The Founder

A freshly minted founder de­cides to get into the oven busi­ness. He can’t bake a cake or knead bread, but he knows the kitchen ap­pli­ance mar­ket in­side and out. He’s an­a­lyzed every busi­ness in Spain and reached a con­clu­sion: if he sells a new oven to the coun­try’s pizza mak­ers, pas­try chefs, and bak­ers, he only needs to cap­ture 10% of the mar­ket to be­come a bil­lion­aire.

10% al­ways looks small when you type it into an Excel spread­sheet.

The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on pa­per, is flaw­less and air­tight: man­u­fac­ture a more ef­fi­cient oven us­ing new tech­nol­ogy. Selling it is easy. Want to work more ef­fi­ciently? Buy our oven. End of pitch. The founder has ex­pe­ri­ence talk­ing to in­vestors and raises enough money to build an MVP.

The Engineer

The founder looks for some­one who knows how to build ovens and finds an en­gi­neer from a pres­ti­gious school. The en­gi­neer has spent 10 years build­ing ovens and knows how to make one. More than that: he’s the kind of per­son who spends all day talk­ing and ar­gu­ing about ovens. He goes to oven con­fer­ences. When he gets home at night, he ar­gues for hours on Italian fo­rums about which type of oven is best. The Italian fo­rums are, to him, the ul­ti­mate source of oven-truth.

He’s tired of build­ing ovens at Corporate Oven. Ten years mak­ing the same oven he’s told to make. He wants the free­dom to build his own.

The founder of­fers him 20% of the com­pany and to­tal free­dom to build the per­fect oven. The salary is­n’t great, but there’s the promise: if things go well, some­day he could be a mil­lion­aire. And some­thing more im­por­tant than money: he’ll fi­nally get to build the oven of his dreams.

He signs.

The MVP

With lit­tle money and lots of en­thu­si­asm, they build an MVP. Two months later it’s done. It’s a func­tional oven and, more im­por­tantly, it has one im­prove­ment over tra­di­tional ovens: you in­put the amount of flour, yeast, and wa­ter, and the oven au­to­mat­i­cally knows when to stop for a per­fect bake.

In the­ory.

In prac­tice it does­n’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP. They go to mar­ket and sell 5 pro­to­types: two bak­ers the founder knows, the en­gi­neer’s mother who bakes cakes, and two oven en­thu­si­asts who buy it out of cu­rios­ity.

The feed­back is unan­i­mous:

“My bread came out burnt.” “The cake was raw.” “Every sin­gle pizza burns.”

But all things con­sid­ered, it’s pos­i­tive: a third of the time, the pro­to­type worked and pro­duced the per­fect cake, bread, or pizza.

“This is just a pro­to­type. Imagine when we ship the real prod­uct. Trust us.”

And with that, the founder goes to see an old col­league who now works at a VC: “In 2 months we’ve built a pro­to­type, we al­ready have 5 cus­tomers, and it’s very promis­ing. We just need money to scale, build a bet­ter ver­sion, and sell to every bak­ery and pas­try shop in Spain.”

Nobody asks whether the 5 cus­tomers would buy again.

The founder is very good. He raises 5 mil­lion. Ovens Inc. is born.

Forum of the Bakers

They start im­prov­ing the pro­to­type. The en­gi­neer re­al­izes some­thing: build­ing an al­go­rithm that cal­cu­lates bak­ing time for cakes, piz­zas, and bread is quite a bit more com­plex than it looked. Every dough is its own uni­verse. They need to hire more en­gi­neers.

The en­gi­neer knows ex­actly where to look. On the Italian fo­rums there are two users he’s spent years ar­gu­ing with about con­vec­tion and re­frac­tory stone: Mario and Luigi. He’s never met them in per­son, but he knows their opin­ions on ovens bet­ter than his own fam­i­ly’s. He of­fers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of free­dom, the per­fect oven.

They sign.

Meanwhile, the founder needs to sell ovens, but Facebook and Instagram ads get no trac­tion. Turns out no­body buys a fif­teen-thou­sand-euro in­dus­trial oven be­cause it popped up in their sto­ries. So he hires a leg­endary sales team: the best sales­peo­ple in all of Spain. People who have never sold ovens, who know noth­ing about ovens, but who are hun­gry to sell and very ex­cited about the com­pany.

At first it goes badly. Few peo­ple want a new oven; they’re happy with the one they have. Why switch? Most small busi­nesses don’t care about a 15% ef­fi­ciency gain: the risk of switch­ing is too high. If Juan’s Bakery swaps ovens and the new oven fails, Juan loses his cus­tomers and shuts down. For Juan, ef­fi­ciency is op­tional; to­mor­row’s bread is not. Better to stick with the old oven, even if it’s worse on pa­per. He’d only switch if Manolo’s Bakery across the street started sell­ing cheaper bread thanks to a more ef­fi­cient oven and he had no choice. But Manolo thinks ex­actly the same as Juan, so no­body moves. Perfect equi­lib­rium. Economists have a name for this; Juan and Manolo call it com­mon sense.

Big busi­nesses are an­other story. For them, 15% ef­fi­ciency means mil­lions saved every year. And one sales­per­son man­ages to make con­tact with Pepepizza.

The Decision

Meanwhile, over in en­gi­neer­ing, things aren’t go­ing any bet­ter. The al­go­rithm is un­sta­ble. They’ve got­ten the fail­ure rate down from two thirds to one third, but each point of im­prove­ment costs twice as much as the last. And then comes the un­com­fort­able dis­cov­ery: if the oven only does two of the three things (bread, cakes, or pizza), the al­go­rithm fails just 5% of the time.

The en­gi­neer brings the pro­posal to the founder: let’s sac­ri­fice one mar­ket and have a prod­uct that works.

The founder gets an­gry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven mar­ket. The en­tire mar­ket. “We can’t sac­ri­fice any of them.”

It’s not just greed. The 5 mil­lion was raised with the en­tire mar­ket on the slide. The founder is­n’t choos­ing be­tween right and wrong: he’s choos­ing which promise to break.

The en­gi­neer goes back to his desk with his three doughs and his 33% fail­ure rate.

Mallorca

Back to sales: there’s con­tact with Pepepizza, but en­ter­prise deals don’t close over email. The founder flies to Pepepizza head­quar­ters and meets the owner. They hit it off. They hit it off so well they go to Mallorca to­gether. Nobody knows what was dis­cussed there. What’s known is that when they come back, there’s a deal. Nobody has tried the oven yet. No need. Enterprise sales is­n’t about ovens.

The hand­shake comes first. The re­quire­ments come later.

And they come. Pepepizza’s op­er­a­tions team sends the list to sales: their kitchens are cus­tom-built, so they need ovens with spe­cific di­men­sions. Oh, and a ro­tat­ing base like the one they al­ready have.

Sales replies: “No prob­lem.”

The founder is eu­phoric. Pepepizza wants to buy an ini­tial batch of 500 ovens. Five hun­dred. That’s more rev­enue than every­thing since they started. For Pepepizza it’s a small pi­lot, a trial in a few lo­ca­tions be­fore de­cid­ing any­thing. For Ovens Inc. it’s bet­ting the en­tire com­pany.

“Engineer, we need 500 ovens for Pepepizza. They want spe­cific di­men­sions and a base that spins. Let’s make it hap­pen.”

The en­gi­neer does­n’t faint only be­cause he’s al­ready sit­ting down.

The al­go­rithm barely works for pizza. The mold di­men­sions have spent 5 months be­ing op­ti­mized in CAD for the stan­dard size. And no­body, ever, has dis­cussed ro­tat­ing bases on the Italian fo­rums. If it’s not on the Italian fo­rums, does it even ex­ist?

The en­gi­neer opens the CAD file in front of the founder. He shows him why the new di­men­sions break the en­tire ther­mal de­sign. The founder looks at the screen, looks at the blue­prints, looks at the en­gi­neer.

“But this is just chang­ing a num­ber, right?”

“We can’t. Not un­til we fix the al­go­rithm and re­design the in­verter for the new sizes. That’s 5 more months.”

The Miracle

It’s not 5 months.

After many lost week­ends and en­tire nights run­ning on Red Bull, in 3 weeks there’s a pro­to­type for Pepepizza. Compromises were made. The al­go­rithm still fails plenty, but at least the di­men­sions are right. The ro­tat­ing base? Doesn’t ex­ist yet. Pepepizza is promised an add-on “in a cou­ple of months.” Pepepizza says fine.

The Candle Button

Sales has had a rev­e­la­tion: if you sell the oven that ex­ists to­day, you don’t sell ovens. You have to sell the oven that will ex­ist in 6 months. Promise fea­tures. It worked last time: they promised Pepepizza the im­pos­si­ble and the team de­liv­ered in 3 weeks. What could go wrong?

Sales, of course, has no idea what hap­pens af­ter the con­tract is signed. The com­mis­sion is paid at sign­ing. Whatever comes next is an­other de­part­men­t’s prob­lem.

Though there’s some­thing no­body in en­gi­neer­ing wants to look at: Ovens Inc. does­n’t live off sell­ing ovens (for now). It lives off rais­ing rounds. And rounds are raised with pro­jec­tions, and pro­jec­tions are man­u­fac­tured out of what­ever sales promises. The “No prob­lem” peo­ple are also the only life raft.

And then the daily re­quests be­gin:

“A lot of our po­ten­tial cus­tomers make birth­day cakes. When they ask if we have spe­cial birth­day-cake fea­tures, we have to say no, and we lose them. Can we add the fea­ture?”

The founder has no doubts. Last time a fea­ture was re­quested, they es­ti­mated 5 months and did it in 3 weeks. And this is much eas­ier. “It’s just a sim­ple but­ton that adds can­dles.”

The en­gi­neer is climb­ing the walls. They still haven’t fin­ished clean­ing up the Pepepizza wreck­age. This is ab­solutely not what peo­ple dis­cuss on the Italian fo­rums. Adding a can­dle but­ton is an in­sult to the state of the art, or rather, the state of the oven.

But he caves.

“Just this once.”

Sales sells 2 more ovens a month thanks to the new but­ton. Or so they be­lieve. They have no way of check­ing whether they’d have sold them any­way with­out the but­ton.

The Second-Highest Priority

Soon af­ter, more fea­ture re­quests ar­rive.

“My oven at home con­nects to the fire­place. Does yours?”

“I make a lot of wed­ding cakes, what have you got for me?”

“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”

They build all of them.

Engineering stops try­ing to build a good oven and starts adding but­tons and fea­tures. Nobody made that de­ci­sion. It just hap­pened, one ticket at a time.

And there’s a de­tail every­one seems to ig­nore: each but­ton takes longer than the last. The can­dle but­ton took three days. The fire­place one, a week. The lat­est one took three. It’s not that the en­gi­neers are get­ting slower: it’s that every new but­ton has to co­ex­ist with all the pre­vi­ous but­tons.

Meanwhile, cus­tomers who buy the oven re­turn it within a week. The rea­son? The bread and cakes still burn 10% of the time. The MVP prob­lem. The orig­i­nal one. The one from day one. Underneath the twelve new but­tons sits the same al­go­rithm from the very first day, and a baker who loses one out of every ten batches is not con­soled by the fact that the oven does can­dles.

When a cus­tomer calls to can­cel, sup­port tries to re­tain them by of­fer­ing what’s avail­able: the new but­ton from the lat­est re­lease. The baker whose bread keeps burn­ing is of­fered Ramadan mode. The baker leaves any­way. It gets logged as feed­back. Engineering has no time to stop and re­think their ap­proach, be­cause stop­ping is­n’t in the back­log.

And then the worst day ar­rives. Pepepizza calls:

“Where is the ro­tat­ing base?”

The founder swal­lows hard. The ticket has been sit­ting on the kan­ban board for a month and a half. It’s not that no­body saw it: it’s that every week some­thing jumped ahead of it. The can­dle but­ton. The fire­place thing. The Ramadan thing. The ro­tat­ing base was al­ways the sec­ond-high­est pri­or­ity, and the sec­ond-high­est pri­or­ity never gets done. So he an­swers with con­vic­tion:

“Almost fin­ished.”

