de­pen­dency and the in­stal­la­tion size is smaller.

For pro­jects that need the React Compiler, v6 pro­vides a re­act­Com­pil­er­P­re­set helper that works with @rolldown/plugin-babel, giv­ing you an ex­plicit opt-in path with­out bur­den­ing the de­fault setup.

See the Release Notes for more de­tails.

Note that v5 still works with Vite 8, so you can up­grade the plu­gin af­ter up­grad­ing Vite.

The Rolldown in­te­gra­tion opens the door to im­prove­ments and op­ti­miza­tions. Here is what we are work­ing on next:

* Full Bundle Mode (experimental): This mode bun­dles mod­ules dur­ing de­vel­op­ment, sim­i­lar to pro­duc­tion builds. Preliminary re­sults show 3x faster dev server startup, 40% faster full re­loads, and 10x fewer net­work re­quests. This is es­pe­cially im­pact­ful for large pro­jects where the un­bun­dled dev ap­proach hits scal­ing lim­its.

* Raw AST trans­fer: Allows JavaScript plu­g­ins to ac­cess the Rust-produced AST with min­i­mal se­ri­al­iza­tion over­head, bridg­ing the per­for­mance gap be­tween Rust in­ter­nals and JS plu­gin code.

* Native MagicString trans­forms: Enables cus­tom trans­forms where the logic lives in JavaScript but the string ma­nip­u­la­tion com­pu­ta­tion runs in Rust.

* Stabilizing the Environment API: We are work­ing to make the Environment API sta­ble. The ecosys­tem has started reg­u­lar meet­ings to bet­ter col­lab­o­rate to­gether.

We want to be trans­par­ent about changes to Vite’s in­stall size. Vite 8 is ap­prox­i­mately 15 MB larger than Vite 7 on its own. This comes from two main sources:

* ~10 MB from light­ningcss: Previously an op­tional peer de­pen­dency, light­ningcss is now a nor­mal de­pen­dency to pro­vide bet­ter CSS mini­fi­ca­tion out of the box.

* ~5 MB from Rolldown: The Rolldown bi­nary is larger than es­build + Rollup mainly due to per­for­mance op­ti­miza­tions that fa­vor speed over bi­nary size.

We will con­tinue mon­i­tor­ing and work­ing to re­duce in­stall size as Rolldown ma­tures.

For most pro­jects, up­grad­ing to Vite 8 should be a smooth process. We built a com­pat­i­bil­ity layer that auto-con­verts ex­ist­ing es­build and rollupOp­tions con­fig­u­ra­tion to their Rolldown and Oxc equiv­a­lents, so many pro­jects will work with­out any con­fig changes.

For larger or more com­plex pro­jects, we rec­om­mend the grad­ual mi­gra­tion path: first switch from vite to the roll­down-vite pack­age on Vite 7 to iso­late any Rolldown-specific is­sues, then up­grade to Vite 8. This two-step ap­proach makes it easy to iden­tify whether any is­sues come from the bundler change or from other Vite 8 changes.

Please re­view the de­tailed Migration Guide be­fore up­grad­ing. The com­plete list of changes is in the Vite 8 Changelog.

As Vite moves to Rolldown, we want to take a mo­ment to ex­press our deep grat­i­tude to the two pro­jects that made Vite pos­si­ble.

Rollup has been Vite’s pro­duc­tion bundler since the very be­gin­ning. Its el­e­gant plu­gin API de­sign proved so well-con­ceived that Rolldown adopted it as its own, and Vite’s en­tire plu­gin ecosys­tem ex­ists be­cause of the foun­da­tion Rollup laid. The qual­ity and thought­ful­ness of Rollup’s ar­chi­tec­ture shaped how Vite thinks about ex­ten­si­bil­ity. Thank you, Rich Harris for cre­at­ing Rollup, and Lukas Taegert-Atkinson and the Rollup team for main­tain­ing and evolv­ing it into some­thing that has had such a last­ing im­pact on the web tool­ing ecosys­tem.

es­build pow­ered Vite’s re­mark­ably fast de­vel­op­ment ex­pe­ri­ence from its early days: de­pen­dency pre-bundling, TypeScript and JSX trans­forms that com­pleted in mil­lisec­onds rather than hun­dreds. es­build proved that build tools could be or­ders of mag­ni­tude faster, and its speed set the bar that in­spired an en­tire gen­er­a­tion of Rust and Go-based tool­ing. Thank you, Evan Wallace, for show­ing all of us what was pos­si­ble.

