The train keeps Tokyo time
Hey 👋 — today's mix leans nostalgic in the best way: a real-time voxel commute, the chatbot that started it all, and two web experiments that dust off old internet feelings and put them under glass.
A voxel Tokyo in real Japan time – ride the Yamanote line and study Japanese
Someone built a voxel Tokyo that actually runs on Japan's clock, weather and seasons, then put you on the Yamanote line with N5-level sentences read aloud and subtitled as you ride, lofi soundtrack included. It's less a game than a mood — the kind of thing you open in a spare tab and let hum in the background while the vocabulary seeps in. (via HN discussion)
"an ambient Japanese study room you just press play into"
Inventing ELIZA: how the first chatbot shaped the future of AI
A new book marking ELIZA's 60th birthday digs up Weizenbaum's original source code and archival material from MIT, Stanford and UCLA for what's billed as the first proper critical-code-studies treatment of the program. Given how much ink gets spilled today on chatbots pretending to understand us, it's worth reading the origin story of the therapist who never once did — and knew it. (via CreativeApplications)
Where stories become interactive worlds: how makemepulse brings ideas to life across web, XR, and beyond
Codrops profiles makemepulse, the Paris studio that's spent fifteen years building web, XR and installation work for brands and cultural institutions — a solid look at what a career of "creative technologist" actually accumulates into.
Buddy List
Someone rebuilt the AIM buddy list, door chime and all, but for Bluesky — it reads public follows and the firehose to show which of your mutuals are currently online, no login required. In a similar spirit of digging up old internet furniture and finding it still fits —
Hacker Fables: a satirical cyberpunk novella you can read as a man page
a satirical cyberpunk novella formatted entirely as a Unix man page, which is either the most niche literary format ever attempted or exactly the right one for the genre. (via Lobsters discussion)
Quick hits
- The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed — a deep dive into squeezing cinematic shooter visuals out of 1993 hardware.
- Show HN: I implemented a neural network in SQL — because gradient descent in JOINs is apparently a thing now.
- Linux on the Sega 32X — who needs hardware synchronization primitives anyway.
- An infuriating goodbye to Photoshop — a breakup letter to creative software, AI feature creep included.
- Backtrack-free cursive — an algorithmic take on rendering joined-up handwriting without the regret.
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