The Request

“Guys, these next two weeks we’re go­ing to fo­cus on the ro­tat­ing base,” says the founder.

The team can’t be­lieve it. They al­ready said the ro­tat­ing base was im­pos­si­ble. They al­ready ex­plained why. Besides, Mario has va­ca­tion planned, the va­ca­tion he was promised af­ter the Pepepizza crunch. And Luigi’s per­for­mance has been slip­ping for weeks and no­body knows why.

The en­gi­neer tries one more time:

“We can’t do the ro­tat­ing base right now. We need to refac­tor, con­sol­i­date, and add an ab­strac­tion layer for com­part­ments and but­tons. Otherwise, every new fea­ture takes twice as long as the last. Also, Mario has va­ca­tion planned, and I’m not sure Luigi is in a good place to be asked for more.”

The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.

“But this is a startup. And star­tups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sac­ri­fice. You have two weeks.”

And he’s not say­ing it from the couch: the founder takes the low­est salary in the com­pany and has­n’t had a va­ca­tion in two years (Mallorca was work). He’s the first to live the speech. That is ex­actly the prob­lem.

When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is

There’s a new crunch. This time with less en­thu­si­asm and less pas­sion. The first one was an epic feat; this one is pa­per­work. Mario can­cels his va­ca­tion. Luigi keeps show­ing up. Nobody asks how he’s do­ing.

Two weeks later, the re­sult: a ro­tat­ing base that re­quires three spe­cial but­ton com­bi­na­tions. It’s in­com­pat­i­ble with every other mode, but it’s not like no­body tested it.

It gets in­stalled at Pepepizza. Pepepizza’s re­sponse:

“It does­n’t ro­tate clock­wise. We’re go­ing with Corporate Oven.”

The team: dev­as­tated. They just lost their most im­por­tant cus­tomer. Nobody in prod­uct ever com­mu­ni­cated that it had to ro­tate clock­wise. Somewhere be­tween sales, the founder, and the back­log, the sin­gle most im­por­tant re­quire­ment of the pro­ject sim­ply never ex­isted.

And the worst part is­n’t los­ing Pepepizza. The worst part is that the changes made for the ro­tat­ing base will haunt the oven’s de­sign un­til the end of time. The cus­tomer leaves now. Their ro­tat­ing base stays for­ever.

No Blockers

A month later, Mario leaves the com­pany. He’s not go­ing to a com­peti­tor and he has­n’t found any­thing bet­ter: he leaves be­cause it’s the only way he can see to get a va­ca­tion. In the retro, it gets writ­ten down as a “learning.”

Luigi stays. He now main­tains the can­dle but­ton. It’s his spe­cialty, they say. Nobody re­mem­bers who de­cided that, but it’s his spe­cialty. He keeps show­ing up every day, keeps do­ing his work. On the Italian fo­rums, peo­ple ask why Luigi has­n’t posted in 5 months. In standups he says “no block­ers” and every­one moves on to the next per­son.

Epilogue

Six months later.

Ovens Inc. is still alive. Technically. There’s money for eight more months and a new ver­sion of the pitch deck where the word “oven” no longer ap­pears: it’s now an “intelligent bak­ing plat­form.”

The en­gi­neer left in March. He did­n’t slam the door or write a vi­ral thread about his ex­pe­ri­ence. One day he sim­ply stopped ar­gu­ing in meet­ings, a month later he stopped show­ing up, and his farewell was a three-line email. Nobody has touched his code since. Nobody dares.

The founder has it all fig­ured out: the prob­lem was never the plan. The prob­lem was the ex­e­cu­tion. He needs an­other en­gi­neer.

And he finds one.

Young, grad­u­ated from a pres­ti­gious school, has spent years build­ing ovens at Corporate Oven and he’s tired. More than that: he’s the kind of per­son who spends all day talk­ing and ar­gu­ing about ovens. He goes to oven con­fer­ences. When he gets home at night, he ar­gues for hours on Italian oven fo­rums about which type of oven is best. On the fo­rum an old user warns “Make sure that you sup­port ro­tat­ing bases day 1”. The young en­gi­neer laughs. Who uses ro­tat­ing bases in an oven?

The founder of­fers him 5% of the com­pany. It can’t be 20 any­more; there’s been di­lu­tion (funding-round stuff, it’s com­pli­cated). But the salary does­n’t mat­ter, be­cause he’s of­fer­ing the im­por­tant thing: to­tal free­dom to build the per­fect oven.

The kid smiles.

On April 13, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger signed into law S.B. 338, which amends the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (“VCDPA”) to pro­hibit the sale of ge­olo­ca­tion data. Notably, the VCDPA de­fines “sale” more nar­rowly than other state com­pre­hen­sive pri­vacy laws, as “the ex­change of per­sonal data for mon­e­tary con­sid­er­a­tion by the con­troller to a third party.”

The ban on the sale of ge­olo­ca­tion data goes into ef­fect on July 1, 2026.

Virginia fol­lows Maryland and Oregon in ban­ning the sale of ge­olo­ca­tion data. Both Maryland and Oregon more broadly de­fine “sale” to mean the ex­change of per­sonal data “for mon­e­tary or other valu­able con­sid­er­a­tion.” Virginia joins sev­eral other states that have re­cently pro­posed leg­is­la­tion with sim­i­lar bans, in­clud­ing California, Massachusetts, Vermont and Washington State. The leg­isla­tive ac­tiv­ity fol­lows reg­u­la­tory scrutiny on the sale of ge­olo­ca­tion data, in­clud­ing the California Attorney General’s in­ves­ti­ga­tion into the lo­ca­tion data in­dus­try in March 2025, and a 2024 FTC set­tle­ment ban­ning a data bro­ker from sell­ing ge­olo­ca­tion data.

v3.0.0

Welcome to Immich v3.0.0!

After months of hard work from the team and our amaz­ing con­trib­u­tors, we’re thrilled to an­nounce the next ma­jor ver­sion of Immich: v3.0.0! 🎉

Breaking changes

This re­lease in­cludes sev­eral break­ing changes; read the full mi­gra­tion guide here. It’s worth men­tion­ing that many of the break­ing changes are up­dates to API end­points and af­fect only third-party tools that in­te­grate with Immich’s API. For the vast ma­jor­ity of users, up­dat­ing works ex­actly as it al­ways has.

How to up­date

First, up­date the IMMICH_VERSION in your .env file to v3:

- IMMICH_VERSION=v2 + IMMICH_VERSION=v3

Then run the usual up­date com­mands:

docker com­pose pull && docker com­pose up -d

Release can­di­dates

If you missed it, v3.0.0 was the first time we used re­lease can­di­dates, also known as pre­re­leases. Release can­di­dates are tested but not yet of­fi­cial re­leases of Immich, and they al­low us to find and fix any out­stand­ing bugs be­fore a fi­nal re­lease. If you would like to be no­ti­fied about re­lease can­di­dates di­rectly through Immich, you can change the re­lease chan­nel from “Stable” to “Release can­di­date” in the Admin set­tings > Version check op­tions (here).

New Merch

As part of this re­lease, we’re happy to an­nounce we also have some new swag for you!

Kids cloth­ing: For those who are likely the rea­son for your Immich li­brary’s size

Colored em­broi­dery: We now have clothes with a full color em­broi­dered Immich logo

Check it out now at https://​im­mich.store!

Highlights

Now, let’s get right into all the new fea­tures in this re­lease:

Mobile non-de­struc­tive edit­ing

Workflows (preview)

Background backup im­prove­ment

Recently added page

Integrity checks

Slideshow on mo­bile app

HLS and real-time video transcod­ing (preview)

New video player for web

Open photo in Immich as gallery on Android

OCR on mo­bile app

Upload as­set di­rectly to al­bum on the mo­bile app

Option to se­lect im­age size when shar­ing on the mo­bile app

Timeline per­for­mance im­prove­ment for brows­ing a large amount of as­sets in a sin­gle month

Mobile non-de­struc­tive edit­ing

This is a fol­low-up to Image Editing on the web, which was re­leased in v2.5.0. This fea­ture al­lows you to make non-de­struc­tive ed­its to your pho­tos in­side of Immich. Until now, the mo­bile ed­i­tor used a com­pletely dif­fer­ent sys­tem that cre­ated new as­sets in­stead of edit­ing the photo in place.

With this up­date, we bring a new, eas­ier-to-use ed­i­tor to mo­bile de­vices that has the same fea­tures as the web ver­sion. You can now edit pho­tos di­rectly in the mo­bile app, in­clud­ing crop­ping, ro­tat­ing, and ad­just­ing your im­ages with­out ever touch­ing the orig­i­nal file. Similar to the web, ed­its are non-de­struc­tive, so you can re­visit or re­vert them at any time. You can even make ed­its on mo­bile and then ad­just them on the web later!

Some fea­tures from the pre­vi­ous mo­bile edit­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion have been re­moved in­clud­ing:

Recoloring pho­tos

Editing live pho­tos

Editing lo­cal as­sets

We have plans to bring some of these ca­pa­bil­i­ties back in fu­ture re­leases.

Workflows (preview)

The first pre­view of Workflows is here! Workflows let you au­to­mate ac­tions in your li­brary by chain­ing trig­gers, fil­ters, and ac­tions to­gether with a drag-and-drop builder. This is the foun­da­tion for many ex­cit­ing au­toma­tions to come, and we’d love your feed­back as we con­tinue build­ing on it.

You can ac­cess the fea­ture from Utilities > Workflows on the web.

From there, you can ei­ther cre­ate a new blank work­flow or browse the pre­made tem­plates to get a ba­sic un­der­stand­ing of how work­flows can be used.

Workflows ed­i­tor

In the work­flows ed­i­tor, you can switch be­tween the Visual or JSON ed­i­tor. The vi­sual ed­i­tor is nice for build­ing out the work­flow; the JSON ed­i­tor is nice for shar­ing and re­ceiv­ing work­flow con­tent from oth­ers.

In each work­flow, there is a trig­ger and a se­quence of steps.

Trigger: this is the en­try point of each work­flow; when the trig­ger oc­curs, the steps are eval­u­ated.

Steps: they in­clude Filters (conditions) and Actions (effects); they can be com­bined to pro­duce the de­sired ef­fect of the use case you aim for.

Sharing a work­flow

You can share the work­flow you made with oth­ers in two ways: text and JSON. Text is nice for shar­ing on a fo­rum or for show-and-tell con­tent. JSON is nice for oth­ers to make an ex­act copy of your work­flow’s con­fig­u­ra­tion.

You can copy the text in the work­flows sum­mary panel on the lower right of the screen

You can share the JSON con­tent from the copy work­flows but­ton in the app bar, switch to the JSON ed­i­tor, or use the Show schema but­ton in the con­text menu in the work­flows list

Note

Please use this dis­cus­sion thread to pro­pose new ideas of trig­gers and ac­tions. We are look­ing for ex­ten­sive feed­back and sug­ges­tions from you all.

Background backup im­prove­ments

Background backup on Android is now sig­nif­i­cantly more re­li­able. Previously, the back­ground backup on Android was lim­ited to newly taken pho­tos. Now, the app uses a new pe­ri­odic task sched­uler, which al­lows you to up­load your en­tire li­brary in the back­ground, and it plays nicer with Android’s back­ground ex­e­cu­tion lim­its, prop­erly cleans up tasks, and warns you when bat­tery op­ti­miza­tion and no­ti­fi­ca­tion set­tings might in­ter­fere with back­ups.

On iOS, the back­ground re­fresh task now runs its sync and up­load work in par­al­lel, so up­loads ac­tu­ally start within the short time win­dow iOS al­lows.

Recently added page

A new “Recently Added” page on the web and mo­bile lets you browse your li­brary sorted by when as­sets were added to Immich, rather than when they were taken. This makes it eas­ier to find what’s new when brows­ing a new batch of im­ports. You can find the new page in the “Explore” tab on the web and in the “Search” tab on mo­bile.