Without these two pro­jects, Vite would not ex­ist as it does to­day. Even as we move for­ward with Rolldown, the in­flu­ence of Rollup and es­build is deeply em­bed­ded in Vite’s DNA, and we are grate­ful for every­thing they have given to the ecosys­tem. You can learn more about all the pro­jects and peo­ple Vite de­pends on at our Acknowledgements page.

Vite 8 was led by sap­phi-red and the Vite Team with the help of the wide com­mu­nity of con­trib­u­tors, down­stream main­tain­ers, and plu­gin au­thors. We want to thank the Rolldown team for their close col­lab­o­ra­tion in mak­ing the Rolldown-powered Vite 8 pos­si­ble. We are also es­pe­cially grate­ful to every­one who par­tic­i­pated in the roll­down-vite pre­view and the Vite 8 beta pe­riod. Your test­ing, bug re­ports, and feed­back made the Rolldown mi­gra­tion pos­si­ble and shaped this re­lease into some­thing we are proud of.

Vite is brought to you by VoidZero, in part­ner­ship with Bolt and NuxtLabs. We also want to thank our spon­sors on Vite’s GitHub Sponsors and Vite’s Open Collective.

The Iran war is re­viv­ing re­mote work across the world — from Denmark to VietnamAsia rolls out four-day weeks and work-from-home as emer­gency mea­sures to solve a fuel cri­sis caused by Iran war­Bei­jing’s dom­i­nance in rare earth pro­cess­ing leaves oth­ers scram­bling to close the gap: ’China is the leader, and the U. S. is far be­hind’LIV Golf CEO Scott O’Neil on how stuck golfers got out of a be­sieged Gulf: ‘Precise plan­ning, ex­cel­lent re­sources and tremen­dous lead­er­ship’ and The Associated Press

‘This can­not be sus­tain­able’: The U. S. bor­rowed $50 bil­lion a week for the past five months, the CBO saysThe na­tional debt is­n’t $39 tril­lion. One econ­o­mist says it’s ac­tu­ally $100 tril­lion’Pro­ceed with cau­tion’: Elon Musk of­fers warn­ing af­ter Amazon re­port­edly had manda­tory meet­ing to ad­dress ‘high blast ra­dius’ and AI-related in­ci­dents­The U.S. Mint dropped the olive branch from the dime. What does that mean for the coun­try?‘I don’t know if we’re ready’: Governors from each party ap­palled at 100-year-old fed­eral work­force strat­e­gy­Mor­gan Stanley warns an AI break­through Is com­ing in 2026 — and most of the world is­n’t ready

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The sight of a de­lec­table plate of lasagna or the aroma of a hol­i­day ham are sure to get hun­gry bel­lies rum­bling in an­tic­i­pa­tion of a feast to come. But al­though we’ve all ex­pe­ri­enced the sen­sa­tion of “eating” with our eyes and noses be­fore food meets mouth, much less is known about the in­for­ma­tion su­per­high­way, known as the va­gus nerve, that sends sig­nals in the op­po­site di­rec­tion — from your gut straight to your brain.

These sig­nals re­lay more than just what you’ve eaten and when you are full. A new study in mice from re­searchers at Stanford Medicine and the Palo Alto, California-based Arc Institute has iden­ti­fied a crit­i­cal link be­tween the bac­te­ria that live in your gut and the cog­ni­tive de­cline that of­ten oc­curs with ag­ing.

“Although mem­ory loss is com­mon with age, it af­fects peo­ple dif­fer­ently and at dif­fer­ent ages,” said Christoph Thaiss, PhD, as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of pathol­ogy. “We wanted to un­der­stand why some very old peo­ple re­main cog­ni­tively sharp while other peo­ple see sig­nif­i­cant de­clines be­gin­ning in their 50s or 60s. What we learned is that the time­line of mem­ory de­cline is not hard­wired; it’s ac­tively mod­u­lated in the body, and the gas­troin­testi­nal tract is a crit­i­cal reg­u­la­tor of this process.”

