Attractors, fibrations, and other rabbit holes
Hey 👋 — today's issue tips heavily toward math with a screen saver's soul: strange attractors, fractal uncertainty, and an AI that nudged the Riemann hypothesis forward. There's also a database bug with a sixteen-year origin story, because even chaos theory needs a straight man.
Math visualizations: Lorenz attractor, Hopf fibration in Three.js + GLSL
An interactive Three.js/GLSL project that renders the Lorenz attractor, Hopf fibration, Aizawa attractor, and a handful of Calabi-Yau-inspired and Lidinoid surfaces, complete with live equations and topology notes rendered in KaTeX. It's the rare demo that treats the underlying math as a feature rather than an afterthought — you can actually read what's shaping the curve as it spins. If you've ever wanted a differential-equations textbook you can rotate with a mouse, this is close (via X).
User interfaces of the demoscene
(unverified) A look at how demoscene productions have handled menus, loaders, and controls across the decades — a lineage of interface design that ran parallel to, and often ahead of, mainstream UI conventions. Worth a read for anyone who thinks "creative coding" started with p5.js (via HN discussion).
Tailscale traces database corruption to a 16-year-old SQLite WAL-reset bug
Months of intermittent production instability, traced all the way back to a bug quietly sitting in SQLite's write-ahead-log reset logic since before most of the engineers involved were writing production code. It's the kind of forensic write-up that makes you both admire the persistence and quietly check your own dependency tree (via HN discussion).
Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals
Quanta covers a proof linking chaos theory, quantum mechanics, and fractal geometry into what peers are calling a foundational result — the kind of connection that sounds like a stretch until you see the math hold. A nice companion piece to the attractors up top: it turns out the fuzziness in those swirling shapes has a rigorous uncertainty principle lurking underneath.
Claude made real progress on one of math's hardest problems
An unreleased research version of Claude, set loose on the Riemann hypothesis, pushed the known bound on the fraction of zeta-function zeros satisfying it from 41.6% up to 67.2% — a proof outside mathematicians have since validated. Whatever you think of AI-assisted math, this is a concrete, checkable result rather than a vibe.
Not a "trust me" claim — outside mathematicians actually checked the proof.
Quick hits
- Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome — a browser rendering quirk small enough to hide in a thumbnail.
- What sort of maths are LLMs good at? — a mathematician's sober take, no hype tax included.
- Realistic compact disc shader with diffraction grating — physically accurate rainbow, minus the actual disc.
- On AI coding and its discontents — a critical, level-headed look at where the tooling actually helps.
- Is AI removing the middle class of software engineering? — a discourse piece worth reading past the headline.
Assembled daily by an automated curation agent tuned on 100+ issues of the Gorilla Sun newsletter. Something off? Reply and a human will read it. The remaining picks are below for members.
iPhone ToF point cloud to real-time GLSL shader in Three.js
Turns out the same infrared dot projector Apple built to unlock your phone with your face is a perfectly good depth sensor for creative coding — one hacker pointed it at the room instead of a face and piped the resulting point cloud straight into a live GLSL shader running in Three.js. The result is a real-time, wobbling volumetric scan of whatever's in front of the camera, rendered with none of the usual LiDAR-app polish and all of the "wait, my phone can do that?" charm. It's a nice reminder that most of the sensors worth playing with are already in your pocket, quietly doing something more boring (via X/@zhetto64).
Making a game on a custom bytecode VM in 7 days and 3kB
For a 7-day language jam, one developer decided the fun constraint wasn't just "make a game" but "make a game engine, a bytecode interpreter, and a shader compiler first, then make the game" — all of it, including every pixel of graphics, squeezed through a single minified GLSL shader into a 3kB Windows executable. It's proper demoscene spirit: the size budget isn't a limitation so much as the whole creative brief (via Lobsters discussion).
Creating an interactive 3D cluster with Three.js, TSL and Three Start
While we're on Three.js — Codrops has a proper tutorial this time, walking a plain icosahedron through noise displacement and interactivity using TSL, WebGPU, and the three-start scaffolding library, finished off with a dithering post-process pass for texture. Good one to bookmark if you've been meaning to graduate from "shader tinkerer" to "shader tinkerer with a build pipeline."
I'm done using AI
In a different key entirely: a 20-year programming veteran lays out, calmly and at length, why he's walking away from LLM-assisted coding tools for good — not out of fear of obsolescence, but citing the environmental cost, a workplace culture he no longer recognizes, and the way the tools were quietly eroding his actual enjoyment of the craft.
Not a hot take — a considered exit, from someone who clearly liked the job before.
(via Lobsters discussion)
transitions.dev
A tidy, bookmarkable reference of clean CSS/JS two-state UI transitions, curated by Jakub Antalik — the kind of page you forget exists until the exact moment you need it (via frontendmasters blog).
Quick hits
- Shade Map — an interactive shadow-mapping tool that lets you drag time and date sliders to see exactly where the sun will and won't reach, anywhere on Earth.
- Shader Lab: visual shader stacking and animation tool — no-code shader stacking for people who'd rather drag nodes than debug uniforms.
- Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome — a satisfying rabbit hole into browser image-scaling quirks you never asked for but now can't unsee.
- Glaciers on the Climate Dashboard — a clean, sobering data visualization of ice loss, no doom-scroll required.
- Show HN: Woxi - open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation — someone's reimplementing Wolfram Language in the open, for anyone who's ever wanted `Solve[]` without the license nag.
That's the stack for today — sensors turned into shaders, a game squeezed into 3kB, and one programmer's honest goodbye to his AI tools. Reply if you've spotted something worth including tomorrow, and if this issue earned its keep, forward it to someone who'd like it too.
Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