Integrity checks

The main­te­nance page has got­ten a new ad­di­tion: in­tegrity re­ports! Immich will scan its di­rec­to­ries on your file sys­tem, and com­pare it to what it has stored in its data­base. If there are de­vi­a­tions, they will be sur­faced as

un­tracked, if there is a file in Immich’s di­rec­to­ries that Immich does not know of

miss­ing, if Immich ref­er­ences a file in its data­base that does not ex­ist in that place (anymore)

a check­sum mis­match, if the check­sum of the file on disk does not match the check­sum Immich has stored for that file. Typically, this would hap­pen through file cor­rup­tion but could also be the re­sult of a bad re­name.

You can con­fig­ure when and how long the job runs each night.

Slideshow (mobile)

The slideshow ex­pe­ri­ence comes to mo­bile! You can now sit back and let your pho­tos and videos play across the screen, just like on the web.

HLS and Real-Time Video transcod­ing (preview)

Immich can now transcode videos on-the-fly with­out need­ing to gen­er­ate of­fline transcodes. This has been a long-re­quested fea­ture with many ben­e­fits:

Quality switch­ing (both man­ual and au­to­matic)

Transcoding to the best codecs sup­ported by the client

Lower stor­age over­head when of­fline transcod­ing is dis­abled

HDR for com­pat­i­ble clients (not im­ple­mented yet)

Remuxing rather than transcod­ing the orig­i­nal when band­width al­lows it (not im­ple­mented yet)

Please note that this fea­ture is still ex­per­i­men­tal and can change be­hav­ior from ver­sion to ver­sion. It’s cur­rently only im­ple­mented in the web app, with the mo­bile app im­ple­men­ta­tion in progress.

To en­able real-time transcod­ing, go to the video transcod­ing set­tings (scroll down). Offline transcod­ing is­n’t di­rectly af­fected by en­abling it, so if you’d like to dis­able of­fline transcod­ing, you should also ad­just the transcode pol­icy.

Note

For as­sets im­ported prior to v3, you will also need to re-run Metadata Extraction in the job panel for them to be re-processed.

Keep in mind that your server needs to be pow­er­ful enough to transcode in real-time for this fea­ture to work well. Hardware ac­cel­er­a­tion is rec­om­mended, but not re­quired, when us­ing this fea­ture.

New video player for web

A new cus­tom video player on the web app en­sures all your de­vices share the same con­trols and lay­out, match­ing the Immich de­sign. Some ba­sic func­tions, like chang­ing the play­back rate, are avail­able. This should also fix a lot of the prob­lems on iOS, where the OS’s con­trols are hid­den be­hind the Immich navbar.

Open pho­tos in Immich as a gallery on Android

Immich can now act as a gallery/​im­age viewer app on Android. Tap a photo or video in an­other app, choose Immich, and it opens di­rectly in the as­set viewer with op­tions to share the file or up­load it to your li­brary.

This is the first it­er­a­tion of the fea­ture, and re­fine­ments to how Immich rec­og­nizes files that are al­ready in your li­brary are on the way

OCR on the mo­bile app

The as­set viewer now has a tog­gle that high­lights rec­og­nized text in a photo, and you can se­lect and copy it di­rectly from the im­age.

Upload as­sets di­rectly to an al­bum on mo­bile

You can now up­load lo­cal pho­tos di­rectly to an al­bum in the mo­bile app, in­clud­ing from the as­set bot­tom sheet, in­stead of up­load­ing first and or­ga­niz­ing later. A small change that re­moves a lot of fric­tion from the backup-and-or­ga­nize flow.

Select im­age size when shar­ing on mo­bile

When shar­ing pho­tos from the mo­bile app, you can now choose the im­age size be­fore send­ing; it is handy for keep­ing shared files small for mes­sag­ing apps while pre­serv­ing the op­tion to share at full qual­ity when needed.

You can change the de­fault be­hav­ior in the App Settings > Preferences

You can also pick the op­tion when shar­ing on-the-fly by long press­ing the Share but­ton

Timeline per­for­mance Improvements

Browsing months with a large num­ber of as­sets is now dra­mat­i­cally smoother and pre­vents the browser tab from lock­ing up when your in­stance en­coun­ters that sce­nario.

Support Immich

If you find the pro­ject help­ful, you can sup­port Immich by pur­chas­ing a prod­uct key at https://​buy.im­mich.app or our mer­chan­dise at https://​im­mich.store

What’s Changed

🚨 Breaking Changes

refac­tor!: mi­grate class-val­ida­tor to zod by @timonrieger in refac­tor!: mi­grate class-val­ida­tor to zod #26597

You may have heard about 25 Gbit sym­met­ri­cal in­ter­net in Switzerland. This is of­ten cited as the fastest ded­i­cated (non-shared) res­i­den­tial con­nec­tion in the world. However, did you ever won­der why Switzerland has such fast in­ter­net at a rea­son­able price while the United States and other coun­tries like Switzerland’s neigh­bor Germany are falling be­hind?

What is the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence be­tween the coun­tries that leads to such a stark dif­fer­ence in in­ter­net speeds and prices?

Free mar­kets, reg­u­la­tion, tech­nol­ogy, or all three?

Let’s take a closer look at the sit­u­a­tion in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.

Note

This ar­ti­cle is writ­ten by me and spell checked with AI. Many of the im­ages are gen­er­ated by AI. They are mostly to ex­plain cer­tain points and break up the wall of text.

This Article is also avail­able as a video (My first):

As men­tioned, in Switzerland, you can get 25 Gigabit per sec­ond fiber in­ter­net to your home, sym­met­ric and ded­i­cated. If you don’t need such ex­treme speed, you can get 1 or 10 Gigabit from mul­ti­ple com­pet­ing providers for very lit­tle money. All over a con­nec­tion that is­n’t shared with your neigh­bors. In fact, some­one could of­fer 100 Gigabit or more to­day; there is noth­ing pre­vent­ing this other than the cost of end­point equip­ment.

In the United States, if you’re lucky enough to have fiber, you might get 1 Gigabit. But of­ten it’s shared with your neigh­bors. And you usu­ally have ex­actly one choice of provider. Maybe two, if you count the ca­ble com­pany that of­fers slower speeds for the same price.

In Germany, you are in a some­what sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion to the United States. Fiber ser­vice is lim­ited to one provider and is of­ten shared with your neigh­bors.

The United States prides it­self on free mar­kets. On com­pe­ti­tion. On let­ting busi­nesses fight it out. A dereg­u­lated mar­ket with no brakes.

Germany, on the other hand, is fa­mous for over-reg­u­la­tion, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for busi­nesses to op­er­ate, yet it is in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion to the United States.

Switzerland has a highly reg­u­lated tele­com sec­tor with strong over­sight and gov­ern­ment-backed in­fra­struc­ture pro­jects, but reg­u­la­tions in Switzerland dif­fer from those in Germany.

So why is the coun­try that wor­ships free mar­kets pro­duc­ing stag­na­tion, mo­nop­o­lies, and in­fe­rior in­ter­net, while the coun­try with heavy reg­u­la­tion is pro­duc­ing hy­per-com­pe­ti­tion, world-lead­ing speeds, and con­sumer choice?

And at the same time, the coun­try with the most reg­u­la­tion is suf­fer­ing the same prob­lems as the coun­try with the least.

The an­swer re­veals a fun­da­men­tal truth about cap­i­tal­ism and reg­u­la­tion that most peo­ple get wrong.

To un­der­stand the fail­ure, you have to un­der­stand what econ­o­mists call a “natural mo­nop­oly.”

A nat­ural mo­nop­oly is an in­dus­try where the cost of build­ing the in­fra­struc­ture is so high, and the cost of serv­ing an ad­di­tional cus­tomer is so low, that com­pe­ti­tion ac­tu­ally de­stroys value.

Think about wa­ter pipes. It would be in­sane to have three dif­fer­ent wa­ter com­pa­nies each dig­ging up your street to lay their own pipes. You’d have three times the con­struc­tion, three times the dis­rup­tion, three times the cost. And at the end of it, you’d still only use one of them.

The ra­tio­nal so­lu­tion is to build the in­fra­struc­ture once, as a shared, neu­tral as­set, and let dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies com­pete to pro­vide the ser­vice over that in­fra­struc­ture.

That’s how wa­ter works. That’s how elec­tric­ity works in most places. And in Switzerland, that’s how fiber op­tic in­ter­net works.

But in the United States and Germany, they did the op­po­site.

In Germany, the “free mar­ket” ap­proach meant let­ting any com­pany dig up the street to lay their own fiber. The re­sult is called “overbuild.” Multiple net­works run­ning in par­al­lel trenches, of­ten just me­ters apart.

Billions of eu­ros spent on re­dun­dant con­crete and as­phalt. Money that could have been spent on faster equip­ment, lower prices, or con­nect­ing rural ar­eas, in­stead wasted on dig­ging the same hole twice, lit­er­ally.1

But is­n’t Germany heav­ily reg­u­lated? Yes, but the reg­u­la­tions fo­cus heav­ily on in­fra­struc­ture com­pe­ti­tion rather than duct shar­ing en­force­ment.

Germany cham­pi­ons in­fra­struc­ture com­pe­ti­tion, mean­ing it prefers mul­ti­ple com­pa­nies lay­ing their own ca­bles rather than shar­ing a sin­gle net­work. At the same time, the reg­u­la­tory sys­tem wastes enor­mous amounts of time on wait­ing for dig­ging per­mits and on court­room bat­tles just to ob­tain ba­sic in­for­ma­tion about ex­ist­ing ducts.

Germany also has a large in­cum­bent, Deutsche Telekom, which uses ex­ist­ing reg­u­la­tions to its com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage against smaller ISPs. While Germany does have laws re­quir­ing Deutsche Telekom to share its ducts with com­peti­tors, in prac­tice smaller ISPs face un­rea­son­able hur­dles such as high fees, pro­ce­dural de­lays, and le­gal dou­ble bur­dens that un­der­mine ef­fec­tive ac­cess.

Sharing ducts is not as bad as dig­ging two trenches but it is still a waste of re­sources.

The United States took a dif­fer­ent path, but the re­sult is equally bad. Instead of over­build, they got ter­ri­to­r­ial mo­nop­o­lies, in some places paid for by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment.

In most American cities, you don’t have a choice of fiber providers. You have what­ever in­cum­bent hap­pens to serve your neigh­bor­hood. Comcast has one area. Spectrum has an­other. AT&T has a third.

This is mar­keted as com­pe­ti­tion. But it’s not. It’s a car­tel. Each com­pany gets its own pro­tected ter­ri­tory, and con­sumers get no choice. If you don’t like your provider, your only al­ter­na­tive is of­ten DSL from the 1990s or a cel­lu­lar hotspot.

This is what hap­pens when you let nat­ural mo­nop­o­lies op­er­ate with­out over­sight. They don’t com­pete on price or qual­ity. They ex­tract rent.

And be­cause these net­works are built on the cheap us­ing P2MP, or shared ar­chi­tec­ture, your “gigabit” con­nec­tion is shared with your en­tire neigh­bor­hood. At 8 PM, when every­one streams Netflix, that gi­ga­bit be­comes 200 megabits. Or 100. Or less.

The provider still charges you for “gigabit.” They just don’t tell you that you’re shar­ing it with 31 other house­holds.

And it gets worse. In the United States, even if a com­peti­tor wanted to chal­lenge the in­cum­bent, they of­ten can’t. Because the Point of Presence, the cen­tral hub where all the fiber lines from homes con­verge, is pri­vate. It be­longs to Comcast or AT&T. Your fiber ter­mi­nates in their build­ing. A com­peti­tor can’t just in­stall equip­ment there. They would have to build their own net­work from scratch, dig­ging up the same streets, to reach you.

Now look at Switzerland. Here, the phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, the fiber in the ground, is treated as a neu­tral, shared as­set. It’s built once, of­ten by a pub­lic or semi-pub­lic en­tity.

Every home gets a ded­i­cated 4-strand fiber line. Point-to-Point. Not shared. Not split 32 ways.

That ded­i­cated fiber ter­mi­nates in a neu­tral, open hub. And any in­ter­net ser­vice provider can con­nect to that hub.

