CSS learns to bend light

Hey 👋 — a bit of everything today: light-bending CSS, a nostalgic pile of Katamari debris, an elegant bit of 1990s-vintage math, and a security story that should make every maintainer's stomach drop a little. Let's get into it.

Background image refraction in CSS

This one fakes the liquid-glass look — light bending across a background image as it scrolls behind a shape — using nothing but the new view() function to track an element's position inside its scroll container. It's the kind of trick that sidesteps the usual fixed-background headaches entirely, because the effect updates live as you scroll rather than being baked in once. The write-up walks through the math and the markup step by step, so you can steal it without much archaeology (via frontendmasters blog).

Katamari Object Library

Every object your ball of stickiness ever absorbed in the Katamari Damacy games, now downloadable as 3D models — sortable by triangle count or by which game they debuted in, wrapped in a delightfully unnecessary Windows 98 file-browser skin. Pure nostalgia bait, but genuinely useful if you need a low-poly traffic cone or confused cow for a scene (via Waxy).

Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)

Speaking of piles of 3D objects — here's how you'd actually measure one of those Katamari meshes without breaking a sweat. This 2018 post derives a compact formula, via the divergence theorem, that reduces the volume of any closed triangulated mesh to a simple sum over triangle vertices — no numerical integration, no fuss. It's the kind of math that feels like a magic trick until you see the derivation, at which point it feels obvious in hindsight, which is usually the mark of a good one (via HN discussion).

Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days

Simon Willison rounds up reports that AI coding agents are now weaponizing bugs within minutes of them being merely discussed in public — no proof-of-concept required, just chatter. Maintainers at OCaml and rclone describe disclosure volume up 20x, enough to swamp the CVE pipeline itself.

Worth reading if you've ever thought "eh, I'll patch that next week."

A Perfect SimCity

Armed with an open-source port of the original SimCity engine and a Python reinforcement-learning shim, the author set out to algorithmically discover the ideal city — and found it's small (12-16k population), mostly roadless, fire-department-free, and taxed at a stingy 1%. A fun bit of retro-engine archaeology that doubles as a reminder that "optimal" and "livable" don't always mean the same thing (via Lobsters discussion).

Quick hits

• Relay Tetris — Tetris, but the pieces drop by way of actual clicking relays.
• Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions — navigation that folds the world like a pretzel.
• vgpu and HTML-in-Canvas — WebGPU shaders rendered straight into an HTML canvas.
• Vote for the 2026 Tiny Awards winner — small web, big feelings, your ballot awaits.
• Htmx 4.0 — the anti-framework framework hits another milestone.

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