The mouse study showed that the com­po­si­tion of the nat­u­rally oc­cur­ring bac­te­r­ial pop­u­la­tion that lives in the gut, known as the gut mi­cro­biome, changes with age — fa­vor­ing some species of bac­te­ria over oth­ers. These changes are reg­is­tered by im­mune cells in the gas­troin­testi­nal tract, which spark an in­flam­ma­tory re­sponse that ham­pers the abil­ity of the va­gus nerve to sig­nal to the hip­pocam­pus — the part of the brain re­spon­si­ble for mem­ory for­ma­tion and spa­tial nav­i­ga­tion. Stimulating the ac­tiv­ity of the va­gus nerve in older an­i­mals turned old, for­get­ful mice into whisker-sharp whizzes able to re­mem­ber novel ob­jects and es­cape from mazes as nim­bly as their younger coun­ter­parts.

“The de­gree of re­versibil­ity of age-re­lated cog­ni­tive de­cline in the an­i­mals just by al­ter­ing gut-brain com­mu­ni­ca­tion was a sur­prise,” Thaiss said. “We tend to think of mem­ory de­cline as a brain-in­trin­sic process. But this study in­di­cates that we can en­hance mem­ory for­ma­tion and brain ac­tiv­ity by chang­ing the com­po­si­tion of the gas­troin­testi­nal tract — a kind of re­mote con­trol for the brain.”

Thaiss, who is also a core in­ves­ti­ga­tor at Palo Alto-based Arc Institute, is a se­nior au­thor of the study, which was pub­lished March 11 in Nature. Maayan Levy, PhD, an as­sis­tant pro­fes­sor of pathol­ogy and Arc Institute in­no­va­tion in­ves­ti­ga­tor, is the other se­nior au­thor. Timothy Cox, a grad­u­ate stu­dent at the University of Pennsylvania, is the lead au­thor of the re­search.

“Our study em­pha­sizes that processes in the brain can be mod­u­lated through pe­riph­eral in­ter­ven­tion,” Levy said. “Since the gas­troin­testi­nal tract is eas­ily ac­ces­si­ble orally, mod­u­lat­ing the abun­dance of gut mi­cro­biome metabo­lites is a very ap­peal­ing strat­egy to con­trol brain func­tion.”

The call is com­ing from in­side the body

The idea that hun­dreds of species of bac­te­ria are nes­tled com­fort­ably in our in­testines used to be sur­pris­ing. But the gut mi­cro­biome is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a kind of me­dia hey­day as peo­ple re­al­ize that its func­tion is crit­i­cal to not just how we di­gest our food, but also to our over­all health. A lit­tle more than a decade ago, re­searchers showed that tin­ker­ing with ro­dents’ gut mi­cro­bio­mes af­fected the an­i­mals’ so­cial and cog­ni­tive be­hav­iors. Thaiss and Levy won­dered whether a sim­i­lar process could be re­spon­si­ble for the mem­ory loss and cog­ni­tive trou­bles of­ten as­so­ci­ated with ag­ing.

Signals from in­side the body to the brain — like those that travel from the in­testines to the brain via the va­gus nerve — are part of what’s called in­te­ro­cep­tion. In con­trast, sig­nals from out­side the body, con­veyed pri­mar­ily by the five senses of taste, touch, smell, vi­sion and hear­ing, are called ex­te­ro­cep­tion.

This study in­di­cates that we can en­hance mem­ory for­ma­tion and brain ac­tiv­ity by chang­ing the com­po­si­tion of the gas­troin­testi­nal tract — a kind of re­mote con­trol for the brain.”

—Christoph Thaiss

“Exteroception is ba­si­cally how we per­ceive the out­side,” Thaiss said. “We have a lot of de­tailed knowl­edge about how this works. But we know much less about how the brain senses what is go­ing on in­side the body. We don’t know how many in­ter­nal senses there are, or even all of what they are sens­ing. It’s clear that our ex­te­ro­cep­tion ca­pa­bil­i­ties de­cline with age — we grow to need eye­glasses and hear­ing aids, for ex­am­ple. And this study shows that ag­ing also af­fects in­te­ro­cep­tion.”

To test their the­ory that the gut mi­cro­biome plays a role in the “senior mo­ments” many of us ex­pe­ri­ence, the re­searchers housed young (2-month-old) mice to­gether with old (18-month-old) mice. Living (and poop­ing) in close prox­im­ity ex­posed the young mice to the gut mi­cro­bio­mes of the old mice and vice versa. After one month, the re­searchers ex­am­ined the com­po­si­tions of the mi­cro­bio­mes of the old and young an­i­mals.

