Painting outside the crayon box
Hey 👋 — today's mix leans visual: a color space doing quiet, useful work, a grass-painting tool that's oddly meditative to watch, and a data experiment about how humans mow lawns (better than you'd think). Plus a Lisp interpreter so small it fits on a napkin.
Show HN: Simple algorithm and color space to generate diverse skin tones
Most palettes that claim to represent human skin tone top out at a handful of swatches — think emoji yellow or a five-shade default. This Show HN entry proposes a custom RGB color space with a sampling algorithm built to generate plausible, diverse tones procedurally, complete with an interactive 3D picker and open Python/JS source so you can plug it into your own generative work. It's a small, tidy piece of infrastructure for a problem most tools quietly ignore.
"Emojis say we're 5 shades (or cartoon-yellow); a makeup brand might say 50." — Show HN post
(via HN discussion)
Stylized grass painting tool in Three.js
A creative coder built a work-in-progress Three.js tool that lets you literally paint grass onto terrain — brush in density, noise, and directional lean like you're airbrushing a lawn into existence. Part of it was built with AI assistance, which is becoming less a footnote and more just how tools get made now (via X).
Constructed Atmosphere – Reframing light as the primary agent in defining space
A CreativeApplications.net write-up looks at "light pillars" — that atmospheric column effect where light seems to hang solid in the air — as a jumping-off point for treating light itself as the architect of a space, rather than just something that illuminates one. It's a nice reminder that some of the best installation work isn't building anything at all, just arranging air and photons until they behave like walls.
The Pudding's lawn mowing experiment
The Pudding turned Coverage Path Planning — the same problem your robot vacuum quietly solves every day — into a browser game, then watched roughly 31,000 people try to mow a lawn optimally. Median efficiency landed at 91%, and 16% of players found a genuinely perfect path, which says either something encouraging about human spatial intuition or something slightly worrying about how much free time people have (via Waxy).
Lisp in 99 lines of C and how to write one yourself
A PDF walkthrough builds a working Lisp interpreter in 99 lines of C and, more usefully, explains why each line is there, so you can build your own instead of just admiring this one. Size-coding for the mind rather than the demo party (via Lobsters discussion).
Quick hits
- WebGPU Glass Material — open-source shader material for when your scene needs to look expensive.
- The AI Demand Bubble — a sober look at the economics behind the hype.
- Design Magazine CA 287 – The Tools Issue: The Expanded Toolkit — a whole issue devoted to the toolkit, expanded.
- Procedural terrain tricks thread for Three.js — practical tips if that grass tool above left you wanting a hill to plant it on.
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