This guy built a visual scanner that reads 468... points on his face and 42 points on his hands from a regular webcam and turns them into a cloud of thousands of particles right between his palms. Inside, MediaPipe and TouchDesigner are linked: the first captures hands and face from the webcam with high accuracy, the second turns those coordinates into a live plane and feeds it into a POP system that instantly generates a swarm of particles in the shape of a head. No studio, no render farmer, no VR headset. Just a laptop, a webcam, and 1 TouchDesigner session. And traditional VJ studios keep teams of 5 people on a setup with lighting, custom hardware, and commercial plugins, while his expenses are only a TouchDesigner subscription and a regular USB camera. One laptop runs MediaPipe and TouchDesigner simultaneously, holds the camera stream at 60 FPS without drops, and in parallel processes 468 face points + 21 points on each hand. The camera captures frame after frame, MediaPipe in real time sends TouchDesigner the finger coordinates and face geometry, and the POP operator inside the engine translates those numbers into thousands of particle points with colors from bright pink to gold. This setup immediately defines the role of the tool and the limits of its autonomy. It knows where the fingertips are at every moment of the frame. It knows how to read the face geometry at any angle to the camera. It knows how to draw a swarm of particles between them with the right color and contour. → MediaPipe pulls 468 points from the face and 21 points from each hand, 60 times per second → TouchDesigner receives those coordinates, builds a virtual rectangle between the fingertips, and feeds it into the POP system → POP generates thousands of particle points in the shape of a head, coloring them in a gradient from bright pink to gold → The HUD layer adds green corners and a blue neon frame, styling the image like an AR interface → All layers assemble into 1 real-time frame that projects back onto the video in the camera window → The final image is recorded to a file or broadcast to a projector for a live installation And only when the guy spreads his hands wider does the plane between the palms stretch; brings them together, it narrows. Otherwise the system runs on its own. And when he moves from his home room to a concert hall, the same laptop with the same webcam launches the same TouchDesigner session in just 5 minutes, without reconfiguration, without a new team, and without a single line of new code. In his work setup there is no studio of his own and no team for assembly. On the desk sits a laptop with a webcam, on top run MediaPipe and TouchDesigner with POP operators, and the same setup through a USB camera moves to any concert without a new configuration. Out of everything I have seen this year, this is the cleanest Creative Coding setup on 1 laptop: 0 render farms, 0 studio lighting, and between them 3 libraries, thousands of particle points, and 1 webcam.show more

A guy from China is reshaping glowing particles into... a jellyfish, a statue, a dragon, and a samurai just by moving his hands in front of a camera No controller, no mouse, no keyboard Just a camera reading his hand position and a particle system recalculating thousands of points in real time, morphing one shape straight into the next Clench both fists at the end, and everything collapses into nothing This is running live at 60fps, not pre-rendered The entire scene sits inside a wireframe box tracking every motion as raw geometry reshapes into whatever his hands tell it to becomeshow more

Apple spent 7 years and $3,500 per unit building... Vision Pro, this guy did something better with a webcam in his bedroom. And no, this isn't a render, it's running live on his laptop right now with a webcam pointed at his hands. The webcam tracks 21 points on each of his hands in real time, every fingertip, every knuckle, every joint, mapped to a 3D skeleton at 60 frames per second. A piece of digital silk is rigged to that skeleton, so when he opens his palm the fabric drapes across his fingers, when he closes his hand it crumples in his fist, when he tilts his wrist the cloth slides off and folds with real physics, light reflecting off it like actual material. He can grab it, stretch it, throw it, catch it, all with his bare hands and zero hardware on his body. No headset, no gloves, no $3,500 face computer, no 600 gram brick on his skull, no 2 hour battery, no Apple ID, no App Store. Just a webcam, TouchDesigner and a kid who saw the Vision Pro keynote and thought, I can do that for free. Apple has 3,000 engineers, $200 billion in cash and 7 years of development time, they built a face computer most people will never own. This guy has a laptop, a webcam and a weekend, he built a future most people can actually use. The mixed reality industry just got embarrassed by a guy in a white t-shirt.show more