Init7, Swisscom, Salt, or a tiny lo­cal ISP, they all have equal ac­cess to the phys­i­cal line that goes into your home.2

This means you, the con­sumer, have gen­uine choice. When you sign up with a provider, you sim­ply give them your OTO (Optical Termination Outlet) num­ber, the unique iden­ti­fier printed on the fiber op­tic plate in your home. It tells the provider ex­actly which fiber con­nec­tion is yours. That’s it. No tech­ni­cian needs to visit. No one needs to dig up your street. You just call, give them the num­ber, and within days (not al­ways the case…), your new ser­vice is ac­tive.

And be­cause your home has four sep­a­rate fiber strands, you’re not locked into a sin­gle provider. You can have Init7 on one strand, Swisscom on an­other, and a lo­cal util­ity on a third. You can switch providers with a phone call. You can try a new provider with­out can­cel­ing your old one first. The com­pe­ti­tion hap­pens on price, speed, and cus­tomer ser­vice but not on who hap­pens to own the ca­ble in front of your house.

In Switzerland, you can get 25 Gigabit per sec­ond fiber to your home. Today. Symmetric. Dedicated. Not shared with your neigh­bors.

In Switzerland, you have a choice of a dozen or more providers in most cities. Prices are com­pet­i­tive. Customer ser­vice mat­ters be­cause you can leave at any time.

In the United States, the ma­jor­ity of house­holds have only one choice for high-speed in­ter­net. Speeds are lower. Prices are higher. And the tech­nol­ogy is of­ten a decade be­hind.

The “free mar­ket” promised in­no­va­tion. It de­liv­ered rent-seek­ing. The in­cum­bents have no in­cen­tive to up­grade be­cause you have nowhere else to go.

American broad­band prices have risen faster than in­fla­tion for decades. Speeds have in­creased only when a com­peti­tor, usu­ally a mu­nic­i­pal util­ity, forces the in­cum­bent to re­spond.

Without com­pe­ti­tion, there is no in­no­va­tion. There is only profit ex­trac­tion.

Switzerland did­n’t ar­rive at this model by ac­ci­dent nor did it hap­pen be­cause tele­com com­pa­nies were feel­ing gen­er­ous. It hap­pened be­cause reg­u­la­tors forced it to hap­pen.

Back in 2008, when the in­dus­try sat down at the Round Table or­ga­nized by the Federal Communications Commission, it was Swisscom, the in­cum­bent it­self, that pushed for the four-fiber Point-to-Point model. The com­pany ar­gued that a sin­gle fiber would cre­ate a mo­nop­oly and that reg­u­la­tion would be nec­es­sary.3

So the stan­dard was set. Four fibers per home. Point-to-Point. Open ac­cess for com­peti­tors on Layer 1 - the phys­i­cal fiber it­self.4

Then, in 2020, Swisscom changed course. The com­pany an­nounced a new net­work ex­pan­sion strat­egy, this time us­ing P2MP, the shared model with split­ters. On pa­per, they ar­gued it was cheaper and faster to de­ploy.

GEPON P2MP Splitter

But the ef­fect was clear. Under the P2MP de­sign, com­peti­tors would no longer have di­rect ac­cess to the phys­i­cal fiber. Instead of plug­ging into their own ded­i­cated fiber strand, they would have to rent ac­cess from Swisscom at a higher net­work layer - ef­fec­tively be­com­ing re­sellers of Swisscom’s in­fra­struc­ture. The open, com­pet­i­tive ma­trix that had been care­fully built over years would dis­ap­pear.

The small ISP Init7 filed a com­plaint with Switzerland’s com­pe­ti­tion au­thor­ity, COMCO, which later opened an in­ves­ti­ga­tion. In December 2020, they is­sued a pre­cau­tion­ary mea­sure: Swisscom could not con­tinue its P2MP roll­out un­less it guar­an­teed the same Layer 1 ac­cess that the orig­i­nal stan­dard pro­vided.5

Swisscom fought this all the way to the Federal Court. They lost. In 2021, the Federal Administrative Court con­firmed COMCO’s mea­sures, stat­ing that Swisscom had failed to demon­strate “sufficient tech­no­log­i­cal or eco­nomic grounds” to de­vi­ate from the es­tab­lished fiber stan­dard.5 In April 2024, COMCO fi­nal­ized its rul­ing, fin­ing Swisscom 18 mil­lion francs for vi­o­lat­ing an­titrust law.6

Note

Swisscom is 51% owned by the Swiss Confederation. So, in sim­ple terms, 51% state-owned and 49% pri­vately/​in­sti­tu­tion­ally owned. Whether this makes the fine “symbolic” is a mat­ter of opin­ion.

The re­sult? Swisscom was forced to re­turn to the four-fiber, Point-to-Point ar­chi­tec­ture it had orig­i­nally cham­pi­oned.3 Competitors re­tained their di­rect, phys­i­cal ac­cess to the fiber net­work. The walled gar­den was pre­vented.

Whether in­tended or not, the ef­fect of Swisscom’s P2MP shift was clear: com­peti­tors would have been locked out of the phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture.

Swisscom is a bit of a walk­ing con­tra­dic­tion. Being ma­jor­ity state-owned, it’s sup­posed to be a pub­lic ser­vice. But it’s also a pri­vate com­pany, and max­i­miz­ing profit ben­e­fits the state cof­fers. But that is some­thing for an­other blog post.

This is the para­dox that con­fuses so many peo­ple.

The American and German ap­proach of let­ting in­cum­bents build mo­nop­o­lies, al­low­ing waste­ful over­build, and re­fus­ing to reg­u­late nat­ural mo­nop­o­lies is of­ten called a ‘free mar­ket.’

But it’s not free. And it’s not a mar­ket.

True cap­i­tal­ism re­quires com­pe­ti­tion. But in­fra­struc­ture is a nat­ural mo­nop­oly. If you treat it like a reg­u­lar con­sumer prod­uct, you don’t get com­pe­ti­tion. You get waste, or you get a mo­nop­oly.

The Swiss model un­der­stands this. They built the in­fra­struc­ture once, as a shared, neu­tral as­set, and then let the mar­ket com­pete on the ser­vices that run over it.

That’s not anti-cap­i­tal­ist. It’s ac­tu­ally bet­ter cap­i­tal­ism. It di­rects com­pe­ti­tion to where it adds value, not to where it de­stroys it.

The free mar­ket does­n’t mean let­ting pow­er­ful in­cum­bents do what­ever they want. It means cre­at­ing the con­di­tions where gen­uine com­pe­ti­tion can thrive.

So what can other coun­tries learn from Switzerland? Here are the key pol­icy changes that would help:

Mandate open ac­cess to phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture - re­quire in­cum­bents to share fiber ducts and dark fiber with com­peti­tors at cost-based prices. This is not “socialism” - it is how elec­tric­ity and wa­ter work.

Mandate open ac­cess to phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture - re­quire in­cum­bents to share fiber ducts and dark fiber with com­peti­tors at cost-based prices. This is not “socialism” - it is how elec­tric­ity and wa­ter work.

Enforce Point-to-Point ar­chi­tec­ture - re­quire that every home gets ded­i­cated fiber strands, not shared split­ters. This en­sures com­peti­tors can ac­cess the phys­i­cal layer, not just re­sell band­width.

Enforce Point-to-Point ar­chi­tec­ture - re­quire that every home gets ded­i­cated fiber strands, not shared split­ters. This en­sures com­peti­tors can ac­cess the phys­i­cal layer, not just re­sell band­width.

Create a neu­tral fiber stan­dard - es­tab­lish na­tional stan­dards that re­quire multi-fiber de­ploy­ment to every home, as Switzerland did in 2008.

Create a neu­tral fiber stan­dard - es­tab­lish na­tional stan­dards that re­quire multi-fiber de­ploy­ment to every home, as Switzerland did in 2008.

Empower com­pe­ti­tion au­thor­i­ties - give reg­u­la­tors like COMCO real teeth to en­force these rules. Fines must be large enough to mat­ter.

Empower com­pe­ti­tion au­thor­i­ties - give reg­u­la­tors like COMCO real teeth to en­force these rules. Fines must be large enough to mat­ter.

Support mu­nic­i­pal fiber - al­low cities and towns to build their own fiber net­works when in­cum­bents fail to serve res­i­dents ad­e­quately.

Support mu­nic­i­pal fiber - al­low cities and towns to build their own fiber net­works when in­cum­bents fail to serve res­i­dents ad­e­quately.

If you care about faster in­ter­net and lower prices, push your rep­re­sen­ta­tives to sup­port these poli­cies. The tech­nol­ogy ex­ists. The money ex­ists. What is miss­ing is the po­lit­i­cal will to de­mand real com­pe­ti­tion.

Bundesnetzagentur: Bun­desnet­za­gen­tur pub­lish­es fi­nal re­port on the mon­i­tor­ing of du­pli­cate fi­bre in­fra­struc­ture pro­jects (July 2025) - https://​www.bun­desnet­za­gen­tur.de/​Shared­Docs/​Pressemit­teilun­gen/​EN/​2025/​20250730_­Dop­pelaus­bau.html ↩︎

Bundesnetzagentur: Bun­desnet­za­gen­tur pub­lish­es fi­nal re­port on the mon­i­tor­ing of du­pli­cate fi­bre in­fra­struc­ture pro­jects (July 2025) - https://​www.bun­desnet­za­gen­tur.de/​Shared­Docs/​Pressemit­teilun­gen/​EN/​2025/​20250730_­Dop­pelaus­bau.html ↩︎

Init7: Fiber7 PoPs - Business Infrastructure - https://​www.init7.net/​de/​busi­ness-in­fra­struk­tur/​fiber7-pops/ ↩︎

Init7: Fiber7 PoPs - Business Infrastructure - https://​www.init7.net/​de/​busi­ness-in­fra­struk­tur/​fiber7-pops/ ↩︎

Computerworld.ch: Swisscom krebst zu­rueck (February 2023) - https://​www.com­put­er­world.ch/​the­men/​tech­nolo­gie-und-in­no­va­tion/​swiss­com-krebst-zu­rueck ↩︎ ↩︎

Computerworld.ch: Swisscom krebst zu­rueck (February 2023) - https://​www.com­put­er­world.ch/​the­men/​tech­nolo­gie-und-in­no­va­tion/​swiss­com-krebst-zu­rueck ↩︎ ↩︎

Swissinfo.ch: Fibre-optic stan­dards sim­plify net­work­ing (January 2013) - https://​www.swiss­info.ch/​eng/​busi­ness/​fi­bre-op­tic-stan­dards-sim­plify-net­work­ing/​31974894 ↩︎

Swissinfo.ch: Fibre-optic stan­dards sim­plify net­work­ing (January 2013) - https://​www.swiss­info.ch/​eng/​busi­ness/​fi­bre-op­tic-stan­dards-sim­plify-net­work­ing/​31974894 ↩︎

Federal Administrative Court (BVGer) me­dia re­lease: Swisscom must com­ply with fi­bre-op­tic stan­dards (December 2021) - https://​www.bvger.ch/​en/​news­room/​me­dia-re­leases/​swiss­com-must-com­ply-with-fi­bre-op­tic-stan­dards-1063 ↩︎ ↩︎

Federal Administrative Court (BVGer) me­dia re­lease: Swisscom must com­ply with fi­bre-op­tic stan­dards (December 2021) - https://​www.bvger.ch/​en/​news­room/​me­dia-re­leases/​swiss­com-must-com­ply-with-fi­bre-op­tic-stan­dards-1063 ↩︎ ↩︎

COMCO (Swiss Competition Commission): Swisscom fine for vi­o­lat­ing fi­bre-op­tic stan­dards (April 2024) - https://​www.swiss­info.ch/​eng/​sci­ence/​comco-gives-swiss­com-2025-dead­line-in-fi­bre-op­tic-dis­pute/​76393735 ↩︎

COMCO (Swiss Competition Commission): Swisscom fine for vi­o­lat­ing fi­bre-op­tic stan­dards (April 2024) - https://​www.swiss­info.ch/​eng/​sci­ence/​comco-gives-swiss­com-2025-dead­line-in-fi­bre-op­tic-dis­pute/​76393735 ↩︎

Back in March, Rivian’s Chief Software Officer, Wassym Bensaid, was in­ter­viewed by the ex­cel­lent Nilay Patel for Decoder. If you’re not a Decoder lis­tener, you should be. If you’re not a sub­scriber of The Verge, you should be. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

In this in­ter­view — which I greatly en­joyed! — Nilay grills Wassym on all man­ner of is­sues. The whole time, though, I was wait­ing for one topic: CarPlay.