They found that the shared digs caused the mi­cro­bio­mes of the young mice to more closely re­sem­ble that of the older an­i­mals. When they com­pared the abil­i­ties of the mice to rec­og­nize a novel ob­ject, or to find the exit in a maze, the young mice with “old” mi­cro­bio­mes per­formed sig­nif­i­cantly more poorly than their peers — show­ing less cu­rios­ity about the un­fa­mil­iar ob­ject and bum­bling about the maze in ways sim­i­lar to that of old an­i­mals.

When the re­searchers com­pared young mice and old mice raised in a germ-free en­vi­ron­ment since birth (meaning nei­ther group had gut bac­te­ria), the young mice main­tained their abil­ity to form mem­o­ries. But when they trans­planted young, germ-free mice with mi­cro­bio­mes from old mice, the young mice again per­formed like older an­i­mals in the mem­ory and cog­ni­tion tests. Interestingly, the germ-free old mice did not ex­pe­ri­ence a loss of mem­ory and cog­ni­tion as they aged, per­form­ing as well as 2-month-old an­i­mals.

Strikingly, treat­ing young mice with “old” mi­cro­bio­mes (and, there­fore, fal­ter­ing cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties) with broad-spec­trum an­tibi­otics for two weeks re­stored the an­i­mals’ cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, caus­ing them to avidly in­ves­ti­gate un­fa­mil­iar ob­jects and scam­per through the maze as well as their con­trol peers.

“The ob­ject recog­ni­tion test is like cog­ni­tive recog­ni­tion tests in hu­mans, where you are shown a se­ries of im­ages, then have to re­mem­ber which ones you’ve seen be­fore af­ter some time passes,” Thaiss said. “And the maze test is like peo­ple try­ing to re­call where they parked their car at a large shop­ping cen­ter. What these tasks have in com­mon, in mice and in peo­ple, is that they are very strongly de­pen­dent on ac­tiv­ity in the hip­pocam­pus, be­cause that is where mem­o­ries are en­coded.”

What’s dif­fer­ent in their guts?

Digging deeper, the re­searchers iden­ti­fied spe­cific changes that oc­cur in the com­po­si­tion of the gut mi­cro­biome of mice as they age. In par­tic­u­lar, the rel­a­tive abun­dance of a bac­te­ria called Parabacteroides gold­steinii in­creases in old mice and is di­rectly as­so­ci­ated with cog­ni­tive de­cline in the an­i­mals. They showed that col­o­niz­ing the guts of young mice with this bac­te­r­ial species in­hib­ited their per­for­mance on the ob­ject recog­ni­tion and maze es­cape tasks, and that this deficit cor­re­lated with a re­duc­tion of ac­tiv­ity in the hip­pocam­pus.

When they treated old mice with a mol­e­cule that ac­ti­vates the va­gus nerve, how­ever, the cog­ni­tive per­for­mance of the an­i­mals was in­dis­tin­guish­able from that of young an­i­mals.

Further ex­per­i­ments showed that the in­creas­ing preva­lence of the Parabacteroides gold­steinii bac­te­ria cor­re­lated with an in­creas­ing amount of metabo­lites called medium-chain fatty acids, and that these metabo­lites cause a group of im­mune cells in the gut called myeloid cells to ini­ti­ate an in­flam­ma­tory re­sponse. This in­flam­ma­tion in­hibits the ac­tiv­ity of the va­gus nerve, the ac­tiv­ity of the hip­pocam­pus and the abil­ity to form last­ing mem­o­ries.

“The GI tract is ar­guably the first or­gan sys­tem to evolve dur­ing hu­man evo­lu­tion­ary his­tory, so the evo­lu­tion of cog­ni­tive processes in the brain has un­doubt­edly been shaped by sig­nals com­ing from the in­tes­tine,” Levy said.

“It’s likely that sig­nals from the GI tract play an im­por­tant role in con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing mem­ory for­ma­tion.”

Thaiss added, “Basically, we’ve iden­ti­fied a three-step path­way to­ward cog­ni­tive de­cline that starts with gas­troin­testi­nal ag­ing and the sub­se­quent mi­cro­bial and meta­bolic changes that oc­cur. The myeloid cells in the GI tract sense these changes, and their in­flam­ma­tory re­sponse im­pairs the con­nec­tion be­tween the gut and the brain via the va­gus nerve. This is a di­rect dri­ver of mem­ory de­cline. And if we re­store the ac­tiv­ity of the va­gus nerve, we can re­store an old an­i­mal’s mem­ory func­tion to that of a young an­i­mal.”

