Xylight

Google has announced it is building a new way for 'experienced users' to install Android apps that haven't been verified.

test

Benchmarks look pretty good, even better than some of the text only models, make sure to take them with a grain of salt tho

Benchmarks

Qwen3 VL 30b a3b (No Thinking)

Visual benchmarks for Qwen3 VL 235 A22B (Thinking)

What's Changed

• design: make media embeds not look like garbage
• design: make error containers not look awful
• design: make big community cards not look awful (and make them fully clickable)
• fix: photon accidentally took inspiration from every article site ever and would autoplay videos from posts when you navigated. this was fixed
• fix: a poor, alone button was in the command palette. i joined it with the other ones so that you can actually navigate with arrow keys and it looks better
  • it also got a friend, an option to search communities.
• fix: i made a workaround for a svelte bug (i think). somehow, it would render an {#if} branch even if the condition was false, specifically if you had a dynamic component anywhere. this caused post feeds to have stale data when switching accounts.
• fix: automatically strip leading https:// from the login prompt, for people who interpret "server domain" as the full fwicking url
• fix: CommentItem had a shadow when it shouldn't've (that's a word?)
• fix: when you went to edit your post, it would crash. i fixed

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.1.0...v2.1.1

What's Changed

• feat: add piefed support
  • you can log into your Piefed account and browse all available features in the API
  • some piefed exclusive features are available too, like user/post flairs, feeds, and topics.
• perf: optimize code bundle size -- initial bundle from 780 KB -> 620 KB
  • cool, tf does that mean
    • ok bub this basically means that theres less code loaded initially so stuff loads faster.
  • I rewrote some bad libraries that were bloating up the javascript
  • yes im embarassed the bundle is this high. im getting it lower every update i swear
  • at least its still smaller than lemmy-ui
  • in addition i restructured the entire file tree of the app, and wrote nearly 3000 import statements manually because i have a human soul and i lowk felt filled with determination
• impr: rewrite feed handling, cache more things
  • post feeds, post pages, communities, feed feeds, topic fe
  • wait a second, feed feeds?? this naming is getting out of hand.
  • ok, in piefed there's "feeds". that's pretty cool. but now the "main feed" can either be the main feed or the main feed.
    • what?
• impr: use native css for more things
  • this is partially because i am embarassed that i use tailwind
  • i am migrating common components to use vanilla css but with some advantages of tailwind
  • like i can use a compile-time design system and it has nice @variant things
  • this also makes the DOM tree smaller so theres probably some benefit elsewhere...maybe
• impr: automatically mark inbox items as read when you click jump
• design: make the modlog not look like absolute buns
  • it actually fits on one screen now and looks nicer. you can now observe the insanity of Lemmy's moderation with more comfort.
• design: make the mobile navbar not look like absolute buns
  • i made the tap targets bigger too. next update i will make them cover the whole screen
• design: make the accounts page not look like absolute buns
• impr: i made the things that should be radio groups actually be radio groups. no problem
• impr: expandables and comments now use <label> so that it uses browser native html
• fix: admin detection is better. lemmy removed a property i used constantly for some reason. i fixed that though
• impr: this one makes me mad. for some reason, native CSS transitions absolutely ruin font rendering (on firefox at least). so i removed some animations or replaced them with svelte ones (js ew)
• impr: i preload a lot more things on hover/tap now. things will be like 100ms faster.
  • call me john locke in the way i be optimizing ts
• misc: the term "instance" has been replaced with "server". let's be real, talking about instances makes no sense

Full Changelog: https://github.com/Xyphyn/photon/compare/v2.0.2...v2.1.0

Try now on Photon™©️ (phtn.app) today! 🚀

I tend to be quite opinionated on design, but I'd like to hear any issues you have regarding:

• any pages that look bad?
• any components that can be improved?
• other ui elements?

Qwen image edit seems to be the best one available right now, but I can't run it. It would take too long on my system, especially at 40 steps.

For general image generation, Flux schnell works great and can generate on my system in about 60 seconds. I was hoping to see Flux kontext-schnell, but it doesn't exist, only kontext-dev.

I set up Wireguard on my phone, server, and computer to let my phone access my home network when I'm outside of it.

It works for the most part, but the inconvenient thing is that on Android you can only have 1 VPN running at a time. I want to use Mullvad VPN for the rest of my network connections for privacy.

I could make a single Wireguard config that defines 2 peers to connect to mullvad and my home VPN at the same time, but by doing this, I lock myself to a single server without the benefits of being able to swap servers at the same time.

Locking myself to a single mullvad server results in:

• less privacy, since my IP is more static
• inability to switch to bypass a VPN block

On desktop, I can have multiple wireguard VPNs at once, but if I have both running at the same time, then my LAN is accessed over the home VPN which is routed through Mullvad VPN. It goes

Computer -> Mullvad server -> Home VPN -> Home server

which is pretty wasteful.

Additionally, I'd prefer not to not do something like: Phone -> Home VPN -> Mullvad server -> destination, as my upload speed is pretty bad and this would throttle every non-local connection

What options do I have?

It uses shadcn-svelte for nice looking components, and it should be faster than the old React-based UI.