Manim breaks out of Python
Hey 👋 — today's mix leans toward things that render in real time: a math-animation engine escaping its Python sandbox, a shader artist chasing glow, and an AI that spent $100k finding cracks in cryptography just because it could. Let's get into it.
Show HN: Manim (3Blue1Brown's animation engine) in the browser via WebGPU
Academa Studio takes Manim — the engine behind 3Blue1Brown's famously precise math videos — and drops it straight into your browser tab, running on WebGPU with an AI-assisted editor alongside it. No local install, no fussing with Python environments, just write animation code and watch the vectors dance. It's the kind of thing that could quietly lower the barrier for anyone who's ever wanted to explain a proof visually but bounced off the setup (via HN discussion).
3D extensions of new custom Unity shader
Speaking of GPUs doing beautiful things — a game VFX artist has pushed a custom Unity shader into 3D, producing glowing, crystalline effects that look like they belong in a boss-fight cutscene. A full tutorial is promised down the line, so consider this the teaser trailer (via X post).
Public Record – Brass Plates, Black Pages
This one takes a small bureaucratic indignity — Luxembourg's company registry captcha, which makes you compute an ever-escalating sum to prove you're human — and turns it into art criticizing exactly that kind of gatekeeping. It's a sharp reminder that the friction we accept from institutional websites is a design choice, not a law of nature (via CreativeApplications).
Improving heuristics (2015)
Red Blob Games' evergreen explainer on building better A* heuristics from landmark-based distance estimates gets its due here, complete with interactive demos running on real game maps from Dragon Age and Cogmind. If you've ever watched a pathfinder take a weirdly roundabout route, this is the fix (via Lobsters discussion).
Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
In the AI Corner: Anthropic researchers let an internal "Mythos" model loose on HAWK and a reduced AES variant for 60 hours and roughly $100,000 in compute, hunting for mathematical weaknesses. Nothing practically exploitable turned up, but the process produced a new cryptanalysis benchmark — proof that even a null result can leave behind a useful yardstick (via Simon Willison).
Quick hits
- A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants — surprisingly, you probably could have invented it too.
- Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9 — Gordon Freeman, now with extra crashes for authenticity.
- Kimi K3 architecture overview and notes — the reliably clear explainer treatment, this time on Kimi K3.
- Parallel JSON parsing on the GPU with compute shaders — because your JSON deserves a GPU too.
- Show HN: XY – A fast, composable, GPU-accelerated interactive plotting library — plots that don't make you wait.
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.