The re­searchers are now in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether a sim­i­lar gut mi­cro­biome and brain ac­tiv­ity path­way ex­ists in hu­mans, and whether it also con­tributes to age-re­lated cog­ni­tive de­cline. Importantly, va­gus nerve stim­u­la­tion is ap­proved by the Food and Drug Administration as a treat­ment for de­pres­sion or epilepsy and to aid stroke re­cov­ery. The re­searchers are also in­ter­ested in de­vel­op­ing ways to non-in­va­sively mon­i­tor, and per­haps even con­trol, the ac­tiv­ity of pe­riph­eral neu­rons to af­fect mem­ory for­ma­tion and cog­ni­tion.

“Our hope is that ul­ti­mately these find­ings can be trans­lated into the clinic to com­bat age-re­lated cog­ni­tive de­cline in peo­ple,” Thaiss said.

Researchers from Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia; the University of California, Irvine; University College Cork, Ireland; Calico Life Sciences LLC; and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia con­tributed to the work.

The study was funded by the Arc Institute, the National Institutes of Health (grants NIH DK019525, T32AG000255, F30AG081097, T32HG000046, F30AG080958, DP2-AG-067511, DP2-AG-067492, DP1-DK-140021, R01-NS-134976 and R01-DK-129691), the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the American Cancer Society, the Pew Scholar Award, the Searle Scholar Program, the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Foundation, the W. W. Smith Charitable Trust, the Blavatnik Family Fellowship, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, the Polybio Research Foundation, the V Foundation, the Kathryn W. Davis Aging Brain Scholar Program, the McKnight Brain Research Foundation, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the IDSA Foundation and the Human Frontier Science Program.

We can go through most of our lives hold­ing out hope of one day see­ing in real­i­ty such works as van Gogh’s Sun­flow­ers, Mon­et’s Haystacks, a clay tablet con­tain­ing actu­al cuneiform writ­ing with our own eyes, or the an­cient Egypt­ian Tem­ple of Den­dur. We can actu­al­ly come face to face — or rather, face to sur­face — with all of them, tem­ple includ­ed, at New York’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, which con­tains all those and more arti­facts of hu­man civ­i­liza­tion than any of us could hope to exam­ine close­ly in a life­time. But even if we did, we might only feel tempt­ed to look at them more close­ly still, even to touch them. That may be an improb­a­ble hope, but we can at least get clos­er than ever now thanks to the Met’s new archive of high-def­i­n­i­tion 3D scans.

“View­ers can zoom in, ro­tate, and exam­ine each mod­el, bring­ing unprece­dent­ed ac­cess to sig­nif­i­cant works of art,” says the Met’s offi­cial announce­ment. “The 3D mod­els can also be ex­plored in view­ers’ own spaces through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty (AR) on most smart­phone and VR head­sets, as a re­source for re­search, explo­ration, and curios­i­ty.”

High­lights in­clude “a mar­ble sar­coph­a­gus with li­ons felling ante­lope (3rd cen­tu­ry); a stat­ue of Horus as a fal­con pro­tect­ing King Nectanebo II (360–343 BCE); Kano Sansetsu’s Old Plum (1646); and a house mod­el by Nayarit artist(s) (200 BCE–300 CE).” Or per­haps you’d pre­fer an inti­mate view of an eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry tile depic­tion of Mec­ca, a nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry mar­ble sculp­ture of Perseus with the head of Medusa, or a suit of ar­mor belong­ing to King Hen­ry II of France?

Brows­ing this archive of more than 100 dig­i­tized his­tor­i­cal ob­jects, you’ll also no­tice pieces from Japan like sev­en­teenth-cen­tu­ry screens by the artists Kano Sanset­su and Suzu­ki Kiit­su. These must have been pri­or­i­ties for the Met’s insti­tu­tion­al part­ner in this pro­ject, the Japan­ese tele­vi­sion net­work NHK. It all came about “as part of the pub­lic broad­cast­er’s ini­tia­tive to pro­duce ul­tra-high def­i­n­i­tion 3D com­put­er graph­ics of nation­al trea­sures and oth­er impor­tant art­works,” with “fur­ther edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram­ming and poten­tial con­tent us­ing these cut­ting-edge, best-in-class mod­els” in the off­ing. For now, though, the archive of­fers us more than enough to be­hold from any pos­si­ble an­gle. To do so, just click the “View in 3D” but­ton be­low the im­age on the page of your arti­fact or art­work of choice. It may not be the same as hold­ing the ob­ject in your hands, but it’s as close as you’re go­ing to get — un­less, of course, you find your­self in­spired to pur­sue the dream of becom­ing a cura­tor at the Met.

