buun @spiritbuun
buun ✓ @spiritbuun
The funniest thing about TurboQuant is that not only is none of it new, every part of what we've implemented is very old. We are just rediscovering tricks video game developers had to use in the 90s.
FWHT decorrelation → DCT in JPEG/MPEG decorrelation
Lloyd-Max 16-centroid codebook → 256-color palette (VQ codebook)
Norm + quantized unit vector → Quake's norm vector table
128-elm blocks with 4-bit indices → S3 texture compression
ADC lookup table (VecInfer) → Dot-product LUTs for lighting
Per-block scale factor → ADPCM audio (scale per block + quantized residuals)
5:02 PM · Mar 28, 2026 · 39K Views
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
A tweet noting that Google's TurboQuant LLM compression algorithm reuses classic 1990s video-game/media compression tricks (JPEG DCT, Quake normal-vector tables, S3 texture compression, ADPCM audio). Continues the same TurboQuant/JL-lemma technical thread as prior screenshots, from a different angle (retrocomputing parallels).
machine learningcompressiontwitterturboquantvideo game historyretrocomputing