Cellular automata learn algebra

Sunday, July 12, 2026

Hey 👋 — today's mix ranges from playful math toys to some genuinely uneasy AI commentary, capped off with a joke Linux distro that refuses to die. Let's get into it.

Plot equations and evolve them with Conway's Game of Life

This little browser toy lets you sketch equations Desmos-style, then hand the resulting grid over to Conway's Game of Life and watch your tidy curves squirm into something alive. It's a neat collision of two very different traditions — the precision of graphing calculators and the anarchic drift of cellular automata — and the results land somewhere between generative art and a math class fever dream. There's something satisfying about watching a parabola get slowly eaten by gliders. Worth a few minutes of poking just to see which equations survive longest (via HN discussion).

Bruce Schneier's latest is a sober one: AI-powered facial recognition and mass surveillance, already normalized at scale in China and quietly expanding elsewhere, could make it possible to enforce any rule, anywhere, in real time. His worry isn't just privacy in the abstract — it's that perfect enforcement tends to freeze the slow, messy process by which societies loosen unjust rules over time. If jaywalking and civil disobedience both get flagged with equal efficiency, progress itself gets harder (via Lobsters discussion).

Zooming out from watchful algorithms to boardroom economics —

Frontier AI models are becoming commodity infrastructure as the token crunch eases

A Techmeme roundup cites analyst Benedict Evans arguing that as compute costs come down, frontier models themselves are turning into commodity plumbing — the interesting (and valuable) work moves to whatever gets built on top. It's a tidy reframe of where the AI gold rush might actually pay off, though the source page itself is unreachable, so treat the framing as secondhand (unverified).

Hannah Montana Linux v26.0

Yes, it's still going. The joke Linux distribution themed entirely around the Disney Channel show has hit version 26.0, and its continued existence is its own small monument to internet weirdness outlasting whatever made sense at the time (via Lobsters discussion).

The best of the best of both worlds is apparently still shipping updates.

Quick hits

Ghost Font: A font that humans can read but AI cannot — adversarial typography for the age of scraping bots.
Stop telling me to ask an LLM — a sharp rebuttal to the reflexive "just ask AI" response.
Monist, a WebGPU compiler for non-well-founded set theory — set theory meets your GPU, for reasons that are somehow legitimate.
The siren song of ariaNotify() — a new accessibility API worth knowing before it's everywhere.
I converted an Android app to a webpage — proof that sometimes the app really was just a website wearing a costume.

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