Take a New Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

See Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring in 3D in a New 108-Gigapix­el Scan

The Earth Archive Will 3D-Scan the Entire World & Cre­ate an “Open-Source” Record of Our Plan­et

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the au­thor of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the so­cial net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @col­in­mar­shall.

Alpha no­tice: Code ex­port is not func­tional yet. We’re ac­tively work­ing on it — check back soon.

Design once, gen­er­ate pro­duc­tion-ready code for your frame­work of choice. Switch tar­gets with­out touch­ing your de­sign.

Alpha no­tice: Code ex­port is not func­tional yet. We’re ac­tively work­ing on it — check back soon.

Design once, gen­er­ate pro­duc­tion-ready code for your frame­work of choice. Switch tar­gets with­out touch­ing your de­sign.

Everything you need to know be­fore hit­ting down­load.

A TUI (Text User Interface) is an in­ter­ac­tive ap­pli­ca­tion that runs en­tirely in the ter­mi­nal — like htop, lazy­git, or k9s. Instead of a web browser or na­tive win­dow, the UI is built from char­ac­ters, col­ors, and ANSI es­cape codes. TUIStudio lets you de­sign these vi­su­ally in­stead of hand-cod­ing every lay­out.

Will ma­cOS or Windows block the app?

With no code-sign­ing con­fig­ured, each plat­form be­haves dif­fer­ently:

ma­cOS

Gatekeeper blocks the app im­me­di­ately. You’ll see ei­ther “TUIStudio can­not be opened be­cause it is from an uniden­ti­fied de­vel­oper” or “TUIStudio is dam­aged and can’t be opened” on newer ma­cOS af­ter quar­an­tine flags the bi­nary.

To get past it: right-click the .app → Open → Open any­way — or go to System Settings → Privacy & Security → “Open Anyway”.

Windows

SmartScreen shows “Windows pro­tected your PC”. Click More info → Run any­way. Less fa­tal than ma­cOS, but still alarm­ing to non-tech­ni­cal users.

Linux

No such gate. dpkg -i TUIStudio-amd64.deb or dou­ble-click in a file man­ager — just works.

Why are ex­ports not work­ing?

TUIStudio is cur­rently in Alpha — ex­ports are not func­tional yet. We’re ac­tively work­ing on it.

When ready, the fol­low­ing 6 frame­works will be sup­ported:

Switch ex­port tar­gets at any time with­out touch­ing your de­sign.

TUIStudio is cur­rently in early ac­cess. The core ed­i­tor is free to down­load and use. A pro tier with team fea­tures, cloud sync, and pri­or­ity sup­port is planned for later.

Can I save and re­open my de­signs?

Yes. Projects are saved as portable .tui JSON files you can open from any­where, com­mit to git, or share with your team. No ac­count or cloud re­quired.

For a decade, I have been work­ing with AWS and third-party se­cu­rity teams to re­solve buck­et­squat­ting / buck­et­snip­ing is­sues in AWS S3. Finally, I am happy to say AWS now has a so­lu­tion to the prob­lem, and it changes the way you should name your buck­ets.

Bucketsquatting (or some­times called buck­et­snip­ing) is an is­sue I first wrote about in 2019, and it has been a re­cur­ring is­sue in AWS S3 ever since. If you’re in­ter­ested in the specifics of the prob­lem, I rec­om­mend you check out my orig­i­nal post on the topic: S3 Bucket Namesquatting - Abusing pre­dictable S3 bucket names. In short, the prob­lem is that S3 bucket names are glob­ally unique, and if the owner of a bucket deletes it, that name be­comes avail­able for any­one else to reg­is­ter. This can lead to a sit­u­a­tion where an at­tacker can reg­is­ter a bucket with the same name as a pre­vi­ously deleted bucket and po­ten­tially gain ac­cess to sen­si­tive data or dis­rupt ser­vices that rely on that bucket.