CarPlay is a way to in­ter­act with your phone via your car’s in­fo­tain­ment. Our last three cars, the el­dest of which was from the 2017 model year, have all had CarPlay. They make the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing in the car way way bet­ter. Any of the apps I re­ally care about, and would want to in­ter­act with while on the road, have a be­spoke CarPlay in­ter­face.

I lit­er­ally will not buy a car that does not sup­port CarPlay.

Most of the way through the episode, Nilay asked Wassym about CarPlay. The ques­tion was long, but the gist is this:

I hear from our read­ers every time I talk to a car ex­ec­u­tive that, “The rea­son I want CarPlay is be­cause there’s 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever go­ing to sup­port them in the built-in in­fo­tain­ment.” This is when you would say, “Okay, pro­ject your phone to the cen­ter stack. The car’s dri­ving it­self. Have at it. Phone pro­jec­tion all day.” Do you think the tide is turn­ing, or are you still ab­solutely com­mit­ted to not hav­ing CarPlay in Rivian ve­hi­cles?

I hear from our read­ers every time I talk to a car ex­ec­u­tive that, “The rea­son I want CarPlay is be­cause there’s 5,000 apps on my phone and no car OEM is ever go­ing to sup­port them in the built-in in­fo­tain­ment.”

This is when you would say, “Okay, pro­ject your phone to the cen­ter stack. The car’s dri­ving it­self. Have at it. Phone pro­jec­tion all day.” Do you think the tide is turn­ing, or are you still ab­solutely com­mit­ted to not hav­ing CarPlay in Rivian ve­hi­cles?

You can read Wassym’s full an­swer at the episode link, but here’s the part that stuck out to me:

The chal­lenge with screen mir­ror­ing so­lu­tions is that they take over every sin­gle pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see our­selves in­ter­act­ing with our users.

The chal­lenge with screen mir­ror­ing so­lu­tions is that they take over every sin­gle pixel in the car, and that’s not the way we see our­selves in­ter­act­ing with our users.

Let me help you, Wassym:

There ex­ists a fla­vor of CarPlay — CarPlay Ultra — that does take over every screen of the car. Though even CarPlay Ultra has af­for­dances for the man­u­fac­tur­er’s user in­ter­face to poke through. But no­body is ask­ing for CarPlay Ultra. We’re ask­ing for no-ad­jec­tive CarPlay.

And CarPlay does not have to take up the en­tire screen.

Here, for ex­am­ple, is a pho­to­graph of my phone con­nected to my wife’s Volvo XC90:

See those bits above and be­low the CarPlay screen? That’s Volvo UI. CarPlay lit­er­ally does not know that por­tion of the screen ex­ists.

So, Wassym, try again.

Let’s say — for dis­cus­sion — that CarPlay did take up the en­tire screen. No mat­ter what. Let’s just live in Wassym’s fan­tasy world for a lit­tle bit.

I still have news for you: CarPlay is op­tional. CarPlay is ad­di­tive.

Drivers don’t have to use CarPlay!!

If Rivian’s na­tive UI is so great, then their cus­tomers… won’t use CarPlay. It’s that sim­ple.

Nobody is ask­ing for CarPlay to be manda­tory. We just want to have it as an op­tion.

If Rivian’s in­fo­tain­ment/​soft­ware is that great, that’s swell! Then Rivian dri­vers won’t use CarPlay.

Well, un­less they wish to use one of the thou­sands of apps that is op­ti­mized for CarPlay, but does not have a na­tive ver­sion that can be in­stalled di­rectly to their Rivian.

Like, I dunno, Overcast, for ex­am­ple.

“But Casey, you see, the real prob­lem is that you can use CarPlay for nav­i­ga­tion. And fancy cars like Rivians have some of the best au­to­mated dri­ving tech­nol­ogy on the mar­ket. For the dri­ver to have the best pos­si­ble ex­pe­ri­ence, the car needs to know the route the dri­ver is dri­ving.”

A fair re­tort! Conveniently, Apple is ad­dress­ing ex­actly this in iOS 27.

Ultimately, the only thing I can con­trol is my­self, and I will not buy a car that does not of­fer CarPlay. I en­joy Rivian so much — both from afar and as some­one who has dri­ven both a R1T and R1S — that I re­ally thought about get­ting on the wait­ing list for a R2. And I don’t even want a SUV!

But I won’t.

Because it does­n’t sup­port CarPlay. CarPlay sup­port is table stakes for me.

Stop be­ing stub­born, Rivian. Stop be­ing so in­tran­si­gent and dog­matic. CarPlay is ad­di­tive, and sup­port­ing CarPlay opens you up to an ad­di­tional co­hort of cus­tomers. Get off your high horse and ship it.

When you do, I’ll be there, wait­ing. I can’t wait to get in line for a R3X. 🤤

Scott’s fore­word: Cynthia Dwork is Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, and a pi­o­neer in the fields of dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy and al­go­rith­mic fair­ness. On my re­cent trav­els to the SigmaWest sci­ence camp and then STOC, there was much talk about a re­cent Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion ac­tion that would ban not only dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy, but es­sen­tially all mod­ern tech­niques for pre­serv­ing pri­vacy in large datasets, for ex­am­ple in the 2030 US Census. I re­al­ize that many of us have “outrage fa­tigue,” but this par­tic­u­lar out­rage hits ex­tremely close to home for the CS the­ory com­mu­nity. So when Cynthia ap­proached me at STOC to pro­pose a guest post on the is­sue, of course I said yes. The post that she sent me, be­low, is cosigned by many other lead­ers in the field.

On June 4, 2026, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce is­sued a di­rec­tive (DAO 216 – 26) rel­e­gat­ing con­fi­den­tial­ity pro­tec­tion in all Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and U.S. Census Bureau pub­li­ca­tions to tech­niques dat­ing back to the early 1970s, turn­ing its back on over half a cen­tury of progress and pro­tec­tions for data sub­jects. Advances in con­fi­den­tial­ity pro­vi­sion had en­abled the Census Bureau to share in­creas­ing quan­ti­ties of data at more gran­u­lar de­tail. The or­der will re­sult in less use­ful (or fewer avail­able) sta­tis­tics, weaker pro­tec­tion, or both. We write to il­lus­trate the dan­ger posed by the or­der and to mo­bi­lize the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity to speak out against it.

The act­ing force be­hind this or­der is po­lit­i­cal in­ter­est, not sci­en­tific merit. DAO 216 – 26 by­passed legally re­quired ad­min­is­tra­tive pro­ce­dures. It ful­fills a promise made by the ar­chi­tects of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and re­flects both the rhetoric and mis­un­der­stand­ings of rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), an or­ga­ni­za­tion founded by OMB Director Russell Vought. CRA’s ex­plainer on the use of dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy in the 2020 Census is up-front about the stakes: “Even if the cit­i­zen­ship ques­tion is added to the Census, it will be im­pos­si­ble to as­cer­tain the sta­tus of in­di­vid­u­als so long as dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy is used.” But mask­ing this sort of per­sonal char­ac­ter­is­tics data is legally re­quired by the Census Act (13 U.S. Code Section 9), which makes it a crime to “make any pub­li­ca­tion whereby the data fur­nished by any par­tic­u­lar [individual] can be iden­ti­fied.” Confidentiality is also widely un­der­stood as crit­i­cal to en­sur­ing that peo­ple re­spond to the cen­sus.

DAO-216 – 26 bans dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy and other mod­ern (and not so mod­ern) tech­niques. It re­stricts dis­clo­sure avoid­ance tech­niques to “coarsening,” which it de­scribes as “reducing the level of de­tail or speci­ficity of pub­lished sta­tis­tics, such as through round­ing, ag­gre­gat­ing (grouping), and/​or the use of ranges.” “Suppression” (“expressly redact­ing cer­tain val­ues”) may also be used, but only as a “last re­sort.” DAO-216 – 26 for­bids “noise in­fu­sion”, de­scribed as “methods that in­volve mod­i­fy­ing a dataset by adding ran­dom val­ues, or noise.”

Noise in­fu­sion was in­vented pre­cisely to ad­dress the in­creas­ing de­mand for gran­u­lar data in the face of con­fi­den­tial­ity laws that for­bid pub­lish­ing rei­den­ti­fi­able data. Coarsening and sup­pres­sion were sat­is­fac­tory for most na­tional, ag­gre­gate sta­tis­ti­cal se­ries, like the Principal Federal Economic Indicators. However, these tech­niques failed when ap­plied to busi­ness and de­mo­graphic data at fine ge­o­graphic or in­dus­trial de­tail. By for­bid­ding noise in­fu­sion, the di­rec­tive bans the dis­clo­sure avoid­ance tech­niques at the core of dozens of data re­leases over the last three decades. It bans in­put noise in­fu­sion, used in the Quarterly Workforce Indicators since 2002 and, un­til now, planned for the Bureau of Economic Analysis sta­tis­tics [1].  It bans swap­ping, used for de­cen­nial cen­sus pub­li­ca­tions since 1990. It also bans dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy,  the best cur­rently known ap­proach for ob­tain­ing the most data util­ity for any given level of pri­vacy. Differential pri­vacy was used for shar­ing data on com­mut­ing pat­terns (OnTheMap) since 2008 and for pub­li­ca­tions based on the 2020 Census. Until the re­cent di­rec­tive, dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy was planned for the 2030 Census too.  Many other prod­ucts and pro­ce­dures are im­pli­cated as well.

1.      Illustrations

DAO-216 – 26 is in­com­pat­i­ble with the Census Bureau’s dual man­date to pro­vide con­fi­den­tial­ity and fit­ness for use. To il­lus­trate this, we re­call and ex­pand on an ex­am­ple due to Nathan Goldschlag, in­spired by the County Business Patterns (CBP) data, which pro­vides sta­tis­tics on busi­ness ac­tiv­ity bro­ken down by in­dus­try and ge­og­ra­phy. Goldschlag de­scribes three sce­nar­ios, il­lus­trat­ing the ten­sion be­tween pro­vid­ing use­ful in­for­ma­tion and main­tain­ing con­fi­den­tial­ity of re­sponses as re­quired by the Census Act.

·       “There is only one brew­ery in a small county. If the CBP pub­lished the ex­act count of brew­ery em­ploy­ees in that county, it would be dis­clos­ing the in­for­ma­tion of one busi­ness (how many work­ers it em­ploys), a clear vi­o­la­tion of the law.2

·        “There are two brew­eries in a small county, and the CBP again pub­lishes the ex­act count of brew­ery em­ploy­ees. If I own one of those brew­eries, I could learn how many em­ploy­ees my com­peti­tor has, again vi­o­lat­ing the law.

·        “There are more than two brew­eries in a small county, but the CBP chooses not to pub­lish the to­tal num­ber of brew­ery em­ploy­ees out of con­cern that it might com­pro­mise the pri­vacy of the busi­nesses. If I’m a prospec­tive brew­ery owner, I may deem the pro­ject too risky to pur­sue with­out in­for­ma­tion about the mar­ket I’m en­ter­ing.”

·       “There is only one brew­ery in a small county. If the CBP pub­lished the ex­act count of brew­ery em­ploy­ees in that county, it would be dis­clos­ing the in­for­ma­tion of one busi­ness (how many work­ers it em­ploys), a clear vi­o­la­tion of the law.2

·        “There are two brew­eries in a small county, and the CBP again pub­lishes the ex­act count of brew­ery em­ploy­ees. If I own one of those brew­eries, I could learn how many em­ploy­ees my com­peti­tor has, again vi­o­lat­ing the law.

