SVGs, koans, and shrinking brains
Hey 👋 — today's a small but sharp mix: a browser trick that turns Markdown into shareable video, a Zen classic reborn as procedural 3D, and a genuinely uncomfortable question about what we're trading away for smaller, "smarter" AI models.
Markdown SVG upgrades
Simon Willison keeps sanding the edges off his handy markdown-svg-renderer, and the latest pass adds PNG/JPEG export tabs plus, more interestingly, an MP4 tab that runs ffmpeg.wasm entirely in-browser to turn animated SVGs into actual shareable video files. It's the kind of quietly useful upgrade that makes a niche tool feel like a real production pipeline — paste some Markdown with an SVG chart or animation embedded, and walk away with a clip you can drop straight into a tweet or a Slack thread. No server round-trip, no format wrangling, just a browser doing work that used to require a whole toolchain. (via Simon Willison)
The Gateless Gate – Ancient Zen text as 50 procedural 3D scenes
Someone took The Gateless Gate — the classic 13th-century collection of Zen koans — and rendered each of its 50 riddles as its own procedural 3D scene in the browser. It's an unlikely but fitting pairing: koans resist literal explanation, and procedural generation resists literal repetition, so wandering through generative geometry while chewing on "what is the sound of one hand clapping" feels oddly appropriate rather than gimmicky.
Not every AI-adjacent project needs to explain itself — this one just sits with the questions.
Models are getting dumber on purpose
This one argues that the new crop of small, cheap models — GLM-5.2, Qwen3.5, DeepSeek V4-Flash — are posting huge reasoning-benchmark numbers with a fraction of the active parameters older models needed, but the gain isn't free: what's getting squeezed out is plain factual recall. In other words, labs are consciously trading "knows things" for "can reason well enough to fake knowing things," which is a distinction that matters a lot once you're asking a model something it can't just derive from first principles. Worth a read if you've noticed newer small models feeling weirdly confident and weirdly wrong at the same time. (via Lobsters discussion)
Quick hits
- Research papers using "kidney disappointment" instead of "kidney failure" — somewhere, an LLM autocorrect softened a diagnosis into a Yelp review.
- What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade? — turns out childhood ends eventually, even for language models.
- A faster way to calculate the day-of-the-week — a bit-trick for the calendar-math nerds among us.
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Anthropic's "watermark" text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing
John Gruber dug into how Anthropic's new watermarking scheme actually works, and it's not the invisible-Unicode trick you might expect. Instead, Claude nudges its own word choices at every generation step toward a secretly-defined "green list," embedding a statistical fingerprint directly into the prose itself. Gruber's objection isn't really about detectability — it's that the model is now optimizing for a hidden signal instead of the best word for the sentence, which quietly changes what "writing" means when a machine does it.
"My error was believing Anthropic that their system wouldn't adulterate and corrupt the semantics of the text their models generate." — John Gruber
(via HN discussion)
Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Staying in the language-model weeds for a moment: Simon Willison put Alibaba's new Qwen 3.8 27B through its paces and came away impressed by the output but baffled by the process — asked to draw a simple SVG, it churned through more than 22,000 reasoning tokens over 21 minutes before producing an answer a smaller model would've managed in seconds. It's a neat little data point on the industry's current obsession with "thinking" as a feature, whether or not the thinking is doing anything useful.
I thought I was building a C replacement. I was wrong
The creator of C3 offers a candid bit of self-reckoning: he set out to build what "C replacement" meant to him — a systems language in the spirit of the 80s and 90s home-computer scene he grew up in — only to realize that phrase now carries a completely different set of expectations for modern developers. It's a good reminder that language design is as much about the community's mental model of a problem as it is about the syntax you ship.
(via Lobsters discussion)
Quick hits
- A true telnet BBS on a Casio calculator — proof that any device with a screen and too much free time can host a bulletin board.
- Models are getting dumber on purpose — a pointed argument about quiet quality regressions behind the scenes.
- You can just choose how many bugs you want now — a wry look at what "move fast" costs when the code is written for you.
That's the stack for today — a watermark scandal, a model that can't stop thinking, and a language that had to relearn what it was for. Reply if you've spotted something worth the next issue, and send this along to anyone who'd enjoy the mix.
Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