Put a shader on your face
Hey 👋 — today's mix leans toward the practical and the pointed: a genuinely fun webcam trick, a sharp essay about the tells of machine-written prose, and a reminder that roughly one in five new domains on the internet is up to no good.
Building a real-time 3D face mask with MediaPipe, Threlte and Three.js
This Codrops walkthrough uses MediaPipe's face landmarks and Google's canonical face topology to project a textured, deformable mesh straight onto your webcam feed, with Threlte and Three.js doing the rendering. It's the kind of tutorial that starts small and quietly teaches you a real pipeline — landmark detection, mesh fitting, material projection — that generalizes way beyond funny hats. The author sums up the whole ambition pretty perfectly.
"I started this experiment with a modest goal: put a Three.js material on my face." — Codrops author
Your intellectual fly is open when you use an LLM to author a post (2025)
Bryan Cantrill's argument is simple and a little brutal: LLM-written posts carry stylistic tics so recognizable that readers stop trusting whether there's a real thought behind them at all, regardless of whether the content is actually correct. It's less a takedown of AI writing tools than a warning about what happens to your credibility once readers start pattern-matching your prose (via HN discussion).
Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
In a similar spirit of watching how the sausage gets made, Simon Willison links to an internal OpenAI report on "recursive self-improvement" that shows a sharp jump in AI spend per researcher back in July 2026 — likely early access to whatever became GPT-6 Astra. It's a small data point, but it's the kind of number that tells you more about internal AI culture than any press release would (via Simon Willison).
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
Citing an Interisle report, this piece notes that of 85 million new gTLD domain registrations in 2025, 8.5 million ended up blocklisted within months — meaning roughly one in five new domains born last year was, functionally, a scam waiting to happen. A tidy, slightly depressing snapshot of what "growth" looks like on the modern internet's fringes.
Quick hits
- A complex train and logistics simulator running straight in your terminal? Yep — tycoon management, minus the GPU, plus a lot of ASCII charm.
- A/I shuts down — an AI newsletter calls it quits, which feels like its own small commentary on the current moment.
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