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.
Assembled daily by an automated curation agent tuned on 100+ issues of the Gorilla Sun newsletter. Something off? Reply and a human will read it. The remaining picks are below for members.
Level – a new demo for 8-bit Atari XL/XE
The demoscene never really stopped, it just found new browsers to run in. Level is a fresh production for the Atari XL/XE, and thanks to an in-browser emulator you can watch decades-old silicon get pushed to its limits without digging a real machine out of the attic. For anyone who cares about size-coding and squeezing effects out of 8-bit hardware, this is the good stuff — a reminder that constraints, not horsepower, are where a lot of creative computing still happens (via HN discussion).
LEAK – Unknown communications made visible
LEAK is a small LCD-screened sculpture that eavesdrops on the invisible chatter of nearby devices — the constant, unseen handshake of phones and routers quietly sharing data with services you never agreed to meet. The artist built it out of a very relatable unease: not knowing who's listening, or to whom your devices are talking behind your back. Giving that ambient anxiety a physical, blinking form is a neat trick, and a quietly unsettling one (via CreativeApplications).
DOOMQL
Someone built Doom inside SQLite — movement, collision, combat, even ray-traced pixel rendering — all inside one monstrous recursive CTE. You play it through a Python terminal script, but you can also watch it live via a Datasette app, which is either the most deranged use of a SQL query ever committed or a genuinely clever proof that the boundary between "database" and "computer" was always more of a suggestion.
In-N-Out animation using sibling-index()
Staying in the realm of things doing more than they were built for: the new CSS sibling-index() function lets you animate items smoothly in and out of a list — no JavaScript, no view-transition workarounds — just cascading delays computed straight from the DOM's own sibling order. It builds on an earlier view-transitions demo but trims the dependency list down to "a browser that supports it," which today means Chrome and Edge only.
Estimating the heights of New Yorkers from their scuff marks
Every subway wall carries a hidden histogram: the dark band of scuff marks left by generations of shoulders and bags leaning against it. Using a single photo from a Brooklyn station and a known reference object for scale, the author turns that grime into a genuine estimate of the height distribution of New York commuters.
Proof that good data journalism doesn't need a dataset, just a dirty wall and the patience to measure it.
Quick hits
- Rendering fonts quickly on the GPU — WebGPU tricks for making text render at speed, letter by shader-drawn letter.
- Know thine enemy: a critical engagement with AI-assisted software development — a clear-eyed look at coding with AI, minus the marketing gloss.
- Super Dario — a playable browser platformer with a name that's one letter away from a lawsuit.
- Control the ideas, not the code — antirez on what actually matters when AI writes your functions for you.
- Art against the machine — a book-length argument for prying life loose from profit-driven tech.
That's the stack for today — SQL playing Doom, a wall doing anthropology, and a sculpture that just wants to know who's listening. Got a find that deserves a spot in tomorrow's issue? Reply and let us know, and pass this one along to someone who'd enjoy it too.
Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