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

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

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

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.

Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

Making a Python interpreter in 1024 bytes

Austin Henley crams a working, if severely diet, Python-alike into a single kilobyte of C — single-character variables, basic control flow, and functions handled not with bytecode but by simply re-parsing the source on every call. It's the kind of self-imposed constraint that forces genuinely clever engineering rather than just terse code golf, and the writeup walks through each brutal tradeoff along the way.

"First, make it work, and then make it small." — Austin Henley

(via HN discussion)

Terence Tao on "prematurely solving [a maths] problem by purely AI-powered methods"

Tao — one of the few voices whose skepticism actually moves the needle — reportedly warns against declaring a math problem solved on the strength of AI output alone, cautioning that a proof-shaped artifact isn't the same as a checked one. (unverified, the source page needs JavaScript to render, via Lobsters discussion).

How AI gutted Kenya's essay-writing industry

A different flavor of the same story: the New York Times reportedly details how an entire Nairobi industry — over 40,000 people at its peak, ghostwriting essays for overseas students — has been hollowed out by AI almost overnight, with little clear path back to work for the people it employed. (unverified, via Techmeme).

Tao worries about AI overclaiming in math; here it's already claimed someone's livelihood.

Any Nix package, live in your browser

trynix boots a WebAssembly Linux VM in your browser tab with an in-memory Nix store attached, giving you instant access to any of 310,000+ historical nixpkgs versions — including ones that never made it into any public cache. It's a nice bit of hacker spirit: no install, no daemon, just point a browser at decades of package history.

Quick hits

That's the stack for today — a kilobyte-sized interpreter, a mathematician's caution, and a reminder that automation's ironies are old news dressed in new weights. Reply if you've spotted something we should chase down, and pass this along to a fellow tinkerer if it earned its keep.

Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