Shadows, mapped in advance
Hey 👋 — with a total solar eclipse sweeping through in a few days, today's lead item is basically a planetarium you can drag with your mouse. Round that out with a QR code that moonlights as a photograph, a typography experiment that says almost nothing (on purpose), and a studio site built on a grid that knows how to bend.
Open-source interactive map for the Aug 12 total solar eclipse
Ahead of Wednesday's total solar eclipse, this open-source map lets you scrub the path of totality minute by minute, toggling layers like the Besselian elements that define the shadow's math, a live umbra projection, and even cloud cover forecasts overlaid on OpenStreetMap. It's the kind of tool that turns an abstract "path of totality" into something you can zoom into your own backyard. Drop a pin anywhere and it'll tell you exactly when the sky goes dark, and for how long (via HN discussion).
Dithered QR codes
A clever hack: run Floyd-Steinberg-style error diffusion twice — once to scatter a QR's data modules into something photo-like, once to dither the actual image underneath — and you get a code that scans clean while doubling as a legible little portrait. There's a free generator if you want to turn your own photos into scannable static (via HN discussion).
Type
Joohyun Park's page announces itself with a single word and lets the rest unfold in the browser — less a statement than an invitation to poke at it yourself (via Waxy).
Designing a flexible digital archive for Chems.Studio's creative practice
A solid case study on holding a site together with one three-column grid while letting its rhythm shift across the homepage, archive, and project pages, with Swup.js smoothing the transitions between them (via Codrops).
Quick hits
- Gentoo bugzilla closed due AI bot scraper overload — open-source infra buckling under the very bots meant to learn from it.
- Hardware backdoors in some x86 CPUs — a reminder that "trust the hardware" was always aspirational.
- My server is a phone now — the old phone in your drawer has more uptime potential than you think.
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.
ESP32-S3 for interactive generative art on embedded hardware
One developer's answer to "what's this microcontroller for" is apparently "art, obviously." They prototyped a series of generative pieces in JavaScript and p5.js, then ported them to C++ to run in real time on an ESP32-S3 driving a round TFT display, with a motion sensor feeding the visuals live input. It's a nice reminder that the sketch-first, port-later workflow scales down just as well as it scales up, and that a chip usually relegated to blinking sensors can hold a screen's worth of quiet, moving art. (via X)
"Who says microcontrollers are only for sensors and IoT?" — Alacritic_Super
Three.js Skate game update with multiplayer and prompt-based publishing
A browser skateboarding game built in Three.js, now with actual multiplayer, and it lives on Genex — a platform where games get spun up from prompts and published directly. Worth a roll around the half-pipe just to see how far "prompt to playable" has come. (via X discussion)
AI alignment is a red herring
Matt Webb makes the case that our whole cultural fixation on "AI alignment" traces back not to any coherent technical requirement, but to Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics — a piece of fiction we've been quietly treating as engineering spec ever since. It's a sharp bit of intellectual history, and it lands as a genuine challenge rather than contrarian noise. (via Interconnected)
The rare AI take that questions the framing instead of just the fear.
"Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers
In the same corner of the discourse — a pushback against the now-reflexive claim that writing code was never the hard part of software work, arguing it quietly erases the actual skill and judgment programming takes. A tidy counterweight to Webb's essay: one questions why we obsess over AI's behavior, the other questions why we're so quick to discount our own. (via Lobsters discussion)
Quick hits
- "Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers — a defense of the craft, worth a second look if you skimmed past it above.
- Europe's free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires — orbital eyes, no subscription required.
That's the stack for today — microcontrollers making art, skateboards rolling through the browser, and two essays worth arguing with over coffee. If you spot something we should have caught, reply and tell us. And if a friend would enjoy this mix, forward it their way.
Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