Additionally, it is a com­mon prac­tice for or­ga­ni­za­tions to use pre­dictable nam­ing con­ven­tions for their buck­ets, such as ap­pend­ing the AWS re­gion name to the end of the bucket name (e.g. myapp-us-east-1), which can make it eas­ier for at­tack­ers to guess and reg­is­ter buck­ets that may have been pre­vi­ously used. This lat­ter prac­tice is one that AWS’ in­ter­nal teams com­monly fall vic­tim to, and it is one that I have been work­ing with the AWS Security Outreach team to ad­dress for al­most a decade now across dozens of in­di­vid­ual com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

To ad­dress this is­sue, AWS has in­tro­duced a new pro­tec­tion that works ef­fec­tively as a “namespace” for S3 buck­ets. The name­space syn­tax is as fol­lows:

For ex­am­ple, if your ac­count ID is 123456789012, your pre­fix is myapp, and you want to cre­ate a bucket in the us-west-2 re­gion, you would name your bucket as fol­lows:

Though not ex­plic­itly men­tioned, the -an here refers to the “account name­space”. This new syn­tax en­sures that only the ac­count that owns the name­space can cre­ate buck­ets with that name, ef­fec­tively pre­vent­ing buck­et­squat­ting at­tacks. If an­other ac­count tries to cre­ate a bucket with the same name, they will re­ceive an InvalidBucketNamespace er­ror mes­sage in­di­cat­ing that the bucket name is al­ready in use. Account own­ers will also re­ceive an InvalidBucketNamespace er­ror if they try to cre­ate a bucket where the bucket re­gion does not match the re­gion spec­i­fied in the bucket name.

Interestingly, the guid­ance from AWS is that this name­space is rec­om­mended to be used by de­fault. Namespaces aren’t new to S3, with suf­fixes like .mrap, –x-s3, and -s3alias all be­ing ex­am­ples of ex­ist­ing name­spaces that AWS pre­vi­ously used for new fea­tures; how­ever, this is the first time AWS has in­tro­duced a name­space that is rec­om­mended for gen­eral use by cus­tomers to pro­tect against a spe­cific se­cu­rity is­sue.

It is AWS’ stance that all buck­ets should use this name­space pat­tern, un­less you have a com­pelling rea­son not to (hint: there aren’t many). To this end, AWS is al­low­ing se­cu­rity ad­min­is­tra­tors to set poli­cies that re­quire the use of this name­space through the use of a new con­di­tion key s3:x-amz-bucket-name­space, which can be ap­plied within an Organization’s SCP poli­cies to en­force the use of this pro­tec­tion across an or­ga­ni­za­tion.

This does­n’t retroac­tively pro­tect any ex­ist­ing buck­ets (or pub­lished tem­plates that use a re­gion pre­fix/​suf­fix pat­tern with­out the name­space), but it does pro­vide a strong pro­tec­tion for new buck­ets go­ing for­ward (okay, so it’s dy­ing, not dead). If you wish to pro­tect your ex­ist­ing buck­ets, you’ll need to cre­ate new buck­ets with the name­space pat­tern and mi­grate your data to those buck­ets.

While AWS has in­tro­duced this new name­space pro­tec­tion for S3 buck­ets, the other ma­jor cloud providers han­dle things slightly dif­fer­ently.

Google Cloud Storage al­ready has a name­space con­cept in place for its buck­ets, which is based on do­main name ver­i­fi­ca­tion. This means that only the owner of a do­main can cre­ate buck­ets with names that are of a do­main name for­mat (e.g. myapp.com), and they must ver­ify own­er­ship of the do­main be­fore they can cre­ate buck­ets with that name. Bucketsquatting is still pos­si­ble with non-do­main name for­mat­ted buck­ets, but the use of do­main name for­mat­ted buck­ets is Google’s so­lu­tion to the is­sue.

For Azure Blob Storage, stor­age ac­counts are scoped with a con­fig­urable ac­count name and con­tainer name, so the same is­sue does ap­ply. This is fur­ther ex­ac­er­bated by the fact that Azure’s stor­age ac­count names have a max­i­mum of 24 char­ac­ters, leav­ing a fairly small name­space for or­ga­ni­za­tions to work with. (h/t vhab for point­ing this out)

There is a new name­space for S3 buck­ets. The name­space pro­tects you from buck­et­squat­ting at­tacks, and you should use it for any S3 buck­ets you cre­ate.

If you liked what I’ve writ­ten, or want to hear more on this topic, reach out to me on LinkedIn or 𝕏.