THIS 12-YEAR-OLD CHINESE KID JUST BUILT THE IRON MAN... INTERFACE WITHOUT WRITING A LINE OF CODE He waves his hand and 6500 particles on the screen behind him morph into Saturn, then a globe, then an alien mountain range. The trick is MediaPipe tracking his fingers through a laptop webcam, mapped to a particle physics engine running in the browser. He didn't write the code. He told Gemini what he wanted to see, copy-pasted the output, and shipped it to GitHub the same night. The ceiling for what a kid in his bedroom can build has quietly become absurd. Last year this was a Stanford grad project and this year it is a Tuesday... Save this time capsule from 2026 ↓show more

THIS CHINESE GIRL CREATING INSANE AI VISUALS WITH HER... FINGERS IN REAL TIME. THE TOOLS COST $0. While most visual artists are paying $150+/month for tools that rate limit mid-performance and send every prompt to a third-party server – this runs entirely offline on a normal laptop. –> TouchDesigner: free for non-commercial use. –> Ollama: open source since 2023. –> Total monthly cost: $0. Here's what $0 actually builds: –> Hand tracking with AI logic: MediaPipe tracks your hands, AI reads coordinates and triggers visual states. No hardcoded rules. –> Audio-reactive visuals: Audio feeds into Ollama every frame. AI returns parameters. TouchDesigner renders. Full loop under 50ms. –> Live performance: AI generates color palettes, particle behaviors, scene transitions from crowd audio, MIDI, microphone, camera. All real-time. –> Client installations: No API key that expires. No subscription that dies mid-show. Hand over the laptop and it runs forever. The $150/month tools go down at the worst moment. This doesn't go down. Ever. Your laptop. $0/month. A visual studio that runs forever. Bookmark this post. Full demo in the video below.show more

This Chinese guy built a Second Brain in Obsidian... and every morning gets 3 trading ideas that brought him $180,000 in 6 months. Inside he runs a pipeline of 6 workflows on N8N that automatically pulls every read article, listened podcast, and voice note into a shared Obsidian vault, and a neural network analyst every morning at 6:00 finds connections between the fresh and the old and puts the 3 strongest trading ideas for the day into the inbox. No analytics desk, no Bloomberg terminal, no Telegram chats with traders. Just a Mac Mini by the wall, an iPhone in the pocket, and 1 local Obsidian vault. And traditional quant funds keep entire teams of 8 people on salary for the same flow of insights, while his expenses are only subscriptions to Readwise, Whisper API, and N8N hosting. 6 pipelines process about 200 sources a day and close the monthly API bill at about $120. The Mac Mini itself stores the entire vault and keeps the neural network analyst running 24/7, and from the iPhone the owner drops any idea he hears on the go into a Telegram bot, and it lands in the vault inbox in just 30 seconds. The starting instruction that sits in the VAULT.md file at the root of his vault looks like this: "you are the AI analyst of a solo trader. you read his vault every morning at 6:00, find connections between fresh and old notes, and deliver 3 trading ideas he can verify in the hour before the market opens. pipelines: // Reader (pulls every article and highlight from Readwise, Twitter bookmarks, and Kindle into /notes) // Listener (transcribes podcasts through Airr and voice notes through Whisper, puts them in /notes) // Catcher (accepts any message from the Telegram bot and writes it to /inbox with a timestamp) // Connector (every night reads across the entire vault and updates the connection graph between 4,000 notes) // Briefer (at 6:00 AM writes a brief: 3 trading ideas for today plus the emerging thesis of the week, puts it in /inbox) // Mobile (lives in the iPhone, answers any question about the vault by voice, and confirms alerts while the owner is on the go). you wake the owner with a push notification only when a fresh note contradicts his active thesis or when 1 of the 3 morning ideas has a confidence score above 90%." This instruction immediately sets the role for the system and the limits of its autonomy. It knows it is supposed to connect new with old on its own. It knows it is supposed to prepare 3 trading ideas every morning on its own. It knows it connects the live trader only when a thesis is contradicted or an ultra-confident idea appears. → Reader pulls about 80 articles and highlights a day from Readwise, Twitter, and Kindle → Listener transcribes 4 to 6 podcasts a week through Airr and Whisper → Catcher intercepts all voice and text ideas through the Telegram bot, averaging 15 to 20 a day → Connector updates the connection graph between 4,000 notes every night, adding 25 to 30 new edges → Briefer puts a fresh brief with 3 trading ideas and the emerging thesis into the inbox at exactly 6:00 → Mobile answers any question about the vault by voice and confirms alerts right from the iPhone And only when a new note contradicts his active thesis or 1 of the ideas breaks 90% confidence does the orchestrator raise the owner with a push notification. And when the trader at that moment is driving to the gym or eating breakfast, the Mobile agent in his iPhone answers any quick question about the vault by voice: what he wrote about this ticker last week, which 3 sources support the idea of long NVDA, and what counter-thesis already sits in his notes. The trader makes the decision and sends the order before New York opens. The fresh brief from last Monday looks like this: "reader: 78 materials added over the weekend, 11 of them about semiconductors, 4 about energy, 3 about biotech. passing to connector." "connector: 27 new connections found between fresh materials and the vault, the strongest one is that the Goldman report from Wednesday matches the NVDA thesis you wrote 3 weeks ago." "briefer: 3 trading ideas for today: long NVDA (confidence 0.84), short Tesla at the close of the quarterly report (0.71), watch URI (0.62). emerging thesis of the week: the market is underpricing capex on data centers." "alert: your fresh note about long-term risk in semis contradicts the NVDA thesis. sending for review." In his work setup there is no cloud server, no team of analysts, and not even a Bloomberg subscription. At home sits a Mac Mini with a local Obsidian vault, on top run 6 N8N pipelines and a neural network analyst, and the same vault mirrors to a secure terminal on the iPhone. Out of everything I have seen this year, this is the cleanest solo trading setup on a second brain: $120 a month on the API, about $30,000 a month into the account, and between them 6 pipelines, 4,000 connected notes, and 1 iPhone in the pocket.show more