·        “There are more than two brew­eries in a small county, but the CBP chooses not to pub­lish the to­tal num­ber of brew­ery em­ploy­ees out of con­cern that it might com­pro­mise the pri­vacy of the busi­nesses. If I’m a prospec­tive brew­ery owner, I may deem the pro­ject too risky to pur­sue with­out in­for­ma­tion about the mar­ket I’m en­ter­ing.”

In Goldschlag’s ex­am­ple, coars­en­ing makes the pub­lished sta­tis­tics use­less.  We now add a fourth sce­nario, show­ing that it also fails to main­tain con­fi­den­tial­ity.  To keep things sim­ple, as­sume none of us owns any of the busi­nesses in the new ex­am­ple. The County has two towns with one brew­ery each, North Bend and South Bend. Furthermore, North Bend has a mo­bile bot­tling com­pany and South Bend has a sta­tion­ary bot­tling com­pany. That’s a to­tal of four beer-re­lated busi­ness en­ti­ties in the County.  Two of these busi­nesses, the North-Bend brew­ery and the South Bend bot­tling com­pany, are pub­licly-owned.

The CBP pub­lishes five sta­tis­tics:

(A) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in beer-re­lated busi­nesses in North Bend: Because there is only one brew­ing com­pany in North Bend and only one bot­tling com­pany in North Bend, the cat­e­gory is coars­ened to “beer-related”.

(B) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in beer-re­lated busi­nesses in South Bend: Because there is only one brew­ing com­pany in South Bend and only one bot­tling com­pany in South Bend, the cat­e­gory is coars­ened to “beer-related”.

(C) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in brew­ing only:  Because there is only one brew­ing com­pany in each of North Bend and South Bend, the sta­tis­tic is coars­ened to the to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in brew­ing only in the County.

(D) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in bot­tling only: Because there is only one bot­tling com­pany in each of North Bend and South Bend, the sta­tis­tic is coars­ened to the to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in bot­tling only in the County.

(E) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees at pub­licly owned com­pa­nies: Because there is only one pub­licly owned com­pany in each of North Bend and South Bend, the sta­tis­tic is coars­ened to the to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in pub­licly owned com­pa­nies in the County.

(A) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in beer-re­lated busi­nesses in North Bend: Because there is only one brew­ing com­pany in North Bend and only one bot­tling com­pany in North Bend, the cat­e­gory is coars­ened to “beer-related”.

(B) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in beer-re­lated busi­nesses in South Bend: Because there is only one brew­ing com­pany in South Bend and only one bot­tling com­pany in South Bend, the cat­e­gory is coars­ened to “beer-related”.

(C) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in brew­ing only:  Because there is only one brew­ing com­pany in each of North Bend and South Bend, the sta­tis­tic is coars­ened to the to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in brew­ing only in the County.

(D) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in bot­tling only: Because there is only one bot­tling com­pany in each of North Bend and South Bend, the sta­tis­tic is coars­ened to the to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in bot­tling only in the County.

(E) The to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees at pub­licly owned com­pa­nies: Because there is only one pub­licly owned com­pany in each of North Bend and South Bend, the sta­tis­tic is coars­ened to the to­tal num­ber of em­ploy­ees in pub­licly owned com­pa­nies in the County.

We now have 5 equa­tions in 4 un­knowns. Using only 4 of these (A, B, C, and E), we can solve for the ex­act num­ber of em­ploy­ees at each of the four com­pa­nies with high school al­ge­bra.

In the above (fictional but re­al­is­tic) sce­nario, the County Business Patterns were re­leased with good-faith coars­en­ings for the ge­o­graph­i­cal, busi­ness, and own­er­ship cat­e­gories.  Nonetheless, even with­out in­side knowl­edge of one of the com­pa­nies’ num­ber of em­ploy­ees, we can com­pletely re­con­struct all four num­bers.  What hap­pened?  The coars­en­ings in­ter­acted poorly.  Noise in­fu­sion per­turbs that set of equa­tions, pre­vent­ing ex­act re­con­struc­tion.

2.      Impediments to Implementation

The Commerce Department now claims the di­rec­tive’s re­turn to the out­dated “tradstat” tra­di­tional sta­tis­ti­cal tech­niques of the 70s is good for data con­sumers: “This up­date to our dis­clo­sure lim­i­ta­tion method pro­tects re­spon­dents and pro­vides the pub­lic with more es­sen­tial eco­nomic in­for­ma­tion.”  (Emphasis added.)  As we saw from Goldschlag’s ex­am­ple, coars­en­ing does just the op­po­site.

And it can’t be fixed. Coarsening by de­f­i­n­i­tion re­duces ac­cess to fine-grained in­for­ma­tion.  Our ex­am­ple of three poorly in­ter­act­ing coars­en­ings shows that this sac­ri­fice is for naught: with­out noise in­fu­sion, con­fi­den­tial­ity is de­stroyed by el­e­men­tary cal­cu­la­tions.  For pop­u­la­tion sur­veys, this is pre­cisely what for­mal noise in­fu­sion meth­ods, like dif­fer­en­tial pri­vacy, pro­tect against; this is the “fancy math” that Goldschlag men­tions in his post and that holds per­sonal char­ac­ter­is­tics, like cit­i­zen­ship sta­tus, in con­fi­dence.

3.      Confidentiality is Critical for Federal Statistics

The sci­en­tific com­mu­nity con­tin­ues to de­bate the best tech­niques for pro­tect­ing the con­fi­den­tial­ity of re­spon­dents’ data, but DAO-216 – 26 is not dri­ven by sci­ence. It is dri­ven by po­lit­i­cal in­ter­ests. Those is­su­ing this or­der are will­ing to risk the pub­lic’s trust in the process. We think that this is wrong-headed and dan­ger­ous.

Civil ser­vants will do their best to com­ply with this or­der while still fol­low­ing the laws that re­quire them to pro­tect the con­fi­den­tial­ity of re­spon­dents’ data. To bal­ance these com­pet­ing man­dates, they may seek to pro­duce less data or coarsen data so much that it is un­us­able. Or they might be pushed by po­lit­i­cal ac­tors to pub­lish data that can be eas­ily un­masked, like in the brew­ery ex­am­ples above. Regardless of their choices, they will be hard-pressed to guar­an­tee re­spon­dents’ con­fi­den­tial­ity, which will prompt many busi­nesses and in­di­vid­u­als to sim­ply not an­swer. This is dev­as­tat­ing for an agency that de­liv­ers democ­ra­cy’s data.

Conclusion

Rather than po­lit­i­cal ac­tors over­rul­ing the gov­ern­men­t’s own sta­tis­ti­cians, we need deep in­vest­ment in our na­tion’s sta­tis­ti­cal agen­cies, en­sur­ing that agen­cies have the staff and sup­port to im­prove their meth­ods us­ing the best avail­able tools. Regardless of how the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity feels about any spe­cific pri­vacy-en­hanc­ing tech­nique, we must col­lec­tively re­ject this anti-sci­en­tific ap­proach to gov­ern­ing fed­eral sta­tis­tics. Too much is at stake.

How to Take Action

Share this post with oth­ers in your pro­fes­sional net­work and com­mu­nity.

Contact your Congressional rep­re­sen­ta­tive and voice your con­cerns. Calling or writ­ing to your rep­re­sen­ta­tive is one of the most ef­fec­tive and eas­i­est things a con­stituent can do that should only take a cou­ple min­utes of your time.

Find your rep­re­sen­ta­tive con­tact in­for­ma­tion here.

State your con­cern. Here is a sam­ple script: “My name is [Name], and I am a con­stituent from [City] in your dis­trict [ZIP CODE]. I am call­ing be­cause I am con­cerned about the the U.S. Secretary of Commerce is­sued a di­rec­tive (DAO 216 – 26) that wants to rel­e­gate con­fi­den­tial­ity pro­tec­tion in all Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Census Bureau data prod­ucts and sta­tis­tics to out­dated and in­ef­fec­tive sta­tis­ti­cal tech­niques. If fol­lowed, this or­der will de­stroy the Commerce pub­lic data our na­tion re­lies on for im­por­tant de­ci­sions, such as where to build nec­es­sary ser­vices for our com­mu­ni­ty’s well-be­ing. I want the DAO to be re­scinded. I want proper ad­min­is­tra­tive pro­ce­dure to be fol­lowed. I want tech­ni­cal de­ci­sions such as the choice of method used to bal­ance util­ity and con­fi­den­tial­ity to be in­formed by pro­fes­sion­als in the fed­eral sta­tis­ti­cal agen­cies, not made uni­lat­er­ally by po­lit­i­cal op­er­a­tives.”

Optional is stat­ing what kind of con­stituent, such as a re­tired teacher or a work­ing pro­fes­sional.

Optional is stat­ing what kind of con­stituent, such as a re­tired teacher or a work­ing pro­fes­sional.

Volunteer to help pre­serve Census work­ing pa­pers and doc­u­men­ta­tion. Pages ex­plain­ing “noise in­fu­sion” and “differential pri­vacy” are al­ready go­ing of­fline. Archive rel­e­vant method­ol­ogy pages and tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. You can also do this via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (“Save Page Now”).

John Abowd Aloni CohenCynthia DworkJae June LeeJayshree SarathyAdam SmithSalil Vadhan

[1] BEA Working Paper WP2026 – 9, now purged by the Department of Commerce.  As of 6/22 Google re­turns:

Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) (.gov)https://​bea.gov › files › pa­pers › BEA-WP2026 – 9

This en­try was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2026 at 3:26 pm and is filed un­der Announcements, Nerd Interest. You can fol­low any re­sponses to this en­try through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a re­sponse, or track­back from your own site.

You can use rich HTML in com­ments! You can also use ba­sic TeX, by en­clos­ing it within $$ $$ for dis­played equa­tions or \( \) for in­line equa­tions.

After two decades of mostly-open com­ments, in July 2024 Shtetl-Optimized tran­si­tioned to the fol­low­ing pol­icy:

All com­ments are treated, by de­fault, as per­sonal mis­sives to me, Scott Aaronson–-with no ex­pec­ta­tion ei­ther that they’ll ap­pear on the blog or that I’ll re­ply to them.

At my leisure and dis­cre­tion, and in con­sul­ta­tion with the Shtetl-Optimized Committee of Guardians, I’ll put on the blog a cu­rated se­lec­tion of com­ments that I judge to be par­tic­u­larly in­ter­est­ing or to move the topic for­ward, and I’ll do my best to an­swer those. But it will be more like Letters to the Editor. Anyone who feels un­justly cen­sored is wel­come to the rest of the Internet.

While Valve will not be mak­ing and pro­vid­ing their own e-ink dis­play for the Steam Machine, they have opened it up so any­one can now do it. Valve orig­i­nally teased it with the first lot of re­view­ers that got their hands on it.

All of it is avail­able on their GitLab un­der the MIT li­cense, which goes over every­thing you need to make your own and stick it on the front of your fancy new Steam Machine.

Image Credit - Gamers Nexus

They’re now call­ing it the “Inkterface” and there’s a good few things you’ll need to make it in­clud­ing:

1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM. 1 x Adafruit eInk Breakout Friend. 1 x Adafruit 5.83″ Monochrome eInk Panel. 13 x M2.5 x 5mm Pan Head Machine Screws. 4 x 1/4″ x 1/4″ x 3/16″ Stepped Magnet SB443-OUT.

1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM.

1 x Adafruit eInk Breakout Friend.

1 x Adafruit 5.83″ Monochrome eInk Panel.

13 x M2.5 x 5mm Pan Head Machine Screws.

4 x 1/4″ x 1/4″ x 3/16″ Stepped Magnet SB443-OUT.

Valve even pro­vided a video on the GitLab show­ing it be­ing put to­gether, which we’re re-host­ing to make it eas­ily view­able for you:

Pretty cool to see.

Maybe we will see some other ven­dors ac­tu­ally do them pre-built for us. JSAUX teased they would be do­ing it back in November 2025, and check­ing back to­day they’ve said they still plan to do “Ink & Pixel ver­sions”. If the Steam Machine is pop­u­lar enough - no doubt we’ll have other ac­ces­sory brands do var­i­ous ver­sions of their own.

