The manifesto that still compiles
Hey 👋 — today's mix has a nice throughline: old ideas about code and authorship colliding with new tools that make those ideas tangible. A 26-year-old manifesto, a live-coding language built to prove its point, and a goo that dances to music all show up making the same argument from different angles.
2000 generative art manifesto by Adrian Ward & Alex McLean
Long before "generative art" was a marketplace category, software artists Adrian Ward and Alex McLean wrote a manifesto — originally aimed at music, but it reads just as well pointed at code-driven visuals — built around a deceptively simple split: the artist dictates the code, the code dictates the output. That distinction still does a lot of quiet work in how we think about authorship when a machine is doing the drawing. It's aged well precisely because it never tried to predict the tools, only the relationship between maker and process (via @artblocks_io on X).
TidalCycles – live coding music with algorithmic patterns
In the same spirit, TidalCycles is the open-source live-coding environment (Haskell under the hood, SuperCollider making the sound) where composing means typing patterns that unfold into polyrhythms in real time. It's the parent project of the web-based Strudel, and it's basically the manifesto above turned into a working instrument — the code really does dictate the output, on stage, in front of an audience (via HN discussion).
Run Rob Run: building a music-reactive goo with Three.js and WebGPU
Flip the relationship around and you get this Codrops breakdown: a portfolio site where a blob-like "goo" morphs between organic form and rigid cube, driven by custom geometry deformation, live audio analysis, and scroll position. Here the sound dictates the code's behavior rather than the other way around — worth a read if you want the actual shader and deformation logic, not just the demo reel.
Are we thinking correctly about AI intelligence?
Cognitive scientist Melanie Mitchell makes the case, in a Quanta podcast, that LLMs aren't reasoning like humans at all but running a genuinely "alien intelligence" — and that we'd learn more by borrowing measurement tools from developmental and animal cognition than by grading them on human tests. It's a useful corrective to both the doom and the hype camps, from a magazine that rarely wastes your time.
A look at the geolocation HTML element and how it works
Chrome 144 is experimenting with an actual <geolocation> HTML element — permission handling, auto-location, and a styleable :granted state, all without a line of JavaScript. Small platform news, but the kind that quietly reshapes how many location prompts you'll stop writing boilerplate for.
Quick hits
- Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful — a designer argues the "AI-proof" typeface trend protects nothing but vibes.
- Show HN: Huzzah – a novel approach to coding with AI — one developer's attempt to make pairing with a model feel less like babysitting.
- Don't paste the AI, please — a small, pointed monument to AI fatigue.
- RPCS3 shader float-to-uint conversion bug fix for AMD GPUs — the kind of one-bit fix that only reveals itself after months of "why is this pixel wrong."
- Three.js Water Pro v3.4 update with Jerlov water types — now your fake ocean can be scientifically the wrong color, on purpose.
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