Warp, weft, and WebGL

Hey 👋 — today's mix is equal parts loom and login: a Three.js demo that unravels images thread by thread, a look back at the demoscene's last gasp in America, and a reverse-engineering deep dive into how Zoom knows you're two-timing it with Google Meet.

Building an infinite loom: unravelling images into threads with Three.js

Codrops walks through "Unwoven," a Three.js demo that slices an image into 26 independently animated ribbon strips and lets them braid together or fray apart as you scroll. It's the kind of tutorial the site does best — full shader and geometry breakdown, nothing left as an exercise for the reader — and the effect itself is genuinely hypnotic to watch. Most image sliders shuffle pictures around; this one pulls them apart at the seams.

"Most image sliders move pictures around. This one takes them apart." — Codrops

Who killed the American demoscene? (2019)

An older Vice feature, freshly rediscovered on HN, follows Synchrony — one of the last live demoparties in the US — and asks why a scene that thrives in Europe never took root stateside. It's a good companion piece to the weaving demo above: same lineage of real-time, code-as-craft audiovisual work, just a much scrappier, CRT-lit chapter of it (via HN discussion).

How Zoom detects Google Meet without microphone access

A tidy bit of reverse-engineering: Zoom apparently figures out you're already on a Google Meet or Teams call not by snooping your mic, but by reading macOS's Control Center privacy logs and Windows's microphone-usage registry entries. No permissions required, just a keen eye for the exhaust fumes an OS leaves behind — the kind of hack that makes you a little more paranoid about what your laptop is quietly logging.

The revolt of the reader

Bryan Cantrill argues that readers can spot LLM-authored prose almost instantly, and that the reaction isn't neutral — it's hostility, often followed by readers simply tuning out the author for good. He backs it with survey data showing developers abandoning writing mid-read once they smell the machine, which makes for an uncomfortable but pointed read if you've ever wondered whether your audience notices (via Lobsters discussion).

Quick hits

• Terpstra Keyboard — an alternative keyboard layout that makes microtonal music look almost sensible.
• Show HN: Cowbull — Wordle stripped of letter hints, leaving you with nothing but match counts and your own dwindling confidence.
• FLT: Anthropic has beaten me to it — a mathematician's wry reaction to being scooped by an AI on Fermat's Last Theorem.

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.