SOMEONE BUILT A WAY TO SEND FILES BETWEEN TWO... PHONES WITH NO WIFI, NO BLUETOOTH AND NO NETWORK AT ALL it works with just a screen flashing qr codes at a camera one device plays an endless stream of animated qr codes, the other one points its camera at the screen and rebuilds the file out of the light no pairing, no app, no shared network, nothing but the camera > its pulling about 129 kb/s, a full 2mb image transfers in seconds > theres no back channel, the receiver can never ask for a missed frame, so it uses fountain codes, every frame is a scrambled mix of the file rather than one piece of it > that means the receiver just collects any frames it can catch in any order, and once it has enough it can reconstruct the whole file > dropping frames costs you a little time but never breaks the transfer > you can point the camera at a stream thats already running and it just locks on mid flight he was building a cached mp3 player because he was sick of ads and bad streaming quality. he wanted a way to send tracks phone to phone without both phones being on the same network, and realized flashing qr codes could carry the data he built the whole working prototype in one night with claude code its open source and already at 375 starsshow more

Wow! Send A File By Just The Camera! A... vibe coder used AI to build a file transfer system that sends data between two phones using only a screen and a camera. One phone displays a new type of animated QR codes while the other scans them to rebuild the file, with no Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cables needed. It is fully optical and local. The system uses fountain codes that create each QR frame as a random mix of file data. This keeps transfers working even if some frames are missed, reaching speeds of about 129 KB/s for a 2 MB image. The entire project was built in one night and released as open source. The idea came from a music project where the developer wanted to share MP3 files without streaming or using the same network. Animated QR codes became the solution, showing a creative new way to transfer files with everyday phone hardware. GitHub link:show more

China just dropped an open source model that turns... any phone into a 3D scanner you point it at a room and walk through it the whole space builds itself into a 3D point cloud in real time as the camera moves, no LiDAR and no depth sensor anywhere it held a full 13 minute walkthrough at 25,000 frames without the map drifting or collapsing > ~20 fps on a single GPU > works indoors and outdoors from plain footage > the scan normally needs a $50,000 rig and a technician > Apache 2.0 and runs fully offline on your machine repo in the replyshow more

A 20-year-old engineering enthusiast from Guangdong Province has shared... his new invention A display, wires, a circuit board, a circular frame detector, and a battery He places a part inside the ring, the sensors recognize the item, and it instantly appears on the display The project creator claims he used a combination of a high-frequency inductance coil, custom firmware running on a powerful microcontroller, and a matrix of field sensors According to him, the device captures the slightest changes in electromagnetic response and material density, digitizing the shape of the object in a fraction of a secondshow more

