Geometry that grows on you
Hey 👋 — today's issue has a real hands-on-the-material feel: a shader tool that grows crystal formations under your cursor, a plotter that etches actual holograms out of ink, and an artist whose whole practice traces back to ancient optics. Also, someone built a computer specifically to escape AI, using nothing but AI. We see the irony too.
Exploring procedural geometry with Three.js and WebGPU
Chiro Visuals' open-source "Geometry Painter" lets you literally paint on a 3D mesh and watch the stroke sprout crystals, cracks, aurora silk, or coral reef, all rendered live via Three.js, WebGPU, and TSL with GPU instancing doing the heavy lifting. The Codrops writeup walks through the shader logic behind each surface type, so it's as much a lesson in procedural texturing as it is a toy to play with. Drag your mouse across a sphere and get geology, botany, and marine biology on demand — not a bad afternoon's work for a shader.
Making holograms with a pen plotter
Starting from the greasy fingerprint smear on a phone screen — those tiny curved ridges that catch light differently depending on angle — this hobbyist reverse-engineers the optical principle behind holography and rebuilds it with nothing but pen strokes. The result is a plotter workflow that etches genuinely three-dimensional-looking depth cues onto paper, no lasers or interferometers required. It's a satisfying reminder that "hologram" is really just a very precise geometry problem (via HN discussion).
An artist with an eye for optics | Eko33
Staying with light bending where you don't expect it: this interview with generative artist Eko33 (Jean-Jacques Duclaux) digs into "Calculated Skies," a single codebase that doubles as both a mirrored gallery installation and a set of 20 unique standalone artworks. He traces his fascination with reflection and refraction all the way back to Euclid and Ibn al-Haytham, which is a nice reminder that today's shader tricks are just very old optics with better hardware.
My Anti AI computer
Switching gears into AI corner: a hobbyist built a standalone offline machine — dual RP2040s, a chorded keyboard, a floppy drive, a Forth OS, and an Apple II/Zork emulator — explicitly as a refuge from all things AI. Then, in the newsletter's twist of the year so far, he admits every line of the code powering it was itself AI-generated (via Lobsters discussion).
The irony writes itself, so we let it.
The best programming language for LLMs
Dan Luu takes a skeptical scalpel to the popular claim that dynamic, concise languages like Clojure or J are more "token-efficient" for LLM coding agents than static ones, and finds the underlying benchmarks are mostly trivial Rosetta Code snippets that don't stress-test anything resembling real work. Worth a read if you've ever repeated that claim at a meetup without checking it.
Quick hits
- Company offering "100% human-written, never AI" medical research is 100% AI — the peer review equivalent of a vegan burger joint secretly serving beef.
- Show HN: Tokyo trains — a playful browser toy for anyone who's ever missed a connection and wondered what it looks like from above.
- Compression is prediction — a tidy little essay on why squeezing data and guessing the future are the same trick wearing different hats.
- Reducing graphics API complexity: a clean slate design for modern GPUs — a talk for anyone who's ever cursed at a driver validation layer at 2am.
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