Renders, retro keys, and rogue timelines
Hey 👋 — today's mix has a bit of everything: a plugin that smuggles a full 3D renderer into Figma, a keyboard archaeologist digging up logos we've all forgotten, and someone who got so annoyed by a benchmark claim they built an entire tracing tool to settle it.
Building Depth: Designing and Developing a 3D Renderer Inside Figma
Depth is a Figma plugin that quietly runs a real Three.js renderer inside the plugin window, letting designers drop in models and tweak camera and lighting without ever leaving their canvas. The case study is refreshingly honest about the gap between "technically working" and "actually looks good" — the author kept iterating because the output read as an interactive demo rather than the polished image they were chasing:
"It still looked like an interactive 3D experiment rather than the image I had in mind." — Depth developer
The accompanying marketing site even splices real-time 3D with a pre-rendered, AI-generated hero sequence, which is its own small statement on where "real-time" and "rendered" blur together these days (via Codrops).
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
Marcin Wichary goes hunting for the forgotten glyphs and company logos that used to live on keyboard keys — Commodore, Atari, Amiga, IBM, all with their own quiet iconography that's since been sanded off. It's the first part of a series, kicked off by Apple's recent move toward more European-style key icons, and it's the kind of rabbit hole that makes you want to go dig your old keyboards out of storage (via HN discussion).
I made a build visualizer to understand Bun's compile times
Skeptical of a claim that Bun's Rust build was 5x faster than its Zig build on Linux, Lalit Maganti built buildprof — an open-source Linux tracing tool that turns build timelines into a process-by-process visualization you can actually inspect. It's a nice reminder that "just profile it" is still the fastest way to turn an argument into an answer (via Lobsters discussion).
Quick hits
- Why is the x86 undefined instruction called ud2? Why 2? — the kind of question you didn't know you needed answered until now.
- Fable 5.1 solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher — a 17th-century puzzle finally meets its match, three centuries late.
- Give to AI formulas from charts — feed it a chart image, get the formula back out.
- Can a regex match valid card numbers? — a delightfully overengineered answer to a question nobody asked.
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.
Xorcery – a WebGPU superoptimizer that rediscovers bit hacks in the browser
Superoptimizers are one of those ideas that sound like a joke until you see them work: instead of writing the fastest bit-twiddling trick yourself, you let a search algorithm brute-force every possible instruction sequence until it stumbles on something faster than what you'd have written by hand. Xorcery does this entirely in the browser, using WebGPU to fan the search out across thousands of GPU threads, and watching it independently rediscover classics like popcount or branchless sign tricks is genuinely delightful. It's not that the GPU is inventing new math — it's that it's proving, empirically and in parallel, that the old tricks were already close to optimal.
"your GPU rediscovers bit hacks" — Xorcery
(via HN discussion)
What if my git host were a static site generator?
Fittingly for a follow-up to something called Xorcery, this one's called Sorcery — a git repo viewer built after Forgejo kept keeling over under scraper traffic and disk pressure. Rather than run a full forge with all its moving parts (and JS proof-of-work gates like Anubis standing guard at the door), the author generates static pages straight from the repo, trading dynamic features for something that just doesn't fall over. It's a nice reminder that "host a website" and "run a web application" are different problems, and sometimes the humble one wins (via Lobsters discussion).
Motion docs
The official getting-started docs for Motion (the animation library formerly known as Framer Motion) — springs, gestures, layout transitions, scroll-driven animation, all in one place. Handy reference if you're bolting motion onto a creative-coding project rather than reinventing easing curves from scratch.
Quick hits
- heol — another quiet, esoteric entry from the xxiivv wiki, for the terminally curious.
- CUDA for AMD on Windows — a compatibility hack with the audacity to make Team Red run Team Green's software.
- Watch what you say: Apple opens the door to a nightmare world of always-listening tech — a sober look at what "always listening" actually means once it ships.
- After Math — Terence Tao's take on math and AI, for those not yet saturated on the topic this week.
That's the lot for today — a bit of GPU sorcery, some literal Sorcery, and docs to keep your animations honest. Found something we should've covered? Reply and tell us, and pass this along to anyone who'd enjoy rediscovering bit hacks over breakfast.
Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