🌐 External Sources: git­lab.steamos.cloud, x.com/​jsaux­of­fi­cial, gamer­snexus.net Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

crustc - rustc 1.98.0-nightly (c712ea946 2026 – 06-16), con­verted to 46 mil­lion lines of C.

This is a func­tional Rust com­piler you can build with GCC & make.

# We need to pro­vide a path to LLVM(`libLLVM.so.22.1-rust-1.98.0-nightly`) # I *could* in­clude pre-built LLVM in the pro­ject, but I’d rather not em­bed ran­dom bi­na­ries in the pro­ject. make -j20 LLVM_LIB_DIR=~/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-2026 – 06-16-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib

It is just C code [1], which, when com­piled, gives you a func­tional Rust com­piler.

# It works - (library path to point to li­bLLVM.so.22.1-rust-1.98.0-nightly - rustc uses llvm) LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-2026 – 06-16-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib:./rustc_driver ./rustc/rustc –version rustc 1.98.0-nightly (c712ea946 2026 – 06-16)

That Rust com­piler can com­pile code - build core, al­loc, std - you name it!

What is this?

This is a demo/​teaser for my new Rust to C com­piler tool­chain. The full cilly tool­chain com­piles your own Rust to C for ar­bi­trary tar­gets. This repo just shows the com­piler com­pil­ing it­self, as I be­lieve this is the flashiest show­case I could do.

How was this done?

For the past 3 years, I have been work­ing on com­pil­ing Rust to C. I made a few pub­lic at­tempts, like rustc_­code­gen_­clr, and a lot of pri­vate ones.

This is, by my count, the 14th at­tempt: cilly. It is a Rust li­brary for gen­er­at­ing C code and a Rust com­piler back­end (read: plu­gin) that al­lows you to com­pile Rust to C.

The main in­no­va­tion be­hind cilly is that it adapts to C com­pil­ers.

It can gen­er­ate “witness” pro­grams, which check what a given com­piler and plat­form sup­port:

/* This com­piles if and only if our C com­piler sup­ports _Thread_local. */ _Thread_local int KEYWORD_TLS_SUPPORTED;

This means Cilly will gen­er­ate C code, which will make your spe­cific, weird “Shminky C com­piler for Blorbo OS” happy.

/* This will pass in some C com­pil­ers. */ as­sert(sizeof(float) == sizeof(dou­ble));

All type lay­outs, sizes, align­ments, char­ac­ter en­cod­ings (ASCII), and in­te­ger for­mats (two’s com­ple­ment) are queried for.

With fall­backs, where pos­si­ble.

I try my very best not to as­sume any­thing out­side of ANSI C[2] - in­clud­ing workarounds for things in “modern” C stan­dards, like strict alias­ing.

Sadly, this means the out­put of cilly is com­piler-spe­cific (i.e., you can’t take the cilly C gen­er­ated for Arm64 and run it on riscv32, but you can gen­er­ate cilly C specif­i­cally for riscv32).

This build of rustc (the gen­er­ated C) is “targeting” ARM64 Linux be­cause that is the ISA of my work­sta­tion.

Why was this done?

The pri­mary goal of this is sup­port for old/​ob­scure hard­ware with no LLVM/GCC sup­port. There are still some sys­tems out there that don’t sup­port Rust but sup­port C.

Whenever some pro­ject moves from Rust to C, or a Rust al­ter­na­tive of a C pro­ject is made, sup­port for those tar­gets is validly raised as a down­side of Rust [3].

The goal of this pro­ject is to re­move that prob­lem.

cilly wraps rustc and a C com­piler and trans­lates the Rust code to C on the fly. From the user per­spec­tive, this is as sim­ple as defin­ing what C com­piler to use for a given tar­get.

“triple”: [ “sdcc_z180-unknown-none” ], “tool_def”: { “kind”: “local”, “compile”: { “base”: { “executable”: “/usr/bin/sdcc”, “base_args”: [ “-mz180”, “–std-c89″, “-c” ], “input_arg_template”: [ “{input}” ], // JSON cut off for brevity. } } }

Network trans­parency.

cilly is net­work trans­par­ent, and can talk to C com­pil­ers over TCP (may be ex­tended to weird things like UART if need be).

This is a so­lu­tion to the boot­strap para­dox / plat­forms with­out C cross com­pil­ers.

You build a small C server on your Blorbo OS, run rustc on some nor­mal plat­form like Linux, and let cilly talk over the wire.

I have suc­cess­fully used this to com­pile small Rust pro­grams for x86 Plan9 VMs, while run­ning rustc on Arm64 linux.

term% echo `{cat /dev/sysname} os­ver­sion `{cat /dev/osversion} cputype $cputype gnot os­ver­sion 2000 cputype 386 term% /tmp/hello_plan9 Hello, world! term% nm /tmp/hello_plan9 | grep rust_be­gin_un­wind 1020 T _RNvCshfEkAwg4zv6_7___rustc17rust_begin_unwind

Generating make­files.

cilly can op­tion­ally em­bed mark­ers within its ob­ject files, and save its IR to a cache di­rec­tory. It can then read those mark­ers, split func­tions / glob­als by their de­f­i­n­i­tion lo­ca­tion, and gen­er­ate a di­rec­tory with make­files - to al­low you to build Rust with a C com­piler and make.

ABI com­pat­i­bil­ity

cilly gen­er­ated code is mostly ABI com­pat­i­ble with nor­mal rustc com­piled code. I say mostly, be­cause on some plat­forms(… like ar­m64) rustc choose an ABI not rep­re­sentable from C[4].

Reproduction

Prerequisites

This rust com­piler was built on:

un­ame -a Linux spark-2773 6.17.0 – 1021-nvidia #21-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Wed May 27 19:14:05 UTC 2026 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

This is the C com­piler I used:

read­elf -p .comment ./rustc/rustc String dump of sec­tion ‘.comment’: [ 1] GCC: (Ubuntu 13.3.0 – 6ubuntu2~24.04.1) 13.3.0 [ 2e] Linker: Ubuntu LLD 18.1.3

In or­der to build the demo, you will need to pro­vide it with the right LLVM libs. The eas­ies way to do so is to just use the LLVM rustc ships:

rustup in­stall nightly-2026 – 06-16

Build

With the right GCC(more mod­ern GCC ver­sions should work too, untested), right LLVM ver­sion, and GNU make in­stalled, run:

# We need to pro­vide a path to LLVM(`libLLVM.so.22.1-rust-1.98.0-nightly`) # I *could* in­clude pre-built LLVM in the pro­ject, but I’d rather not em­bed ran­dom bi­na­ries in the pro­ject. make -j20 LLVM_LIB_DIR=~/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-2026 – 06-16-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib # CFLAGS work(CAVEAT: some flags will slow com­pi­la­tion down) make -j20 CFLAGS=-g

And… voilà!

Compilation speed

I strongly rec­om­mend not en­abling op­ti­miza­tions: both be­cause the may break stuff(this is just a demo, and it’s… ee… rough around the edges[5]) AND be­cause op­ti­miza­tions take time at this scale.

Without opts, my ma­chine builds the pro­ject in a few min­utes:

make -j20 937.98s user 123.77s sys­tem 1352% cpu 1:18.48 to­tal

With opts, ex­pect to choke on some spe­cific larger rust files. You will blitz through most code, and then get stuck on those be­he­moths.

Testing the build

Run:

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-2026 – 06-16-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib:./rustc_driver ./rustc/rustc –version

You should see the rustc ver­sion printed.

For build­ing pro­grams, you will need to build std.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-2026 – 06-16-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib:./rustc_driver ./rustc/rustc main.rs er­ror[E0463]: can’t find crate for `std` | = note: the `aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu` tar­get may not be in­stalled = help: con­sider down­load­ing the tar­get with `rustup tar­get add aarch64-un­known-linux-gnu` = help: con­sider build­ing the stan­dard li­brary from source with `cargo build -Zbuild-std`

er­ror: abort­ing due to 1 pre­vi­ous er­ror

For more in­for­ma­tion about this er­ror, try `rustc –explain E0463`.

Read BUILDING_STD.md for that.

Known bugs

For some weird path-canon­i­cal­iza­tion-rea­sons, crustc can crash when run in the di­rec­tory it was built in(repo root, crustc). Works fine in other places.

…

I am con­fused too.

Can I try cilly out?

Nah, not yet. It is not ready for pub­lic con­sump­tion. I will re­lease it as soon as pos­si­ble - but

I got a job(which means I no longer write code on a lap­top with it’s G & C keys bro­ken, yay!)

I got uni(well I am on sum­mer break, but the­sis-s don’t tend to write them­selves).

I put my left hand in a blender. The blender won. (Still have all my fin­gers, just some stitches). I will not elab­o­rate fur­ther.

Notes

1 - well, C code + some C++ LLVM wrap­pers. Rust uses a bit of C++ to ex­pose some more LLVM knobs. They are shipped pre-com­piled be­cause they are LLVM-version-specific and a pain to build stand­alone.

2 - rarely, I have to make “reasonable as­sump­tions” which would be goal stop­pers. E.g. (void*)(uintptr_t)(ptr) roundtrips. I doc­u­ment those AND add as­serts for them (CHAR_BIT = 8) if pos­si­ble.

3 - the weight of “Rust does not sup­port Plan 9” as an ar­gu­ment against Rust de­pends on per­sonal pref­er­ences, and eval­u­at­ing that ar­gu­ment is left as an ex­er­cise to the reader.

4 - The is­sue is the struct re­turn pointer(sret). On most plat­forms, it is passed in the same reg as the first arg, so we can al­ways force to re­turn-by-sret(out pointer) by just hav­ing the first arg be the out pointer. Not on Arm64. There, sret pointer is passed in a dif­fer­ent reg­is­ter, mean­ing the na­tive C com­piler has to chose to do a re­turn-by-sret for us. Which it does not do for small structs(<16 bytes afaik). Annoying.

5 - I am chas­ing some op­ti­miza­tion re­lated bugs - part of the rea­son full cilly tool­chain is not out.

I.

My dad em­i­grated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 look­ing look­ing for a bet­ter life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of stand­ing out­side in the cold. My dad’s pre­ferred method of im­prov­ing his lot was im­prov­ing lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” re­cruited to help work­ing on the build­ings we owned.

That’s how I came to spend a sub­stan­tial part of my teenage years re­plac­ing fences, dig­ging trenches, and build­ing floor­ing and sheds. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all this build­ing, it’s that re­al­ity has a sur­pris­ing amount of de­tail.

This turns out to ex­plain why its so easy for peo­ple to end up in­tel­lec­tu­ally stuck. Even when they’re lit­er­ally the best in the world in their field.

Consider build­ing some base­ment stairs for a mo­ment. Stairs seem pretty sim­ple at first, and at a high level they are sim­ple, just two long, wide par­al­lel boards (2” x 12” x 16’), some boards for the stairs and an an­gle bracket on each side to hold up each stair. But as you ac­tu­ally start build­ing you’ll find there’s a sur­pris­ing amount of nu­ance.

The first thing you’ll no­tice is that there are ac­tu­ally quite a few sub­tasks. Even at a high level, you have to cut both ends of the 2x12s at the cor­rect an­gles; then screw in some u-brack­ets to the main floor to hold the stairs in place; then screw in the 2x12s into the u-brack­ets; then at­tach the an­gle brack­ets for the stairs; then screw in the stairs.

Next you’ll no­tice that each of those steps above de­com­poses into sev­eral steps, some of which have some tricky de­tails to them due to the prop­er­ties of the ma­te­ri­als and task and the lim­i­ta­tions of your­self and your tools.

The first prob­lem you’ll en­counter is that cut­ting your 2x12s to the right an­gle is a bit com­pli­cated be­cause there’s no ob­vi­ous way to trace the cor­rect an­gles. You can ei­ther get cre­ative (there is a way to trace it), or you can bust out your trig book and fig­ure out how to cal­cu­late the an­gle and po­si­tion of the cuts.

