The modern web browser is now far more than a thing for rendering web pages, it’s a multi-faceted environment that can provide a home for almost any application you could imagine. But why should JavaScript or Wasm have all the fun? CSS is Turing complete now, right? Why not, as [Lyra Rebane] has done, write […]
[Danny Spencer] has a brilliant graphical demo that, like all great demos, flexes a deep understanding of the underlying system: a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color. If you’re not familiar with shaders, they were originally mathematical lighting models (hence the name) and are an integral part of the modern 3D graphics pipeline. […]
You may or may not know, but printf is a Turing-complete language, once you exploit all the strange and wonderful format characters in it (especially %n). But who has time to write code as printf modifiers? Now, thanks to [sebsite], you can at least write in a slightly higher level assembly language and compile to […]
During the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear “dead man’s switch” was central to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In the event that one side was annihilated by the other, an automated system would be triggered to deliver a revenge strike that would ultimately destroy the attacker. It was the ultimate defense, […]
When World of Warcraft was launched in 2004, it became somewhat of a juggernaut in the MMORPG space. Millions of players continue to login every month. [Kelsi Davis] is one such player, but she doesn’t always log in with the regular client anymore. That’s because she put together WoWee—an open-source alternative of her very own. WoWee […]
The ancient question of whether or not it’s possible to construct a circle with the same area as a given square using only a drawing compass and straightedge was finally answered in 1882, where it was proved that pi is a transcendental number, meaning it cannot be accurately represented in a compass-and-straightedge system. This inability […]
It is no secret that we often use and abuse bash to write things that ought to be in a different language. But bash does have its attractions. In the modern world, it is practically everywhere. It can also be very expressive, but perhaps hard to read. We’ve talked about Amber before, a language that […]
Plenty of our childhoods had at least one math teacher who made the (ultimately erroneous) claim that we needed to learn to do math because we wouldn’t always have a calculator in our pockets. While the reasoning isn’t particularly sound anymore, knowing how to do math from first principles is still a good idea in […]
What would happen if you lost your memory, even partially? With so much of our lives being digital, forgetting your passwords (or the master key to your password manager) could be disastrous. Haunted by that specter after a concussion, [eljojo] created ReMemory, a tool based on Shamir’s Secret Sharing to help your friends help you. […]