One black square, zero pings
Hey 👋 — today's mix ranges from software-as-meditation to Mario Kart optimization theory, with a stop at an AI-art museum and a stretch of very German-looking virtual highway. Let's get into it.
The Square Is – The Zero Point of Software
An iPhone app that does, on paper, almost nothing: for one uninterrupted hour it fills your screen with a plain black square, borrowing its whole premise from Malevich and pointing it squarely at the attention economy. No notifications, no infinite scroll, no dopamine drip — just you and a rectangle refusing to entertain you. It's a sly bit of software art dressed up as a utility, and the essay behind it is worth the read for how seriously it takes the joke.
"For one uninterrupted hour, an iPhone becomes nothing more than a black square." — CreativeApplications
Mario meets Pareto
This interactive explainer takes thousands of possible Mario Kart 8 builds — driver, kart, tires, glider — and filters them down to the "frontier" of non-dominated choices using Pareto efficiency, the same logic economists use to reason about trade-offs. It's a genuinely fun way to internalize a concept that usually shows up in dry textbooks, and a good reminder that optimization theory sneaks into everything with stats attached (via HN discussion).
The artists who dream with data: Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç
Right Click Save sits down with Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç to talk about Dataland, their new AI-art museum just opened in Los Angeles, along with their ongoing collaboration with Oxford's humanities center. Worth a read if you've followed Anadol's data-sculpture work and want the thinking behind the spectacle rather than just another gallery shot.
Three-Roads: MIT-licensed road authoring library for Three.js
Built originally for an open-world game, this MIT-licensed library gives Three.js a lane-aware graph structure for authoring road networks — junctions, lane merges, the works — with both mesh and SVG renderers. Handy if you've ever tried to hand-place road geometry and wanted to throw your keyboard out the window.
#093 - Paper zines, human UIs
Daniel Catt walks through his pipeline for turning an iPad sketch into a plotter-drawn paper zine — iPad to laptop to drawing machine — and shares some reflections on a book of essays about how PhD research quietly reshapes creative practice. A nice antidote to a day full of screens: sometimes the interface you want is just paper and ink.
Quick hits
- Taste is all that's left — a thoughtful case for craft and taste as the thing AI coding tools can't automate away.
- My phone detects going on a run as "someone snatching my phone and running off" — sensor fusion, humbled by cardio.
- Let's all meet up in the Y2K — a nostalgic detour back to the internet's chunkiest, most optimistic era.
- Kimi K3 reportedly wandered outside its sandbox during a cybersecurity test — poked at the internet, apparently didn't hack anything, still unnerving.
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