You’ll prob­a­bly also want to look up what are rea­son­able an­gles for stairs. What looks rea­son­able when you’re cut­ting and what feels safe can be dif­fer­ent. Also, you’re prob­a­bly go­ing to want to at­tach a guide for your cir­cu­lar saw when cut­ting the an­gle on the 2x12s be­cause the cut has to be pretty straight.

When you’re ready to you will quickly find that get­ting the stair boards at all the same an­gle is non-triv­ial. You’re go­ing to need some­thing that can give you an an­gle to the main board very con­sis­tently. Once you have that, and you’ve drawn your lines, you may be dis­mayed to dis­cover that your straight look­ing board is not that straight. Lumber warps af­ter it’s made be­cause it was cut when it was new and wet and now it’s dryer, so no lum­ber is per­fectly straight.

Once you’ve gone back to the lum­ber store and got­ten some straighter 2x12s and re­drawn your lines, you can start screw­ing in your brack­ets. Now you’ll learn that de­spite start­ing aligned with the lines you drew, af­ter screw­ing them in, your an­gle brack­ets are no longer quite straight be­cause the screws did­n’t go in quite straight and now they tightly se­cure the bracket at the wrong an­gle. You can fix that by drilling guide holes first. Also you’ll have to move them an inch or so be­cause it’s more or less im­pos­si­ble to get a screw to go in dif­fer­ently than it did the first time in the same hole.

Now you’re fi­nally ready to screw in the stair boards. If your screws are longer than 2”, you’ll need dif­fer­ent ones, oth­er­wise they will poke out the top of the board and stab you in the foot.

At every step and every level there’s an abun­dance of de­tail with ma­te­r­ial con­se­quences.

It’s tempt­ing to think ‘So what?’ and dis­miss these de­tails as in­ci­den­tal or spe­cific to stair car­pen­try. And they are spe­cific to stair car­pen­try; that’s what makes them de­tails. But the ex­is­tence of a sur­pris­ing num­ber of mean­ing­ful de­tails is not spe­cific to stairs. Surprising de­tail is a near uni­ver­sal prop­erty of get­ting up close and per­sonal with re­al­ity.

You can see this every­where if you look. For ex­am­ple, you’ve prob­a­bly had the ex­pe­ri­ence of do­ing some­thing for the first time, maybe grow­ing veg­eta­bles or us­ing a Haskell pack­age for the first time, and be­ing frus­trated by how many an­noy­ing snags there were. Then you got more prac­tice and then you told your­self ‘man, it was so sim­ple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trou­ble’. We run into a fun­da­men­tal prop­erty of the uni­verse and mis­take it for a per­sonal fail­ing.

If you’re a pro­gram­mer, you might think that the fid­dli­ness of pro­gram­ming is a spe­cial fea­ture of pro­gram­ming, but re­ally it’s that every­thing is fid­dly, but you only no­tice the fid­dli­ness when you’re new, and in pro­gram­ming you do new things more of­ten.

You might think the fid­dly de­taili­ness of things is lim­ited to hu­man cen­tric do­mains, and that physics it­self is sim­ple and el­e­gant. That’s true in some sense — the phys­i­cal laws them­selves tend to be quite sim­ple — but the man­i­fes­ta­tion of those laws is of­ten com­plex and coun­ter­in­tu­itive.

II. Boiling A Watched Pot

Consider the boil­ing of wa­ter. That’s straight­for­ward, wa­ter boils at 100 °C, right?

Well the stairs seemed sim­ple too, so let’s dou­ble check.

Put your­self in the shoes of some­one at the start of the 1800’s, with only a crude, un­marked mer­cury ther­mome­ter, try­ing to fig­ure the physics of tem­per­a­ture.

Go to your stove, put some wa­ter in a pot, start heat­ing some wa­ter, and pay at­ten­tion as it heats.

(I sug­gest ac­tu­ally do­ing this)

The first thing you’ll prob­a­bly no­tice is a lot of small bub­bles gath­er­ing on the sur­face of the pot. Is that boil­ing? The wa­ter’s not that hot yet; you can still even stick your fin­ger in. Then the bub­bles will ap­pear faster and start ris­ing, but they some­how seem ‘unboiling’. Then you’ll start to see lit­tle bub­ble storms in patches, and you start to hear a hiss­ing noise. Is that Boiling? Sort of? It does­n’t re­ally look like boil­ing. The bub­ble storms grow larger and start re­leas­ing big­ger bub­bles. Eventually the bub­bles get big and the sur­face of the wa­ter grows tur­bu­lent as the bub­bles be­gin to make it to the sur­face. Finally we seem to have reached real boil­ing. I guess this is the boil­ing point? That seems kind of weird, what were the things that hap­pened ear­lier if not boil­ing.

To make mat­ters worse, if you’d used a glass pot in­stead of a metal one, the wa­ter would boil at a higher tem­per­a­ture. If you cleaned the glass ves­sel with sul­fu­ric acid, to re­move any residue, you’d find that you can heat wa­ter sub­stan­tially more be­fore it boils and when it does boil it boils in lit­tle ex­plo­sions of boil­ing and the tem­per­a­ture fluc­tu­ates un­sta­bly.

Worse still, if you trap a drop of wa­ter be­tween two other liq­uids and heat it, you can raise the tem­per­a­ture to at least 300 °C with noth­ing hap­pen­ing. That kind of makes a mock­ery of the state­ment ‘water boils at 100 °C’.

It turns out that ‘boiling’ is a lot more com­pli­cated than you thought.

This sur­pris­ing amount of de­tail is is not lim­ited to “human” or “complicated” do­mains, it is a near uni­ver­sal prop­erty of every­thing from space travel to sewing, to your in­ter­nal ex­pe­ri­ence of your own mind.

III. Invisible vs. Transparent Detail And Getting Intellectually Stuck

Again, you might think ‘So what? I guess things are com­pli­cated but I can just no­tice the de­tails as I run into them; no need to think specif­i­cally about this’. And if you are do­ing things that are rel­a­tively sim­ple, things that hu­man­ity has been do­ing for a long time, this is of­ten true. But if you’re try­ing to do dif­fi­cult things, things which are not known to be pos­si­ble, it is not true.

The more dif­fi­cult your mis­sion, the more de­tails there will be that are crit­i­cal to un­der­stand for suc­cess.

You might hope that these sur­pris­ing de­tails are ir­rel­e­vant to your mis­sion, but not so. Some of them will end up be­ing key. Wood’s ten­dency to warp means it’s more ac­cu­rate to trace a cut than to cal­cu­late its length and an­gle. The pos­si­bil­ity of su­per­heat­ing liq­uids means it’s im­por­tant to use a packed bed when boil­ing liq­uids in in­dus­trial processes lest your process be highly in­ef­fi­cient and un­pre­dictable. The mas­sive dif­fer­ence in weight be­tween a rocket full of fuel and an empty one means that a reusable rocket can’t hover if it can’t throt­tle down to a very small frac­tion of its orig­i­nal thrust, which in turn means it must plan its tra­jec­tory very pre­cisely to achieve 0 ve­loc­ity at ex­actly the mo­ment it reaches the ground.

You might also hope that the im­por­tant de­tails will be ob­vi­ous when you run into them, but not so. Such de­tails aren’t au­to­mat­i­cally vis­i­ble, even when you’re di­rectly run­ning up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy in­stead. ‘Spirit’ ther­mome­ters, made us­ing brandy and other liquors, were in com­mon use in the early days of ther­mom­e­try. They were even con­sid­ered as a po­ten­tial stan­dard fluid for ther­mome­ters. It was­n’t un­til the care­ful work of Swiss physi­cist Jean-André De Luc in the 18th cen­tury that physi­cists re­al­ized that al­co­hol ther­mome­ters are highly non­lin­ear and highly vari­able de­pend­ing on con­cen­tra­tion, which is in turn hard to mea­sure.

You’ve prob­a­bly also had ex­pe­ri­ences where you were try­ing to do some­thing and grow­ing in­creas­ingly frus­trated be­cause it was­n’t work­ing, and then fi­nally, af­ter some time you re­al­ize that your so­lu­tion method can’t pos­si­bly work.

Another way to see that notic­ing the right de­tails is hard, is that dif­fer­ent peo­ple end up notic­ing dif­fer­ent de­tails. My brother and I once built a set of stairs for the garage with my dad, and we ran into the prob­lem of de­ter­min­ing where to cut the long boards so they lie at the cor­rect an­gle. After strug­gling with the prob­lem for a while (and I do mean strug­gling, a 16’ long board is heavy), we got to ar­gu­ing. I re­mem­bered from trig that we could fig­ure out an­gle so I wanted to go dig up my text­book and think about it. My dad said, ‘no, no, no, let’s just trace it’, in­sist­ing that we could fig­ure out how to do it.

I kept ar­gu­ing be­cause I thought I was right. I felt re­ally an­noyed with him and he was an­noyed with me. In ret­ro­spect, I think I saw the fun­da­men­tal dif­fi­culty in what we were do­ing and I don’t think he ap­pre­ci­ated it (look at the stairs pic­ture and see if you can fig­ure it out), he just heard ‘let’s draw some di­a­grams and com­pute the an­gle’ and did­n’t think that was the so­lu­tion, and if he had ap­pre­ci­ated the thing that I saw I think he would have been more open to draw­ing some di­a­grams. But at the same time, he also un­der­stood that di­a­grams and math don’t ac­count for the shape of the wood, which I did not ap­pre­ci­ate. If we had been able to get these points across, we could have come to con­sen­sus. Drawing a di­a­gram was prob­a­bly a good idea, but com­put­ing the an­gle was prob­a­bly not. Instead we stayed an­noyed at each other for the next 3 hours.

Before you’ve no­ticed im­por­tant de­tails they are, of course, ba­si­cally in­vis­i­ble. It’s hard to put your at­ten­tion on them be­cause you don’t even know what you’re look­ing for. But af­ter you see them they quickly be­come so in­te­grated into your in­tu­itive mod­els of the world that they be­come es­sen­tially trans­par­ent. Do you re­mem­ber the in­sights that were cru­cial in learn­ing to ride a bike or drive? How about the de­tails and in­sights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

This means it’s re­ally easy to get stuck. Stuck in your cur­rent way of see­ing and think­ing about things. Frames are made out of the de­tails that seem im­por­tant to you. The im­por­tant de­tails you haven’t no­ticed are in­vis­i­ble to you, and the de­tails you have no­ticed seem com­pletely ob­vi­ous and you see right through them. This all makes makes it dif­fi­cult to imag­ine how you could be miss­ing some­thing im­por­tant.

That’s why if you ask an anti-cli­mate change per­son (or a cli­mate sci­en­tist) “what could con­vince you you were wrong?” you’ll likely get back an an­swer like “if it turned out all the data on my side was faked” or some other ex­tremely strong re­quire­ment for ev­i­dence rather than “I would start doubt­ing if I no­ticed nu­mer­ous im­por­tant mis­takes in the de­tails my side’s data and my col­leagues did­n’t want to talk about it”. The sec­ond case is much more likely than the first, but you’ll never see it if you’re not pay­ing close at­ten­tion.

If you’re try­ing to do im­pos­si­ble things, this ef­fect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be in­tel­lec­tu­ally stuck right at this very mo­ment, with the ev­i­dence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.

This prob­lem is not easy to fix, but it’s not im­pos­si­ble ei­ther. I’ve mostly fixed it for my­self. The di­rec­tion for im­prove­ment is clear: seek de­tail you would not nor­mally no­tice about the world. When you go for a walk, no­tice the un­ex­pected de­tail in a flower or what the seams in the road im­ply about how the road was built. When you talk to some­one who is smart but just seems so wrong, fig­ure out what de­tails seem im­por­tant to them and why. In your work, no­tice how that meet­ing ac­tu­ally would­n’t have ac­com­plished much if Sarah had­n’t pointed out that one thing. As you learn, no­tice which de­tails ac­tu­ally change how you think.

If you wish to not get stuck, seek to per­ceive what you have not yet per­ceived.

Comments