Ripples, refraction, and a bird alarm
Hey 👋 — today's issue splits nicely into two moods: a shimmering slice of creative coding to start, then a run of AI Corner pieces that get progressively more pointed about what humans are still for.
Volatile Nexus: tinkering with glass, caustics, cubes and sound in Three.js
A thousand mouse-repelled cubes swim beneath a sheet of refractive, iridescent glass, and the ripples pushing them around also drive a procedural soundtrack — same physics, two senses. It's the kind of piece where poking at it feels more productive than reading about it, which the creator seems to know full well.
"poking the glass smears the confetti" — Volatile Nexus
I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system
Three security cameras already had microphones sitting idle, so a hobbyist pointed the open-source BirdNet-Go at them and turned the whole setup into a local, real-time listener for birds, bats, and frogs, complete with custom alerts. No cloud, no subscription, just repurposed hardware doing a job it was never marketed for (via HN discussion).
You have to beat the models at something
As routine coding gets cheaper to automate, this essay argues the durable edge isn't retreating into "hard engineering" — it's deep codebase familiarity and the ability to actually explain your reasoning to other humans, things a model can't shortcut its way into. Worth sitting with if you've been wondering which of your skills are load-bearing.
In a similar vein, but with considerably less patience —
I attended a conference recently and AI use by academics was absurd
An attendee recounts panelists drafting live Q&A answers with AI on stage instead of, you know, listening and answering — a small but pointed example of what happens when the tool for saving effort starts replacing the effort itself (via Lobsters discussion).
The essay above tells you what to get better at; this one shows what it looks like when nobody bothers.
Quick hits
- The safest job from AI may be writing — a case for why the words business might outlast the code business.
- Do not ask an LLM whether it is a good boy — someone tested the limits of chatbot flattery, for science.
- Google has removed MV2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store, including uBO — the ad-blocker saga's next unwelcome chapter.
- Agent memory as a file format — treating what your agent remembers as a spec, not an afterthought.
- The standup your agents can't attend — a reflection on the meetings AI still can't sit through.
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.