For context, Phi is an AI-powered Chromium browser for macOS. I think many people here may not be familiar with it. The closest reference point is probably Arc, although Phi's goal is slightly different: a browser that you and your agents can both use.
The main changes in version 2.0 are Spaces for organizing tabs and fully sandboxed Profiles, which keep cookies and sessions separate. In practice, that means things like multiple Google logins no longer collide. URL rules can also ensure that specific sites open in the correct space/profile.
The assistant now has whole-browser context, and the guardrail for removing sensitive data runs locally on your Mac instead of on a server. I recently worked on optimizing the local model path on the Apple Neural Engine because it seemed wasteful to leave that hardware unused.
I am also experimenting with a new memory visualization system (we call it Nebula). Rather than displaying browser memory as a list or force graph, it presents it as a spatial surface that you can explore over time. This feature is still evolving, but it has been interesting to work on.
Next, we want to enable agents such as Claude Code or Codex to control your actual browser window rather than a separate headless Chrome instance.
Got myself the $20 subscription and tried it out. The 5-hour limit runs out surprisingly fast. Quality is okay but it feels slow, and even with my $20 Claude subscription on Fable, the credit usage ends up being lower. Fable usually catches issues in my Opus 4.8-generated code that I'd miss otherwise, but Fugu didn't. Makes me wonder if it's really at the Fable level. Hard to see the value here.
I use my Flipper Zero weekly (or more frequent). This new model feels much more powerful than the ones based on RPi Zero as a handheld device. I like how they managed to include two RJ45 ports and a USB-A port for connectivity. However, it's still too bulky for me. Perhaps when I get one, I'll try carrying it around all day to see how it goes.
There's also a nano SIM slot. With the two Ethernet ports, it's perfect for use as a mobile router. This use case alone is good enough for me.
For such a powerful device, I think the lack of a QWERTY keyboard and the inherited orange backlit monochrome display are two of its shortcomings. I don't want to carry a keyboard or screen with me, I want it to be able to take more human input/output without accessories.
For those interested in hackable, handheld Linux devices, the M5Stack Cardputer Zero is also worth a look. It will launch on Kickstarter soon, and I have reserved an early bird spot.
I'm curious what this means for ChromiumOS and downstreams like FydeOS.
If Google is now pushing this "intelligence‑first" desktop experience, how much of that work is likely to stay in the proprietary ChromeOS/Googlebook layer vs. land in upstream ChromiumOS?
Good catch — that was actually my mistake. I mixed up cm and mm from the marketing material, and when I actually measured just now it came out to around 0.9mm. So not quite as thin as I claimed, and I probably wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't asked.
I did find some Kevlar-reinforced options that are supposedly ~0.3mm, but they seem to be raw fiber without connectors, purposed for drones, and I'm not sure about global availability.
And after getting 10Gbps working at home I was getting greedy, and looked at InfiniBand as well, 40Gbps and proper RDMA is very tempting compared to Ethernet. The catch for me was the practical side: IB needs PCIe slots and those chunky, inflexible cables. With most of my stuff being laptops, mini PCs and Macs, I just couldn’t see a clean way to route those or even plug cards in everywhere, so in the end the "door-frame‑friendly" skinny SFP+ fiber still won out for this apartment.
I went a slightly different route. My switches are linked with 10Gbps SFP+ across the apartment, but it was way too late (and too much hassle) to pull proper in-wall fiber. Instead I used one of those ultra-thin (around 0.1mm), unshielded fiber cables, and just snaked it through door frames and taped it along the walls. I'm genuinely impressed this stuff exists, it makes retrofitting fiber into a finished space so much less painful.
Most of my edge devices are still on 2.5GbE though, and I'm increasingly aware that for anything with plain SATA disks, the drives are the real bottleneck. Once I LAG'd 2×2.5GbE to get a 5Gbps pipe, it became obvious the network wasn't the slow part anymore in a lot of cases.
And yeah, the 10GbE SFP+ modules run hot, so hot that I would not lay my fingers on them for more than 2 seconds. I stuck 2 copper heatsinks on my module, not sure they do much but the module runs smoothly. Even so, I'm pretty happy with the overall setup: from my 10GbE-equipped Mac I can saturate multiple machines at once and I no longer think about the network most of the time, which was the goal.
Yes, they are with one GPU core fused off. I came across a die shot on the internet[0], and the GPU cores look huge. With some rough calculation, I estimated that the GPU cores together take up about 15.5% of the die area.
I don't know much about photolithography, but I assume the same percentage of single-defect dies could be limited to a single GPU core failure, it's actually pretty surprising that Apple can get enough of these "rare draw" chips to build and ship a real product.
If the shortage continues, I would expect that they start using fully functional A18 Pro chips with one GPU core disabled with software. It kind of reminds me of the AMD Athlon days when user could use a pencil to unlock extra cores.
I don't see my first GPU on there, it was the humble GeForce4 MX440. It could run almost any game I cared about for a surprisingly long time, even if it's not a true modern card.
These days almost all my machines are on iGPUs baked into the CPU. There's way less fun for me, but they are a lot more compact at least.
I'm puzzled by Espressif's naming here. We had the ESP32-S3, so "S31" sounds like "S3, variant 1," but this part doesn't really look like a simple S3 variant. And then there's an ESP32-E22, but no E21 or even a plain E2 anywhere.
Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios.
With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
It seems this model does not have a recording feature. There's an alternative model from Aiwa with Bluetooth and cassette recording support, but I'm not sure if it's available globally, could not find much information about it online.
I recently got my hands on an M5Stack NanoC6 (https://docs.m5stack.com/en/core/M5NanoC6), it's also quite small and I'm pretty happy with it. It has onboard IR and a Grove connector, good enough for IoT projects at home.
I'm kind of the opposite use case: I own four AirTags, keep them in different bags and suitcases, and I've literally never needed them.
I don't lose any luggage or bags, so most of the time they just sit there quietly burning those CR2032s. For me they've ended up feeling more like they are preventing me from anxiety than doing something that actually changes my life day to day...
I'd heard of the "monkey" metaphor from my friend before, but I never really used it in my day-to-day work. When a report came my way with a technical problem they couldn't solve, my first reaction was always, "Okay, I'll take a look," instead of guiding them to take ownership and figure it out on their own.
Looking back, I wish I hadn't let those monkeys jump back onto my back so often. It ended up causing a growing backlog and a lot of pressure for me. It also made it hard for team growth.
This piece really speaks to me, and I'm curious how others here have experienced this in work.
For context, Phi is an AI-powered Chromium browser for macOS. I think many people here may not be familiar with it. The closest reference point is probably Arc, although Phi's goal is slightly different: a browser that you and your agents can both use.
The main changes in version 2.0 are Spaces for organizing tabs and fully sandboxed Profiles, which keep cookies and sessions separate. In practice, that means things like multiple Google logins no longer collide. URL rules can also ensure that specific sites open in the correct space/profile.
The assistant now has whole-browser context, and the guardrail for removing sensitive data runs locally on your Mac instead of on a server. I recently worked on optimizing the local model path on the Apple Neural Engine because it seemed wasteful to leave that hardware unused.
I am also experimenting with a new memory visualization system (we call it Nebula). Rather than displaying browser memory as a list or force graph, it presents it as a spatial surface that you can explore over time. This feature is still evolving, but it has been interesting to work on.
Next, we want to enable agents such as Claude Code or Codex to control your actual browser window rather than a separate headless Chrome instance.
I'm happy to dig into any of this.