A typewriter with your handwriting
Hey 👋 — today's a nice mix: pen plotters getting clever, a shader team turning ray-traced glass into cheap fake meshes, and a trio of pieces asking what AI is actually doing to how we see, write, and think. No unifying theory, just good stuff.
📙 #095 - Hand-Type-Writer, Drawing Bots
Dan Catt is hacking together a typewriter that types in his own handwriting — a bluetooth keyboard feeding a plotter that scrawls each letter as he would, wobble and all. It's a delightfully backwards project: instead of teaching a machine to write neatly, he's teaching it to write like a person who never learned to. The same dispatch rounds up drawingbots.net's absurd stash of 50,000+ open-source plotter algorithms and a Reddit rig for automatic pen-changing mid-drawing, which solves the one problem every plotter owner eventually swears at (via revdancatt).
"I have a typewriter than writes in my handwriting. Well, nearly, and not actually a typewriter." — Dan Catt
From rays to meshes: building Vercel's Prism with vgpu
The launch hero for Vercel's new vgpu shader library started as a full raymarched light simulation of a glass prism, which looked gorgeous and ran like a dial-up modem. This walkthrough shows how the engineer traded the raymarcher for a mesh-based approximation of the refracted color beams, keeping most of the visual drama for a fraction of the GPU bill — a good case study in knowing when "physically accurate" is the wrong goal.
The aesthetics of machine vision: critical terms and ideas
A newly published essay collection asks artists and scholars to sit with machine vision as an aesthetic category, not just a technical one — how algorithms frame, classify, and mis-see the world, and what that does to images made with or for them. Dense reading, but a welcome counterweight to the usual demo-reel coverage of computer vision.
Speaking of counterweights to the usual AI coverage —
In an age of AI, a physicist seeks what endures
Quanta talks to Yale physics chair Sarah Demers, who is co-writing a policy statement on AI's role in physics research despite, notably, never having used an LLM herself. Her outsider vantage makes for an unusually grounded conversation about where AI might genuinely help experimental science and where it's just noise dressed as progress.
How to protect yourself from workslop
A practical field guide to "workslop" — those sprawling AI-generated paragraphs that take a colleague ten seconds to produce and you ten minutes to untangle. The tactics range from politely calling it out to just feeding it back through your own LLM for a summary, which feels like the coding equivalent of fighting fire with fire.
Quick hits
- Three-LLM: Three.js-based WebGPU LLM inference engine — running language models in the same engine you'd use to spin a cube, because why not.
- The asteroid currently hitting front end web development — a sober look at the ecosystem's latest extinction event.
- The race to engineer new knobs for the human brain — neurotech's dashboard is getting crowded.
- Making the internet boring — a case for the web calming down, on purpose.
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