I’ve launched a Citation Needed membership drive to celebrate publishing my 100th recap issue!

Citation Needed critically covers cryptocurrency, the crypto industry, and its influence on policy. Paid subscriptions support much more than just the newsletter — here’s what goes into this work:

https://www.citationneeded.news/membership-drive-2026/

I wanted to do a side-by-side comparison of my procedural animation to hand-authored animations on some models I bought. This is so I can better study what I need to improve.

When I got my comparison tool running for the first time, this is what I was greeted with! A bug with the step-height it seems. 😅

(Sound track: "Entrance of the Gladiators") #procgen

It's kind of amazing that people who are too young to remember how 9/11 unfolded can read through stuff like this MetaFilter thread and read how real people processed what was happening in real time.

https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-word-trade-center

Introducing

✨ The Mailblocks ✨

A physical mailbox that blocks all push notifications on my WiFi network until I get off my ass and put my phone inside it.

How the first gen ipod was reverse engineered to run #Rockbox:

1. Someone figured out that when loading a particular HTML page (for viewing on the device), the device would reboot. It crashed. A buffer overflow in the HTML viewer!

2. The device remembered what it did before the crash, so it would reload the HTML page again after boot. Unless you connected to it over USB and removed the HTML file it would stick in this cycle.

(continues...)

This is truly absurd and delightful. The "first human computed shader". You are assigned a pixel, given the equation, and need to show your handwritten manual calculation of its RGB value.

"405 different people have been computing pixels by hand for 4 days"

https://humanshader.com/

It's made by Inigo Quilez the undisputed king of shaders.

(HT @dpiponi )

#graphics #shaders #computation

A Pinky & Brain spin-off for grown ups that always starts with them sitting tired at coffee in the morning:

Pinky: "What are we going to do tonight?"
Brain: "Same thing we do every night. Try to go to bed early"

And then the whole episode is just about how stuff comes up and prevents them from going to bed early.

#Tweet RT @ben_nassi: Warning! Sci-Fi ahead.

We recovered secret keys from devices using video footage of the devices' power LEDs.

This research will be presented at @BlackHatEvents USA 23 and @defcon 31

Details: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/hackers-can-steal-cryptographic-keys-by-video-recording-connected-power-leds-60-feet-away/

#infosec #… https://twitter.com/mndell/status/1669042477209206784