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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