BUI puts Blender’s UI in your app, Firenook speeds up Firebase emulators, and ASN blocks GrapheneOS

On Friday's Hacker News front page, BUI took the interface of Blender, the 3D app, and made it a UI library. You can drive it from Python, Rust, JavaScript, C or Dear ImGui. ppmpreetham, who built BUI, wrote in the thread that an AI agent was asked to strip out every part of Blender that wasn't UI logic, instead of decoupling the UI. An existing tkinter program runs on BUI unchanged and comes out looking like Blender. pythonRon tried it on Fedora and had to adjust the tkinter code first, then liked the result.

BUI compiles code written for GPUI, the Rust toolkit behind the Zed editor, without changes. One small settings window, written once, puts its first frame on screen in about 40 milliseconds on BUI and about 230 on GPUI. Left open and idle, GPUI keeps about one percent of a core busy, and BUI uses none, because it redraws only what changed and sleeps the rest of the time. That idle figure is what an open app costs your laptop battery.

The license decides whether you can use BUI at all. It is GPL, so any program that includes it is distributed under the GPL too. In the thread, xlii called that a show stopper for many people, and panzi put it plainly: you can only use it in GPL version 3 programs. BUI also draws its own widgets, so screen readers can't see them yet. There are no input methods for typing languages like Japanese, and on macOS it is experimental and always draws on the CPU.

Firenook is a drop-in replacement for the Firebase Local Emulator Suite, written in Rust, with no Java to install. You keep your firebase.json, your SDKs and your ports, and change the one word that starts the emulators in your script. Loaded with about two million documents, Firenook runs in around two gigabytes of memory, where the official suite needed about 22, and your data survives a restart. Firestore, Auth, Storage, Functions and Pub/Sub all answer on the ports they already use.

"emulators": "firebase emulators:start --import ./data"
"emulators": "firenook emulators:start --import ./data"

Hightouch needed a model to spot customer profiles that merge two different people into one. Jev, a fast decision model, returns a confidence score. When Jev is between 30 and 90 percent sure, the profile goes to Claude Opus for a second opinion. About a fifth of profiles go up, and Jev and Opus together get almost as many right as Opus alone for under a quarter of the cost. On harder cases, twins and fathers and sons with the same name, Jev sends more profiles up on its own and still matches Opus for about half the cost. In the thread, pcwelder argued the charts don't show Jev is better calibrated than GPT-6 Luna, the other decision model Hightouch tried.

In the Netherlands, the ASN Bank app runs Google's Play Integrity check before it lets you pay with iDEAL Wero, and GrapheneOS users are told their phone fails the bank's security requirements. EPI, the company behind Wero, wrote that Android's hardware key attestation can't prove the app and the operating system are intact. cristobalbaixas, a developer who runs both checks, answered that the attestation certificate carries the verified boot state, the operating system's boot key and the app's signing digest, all signed by the chip, and GrapheneOS publishes its boot keys for exactly this. If I were building payments on Android, I'd check that certificate myself and accept GrapheneOS's keys.