Datasets, Borges, and one brave t-shirt

Hey 👋 — today's mix leans thoughtful: a decade-long art practice built on hand-curated datasets, a fresh skirmish over who owns the internet's training data, and one absolute unit of a language model squeezed onto a laptop that has no business running it. Plus a t-shirt that turned out to be a shell script. Let's get into it.

An Interview with Anna Ridler

An Interview with Anna Ridler

Right Click Save sits down with generative artist Anna Ridler, who's spent ten years building her own datasets by hand rather than scraping the web for them — treating the labor of classification itself as the artwork, not the plumbing behind it. The conversation touches her recent Oxford commission, which pairs 17th-century taxonomies with Borges's famous skewering of any system that claims to organize all knowledge. It's a sharp reminder that "the dataset" isn't a neutral ingredient; someone chose it, and that choice carries meaning.

"The process, the labor, the choice of what to include and what to exclude has always been the subject, not the method." — Anna Ridler

Building an interactive wave propagation cube grid with Three.js

Building an interactive wave propagation cube grid with Three.js

Franky Hung's Codrops tutorial builds a grid of cubes that ripples outward from your cursor like a pond that's been to physics class — mouse-trail interaction, wave math, post-processing, and performance tuning, all with source included. Good one to bookmark if you've been meaning to graduate from "spinning cube demo" to something with actual choreography.

Show HN: Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer

Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer

Colibri is a pure-C, zero-dependency engine that streams experts off disk to get a 744-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, GLM-5.2, limping along on a machine with just 25GB of RAM. It's the software equivalent of towing a cruise ship with a bicycle, and it works, which is the fun part (via HN discussion).

Publishers prepare to opt-out of Google search over AI training

Publishers prepare to opt-out of Google search over AI training

Staying on the theme of who gets to use what: Adweek reports that major publishers, emboldened by Cloudflare's new default bot-blocking, are weighing whether to cut Google's crawler off entirely rather than let it index their pages and feed AI training on the same pass. It's a notable shift from the old bargain — searchability in exchange for scraping — and suggests the next round of these fights won't be settled quietly.

The dataset question from Ridler's interview, playing out at web scale.

Obfuscated bash script by Akamai found on a Uniqlo t-shirt

Someone spotted a base64-encoded, self-evaluating bash script printed on an Akamai-designed Uniqlo shirt and, naturally, decoded it — turning up a harmless Easter-egg message rather than anything sinister. Proof that "curiosity killed the cat" was never really about cats (via Lobsters discussion).

Quick hits

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#091 – Virtual pen plotters, 3D bros, iPads

#091 – Virtual pen plotters, 3D bros, iPads

Dan Catt's roundup this week centers on Frank Force's Virtual Pen Plotter, a three.js simulation that lets you preview a drawing machine's motion in-browser before any pen touches paper — handy for workshops, teaching, or just satisfying your curiosity about whether a plot is worth the ink. Catt also shares his own delightfully janky rig: an iPad duct-taped into a jig so an AI can guide plotter drawings in real time. It's the kind of hack that shouldn't work and somehow does.

"This is both so dumb and so brilliant at the same time" — revdancatt

Cruise Missile Intersectionality

Cruise Missile Intersectionality

Mo H. Zareei's (mHz) audiovisual live-set, covered by CreativeApplications.Net, takes a scalpel to performative allyship and the contradictions baked into Western liberal politics — sound and image as satire, not just spectacle.

I did not kill Stanley Lieber: how to draw (with 9front)

Sliding from institutional critique to genuine retro-computing weirdness: this zine walks through drawing with paint(1) on 9front, the Plan 9 fork nobody asked for but somebody clearly loves — input quirks, canvas tricks, and a workflow for making art on hardware philosophy that predates the mouse-and-layers era we take for granted (via Lobsters discussion).

Will we ever find alien civilizations?

Quanta's Joy of Why podcast sits down with astronomer David Kipping to ask why every headline-grabbing biosignature seems to dissolve under closer scrutiny, and what a statistically honest search for life elsewhere would actually require. A good one to forward to the space-curious person in your life who still checks for UFO news.

Quick hits

That's the stack for today — plotters pretending to be real, drawings pretending 9front is 2026-friendly, and a healthy dose of skepticism aimed at the stars. Reply if you've spotted something we should be tracking, and pass this along to a fellow tinkerer if it earned its keep.

Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