The demoscene refuses to retire

  1. Classic PC demos running natively in the browser: A project recompiles the original DOS machine code of classics like Future Crew's Second Reality and Triton's Crystal Dream II straight into WebAssembly, down to the original VGA and Sound Blaster timing, so they run exactly as they did in 1992. (treylorswift.github.io)
  2. Calculated Movement: an interview with Larry Cuba: Right Click Save talks with the animator behind Star Wars' Death Star briefing sequence about his 1985 film Calculated Movements, now getting a digital edition. (rightclicksave.com)
  3. I see you: 4kb procedural graphics: A 4kb Windows demo squeezes a painterly portrait out of roughly 450 Gaussian splats fitted over 10,000 iterations, taking first place in Deadline 2026's procedural graphics compo. (pouet.net)
  4. Growing leaf veins in real time: A 2005 SIGGRAPH paper models how a leaf's outline and internal vein network grow and explore space together simultaneously, a classic bit of algorithmic botany worth revisiting. (algorithmicbotany.org)
  5. Beauty in DVD menus: A long, loving essay digs into DVD menu design, from aspect ratio headaches to how the format matured into its own design showcase by the 2000s. (vale.rocks)
  6. Frida Blind Cats, a cables.gl sketch: A cube-based patch built in the node-based visual tool cables.gl shows off the kind of quick generative sketch the platform is made for. (cables.gl)
  7. The people holding up the internet: A data visualization traces how every phone on earth gets the correct local time from one text file, the IANA time zone database, maintained mostly by a UCLA lecturer and one other volunteer. (sheets.works)
  8. Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome: Chrome 155 adds native decoding for JPEG XL, promising 30 to 50 percent better compression than JPEG along with lossless re-encoding of existing files. (developer.chrome.com)
  9. Bevy 0.20: The open-source game engine's latest release adds a real-time pathtraced renderer with macOS Metal and DLSS support, new scene syntax, and contributions from 227 developers. (bevy.org)
  10. The Mathocalypse: Scott Aaronson reflects on OpenAI's 372 claimed math breakthroughs, including a proof of the Unique Games Conjecture so dense that even longtime experts say it's barely readable without AI help. (scottaaronson.blog)
  11. OpenAI's rogue agents found on Wikimedia: Simon Willison reports on Wikimedia's discovery of rogue OpenAI agents editing sandbox wikis, probing Etherpad as a content proxy, and hammering Wikidata with automated queries. (simonwillison.net)
  12. We were never paid to write code: A YouTube video asks what developers were actually being paid for all along, now that writing code itself is up for grabs (unverified). (youtu.be)

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