WOAH.
Sightings from the internet's outer edge: sites, machines and builds that make you scroll back up and check how they did it. Screenshots first. Receipts always.
01 · On the web ·
The art is an algorithm someone left running
Anders Hoff writes small generative programs, differential growth, branching hyphae, sanded splines, then lets simple local rules run until they buckle into organic art.
02 · Play ·
Paint a low-poly planet into being, one tile at a time
Oskar Stalberg's Planet lets you brush terrain onto a tiny globe; hand-built tiles snap to your edits via the vertex trick that grew into Townscaper.
03 · Machines ·
The chip on screen is simulated, the firmware running on it is real
Wokwi simulates an ESP32 or Arduino in the browser by running the actual compiled firmware against a software model of the chip, not a rough approximation of it.
04 · Play ·
One developer's shelf of physics toys, and every one runs real simulation
Saharan's oimo.io works page is a grid of browser toys backed by actual numerics: SIMD water drops, GPGPU fur, MLS-MPM fluid, and a physics engine he wrote himself.
05 · Play ·
In defense of the one-more-minute machine
The best sightings all steal time the same honest way, and the mechanism deserves a name.
06 · On the web ·
Fold a Julia fractal until the math finally makes sense
Steven Wittens' essay How to Fold a Julia Fractal builds the Mandelbrot set from scratch with live WebGL diagrams, rendered by his MathBox library on top of Three.js.
07 · Play ·
The Game of Life went continuous and started growing creatures
Lenia takes Conway's Game of Life off its grid of on-off cells and makes it smooth. What emerges are gliding, self-repairing creatures. More than 400 have been catalogued.
08 · Machines ·
Build a working CPU starting from a single NAND gate
The Nand Game hands you one NAND gate and has you wire your way up through logic, adders and memory to a real processor that runs machine code, in the browser.
29 sightings logged
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