THIS $2 AI VISUAL SETUP JUST MADE A $250/MONTH... CREATIVE STACK LOOK STUPID he moves his hand, the particles react, and the whole scene updates in real time. no cloud render farm, no paid visual API, no expensive plugin chain quietly eating money every month most people still think ai visuals require a stack of $39 tools, $89 subscriptions, and constant API usage. but here the loop is simple: TouchDesigner handles the visuals, a local model handles the logic, and the laptop does the rest the important part is not that the particles look cool. the important part is that the “brain” behind the visual no longer has to live on someone else’s server once that moves local, the monthly bill falls off a cliff this is probably how a lot of small studios start building visuals soon: not by renting 6 tools forever, but by owning one system that runs almost for freeshow more

THIS GUY TURNED HIMSELF INTO AN AI GIRL IN... ONE SECOND. THE WORKFLOW BEHIND IT CAN RUN A $5,000/MONTH FANVUE PAGE IN 40 MINUTES A DAY 00:01 he raises his arms and instantly turns into an AI girl sitting in the same chair, ready to stream without ever showing his real face Claude creates the name, personality, captions and replies. one prompt can generate a full week of content while keeping the same character across TikTok and Fanvue ComfyUI with Flux builds the face and photo library. Kling 3.0 animates the images, then CapCut turns them into 30 to 50 short videos in one afternoon three daily streams and one clip reaching 400,000 views can send 70 buyers into a $15 Fanvue subscription. paid messages and tips are what push the page past $5,000 he stays behind the camera, Claude runs the brain and the AI girl becomes a business that works every dayshow more

It is wild to me that this design got... from someone’s cute idea (“Let’s put the Union Jack on the tail lights!”) through every step of production and regulation and onto the road, resulting in a right turn signal that points left and a left turn signal that points rightshow more

Mx. Glitter Eyes is out here putting his life... “on the line” for the Progress Pride flag. Points at the rainbow like it’s the 101st Airborne. He points to the flag of Hawaii and declares he’d die for it. Points at the Nazi flag like “not only burn.” Points at the American flag as an afterthought, but says he would burn and piss on it. This is the same energy as a guy who gets winded opening a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos declaring he’s ready to die for the cause. Leftism in 2026: non-binary pronouns, Sephora-tier eyeshadow, and cosplaying as a revolutionary from the safety of a hexagonal shelf full of knick-knacks. These people aren’t serious. They’re just loud.show more

A HARDWARE MODDER BOLTED A BATTERY PACK ONTO A... $599 MAC MINI M4 AND TURNED A DESK SERVER INTO A BACKPACK AI RIG THAT RUNS FOR EIGHT HOURS WITHOUT A WALL OUTLET he posts a video of the mac mini with a slim battery module clamped to the side, USB-C plugged into the back. no power brick, no outlet, just the 10 to 30W draw of the M4 chip pulling from a 20,000mAh bank. a full work day on one charge. this is not a portable laptop trick. it is a desk-class AI server that fits in a sling bag the same $599 mac mini i recommended in last week's article as the silent default, now untethered. pair it with a mobile hotspot or a Starlink mini and you have a fully off-grid LLM stack that answers questions in a forest, on a plane, in a power outage. the model lives in the box, the battery powers the box, that is the whole stack this is not a gadget. it is the first time the words "AI server" and "fits in your bag" belong in the same sentenceshow more

There is a room in Málaga that was built... to be the closest thing on earth to standing inside heaven. It is called the camarín of the Virgin of Victory, and it is hidden at the top of a tower inside the Santuario de la Victoria. To reach it, you climb and the ascent is the entire point... The building you are climbing through was completed in 1700, and it was designed as a single argument made in stone. At the bottom lies a crypt: a black chamber crowded with white plaster skeletons, a meditation on death and the brevity of life. From there a staircase rises, and as you climb it the light grows stronger and the imagery changes from bones to saints. The architects of the time understood this ascent as the soul's own journey, the dark crypt as the stage of penitence, the staircase as the stage of spiritual progress, and the room at the very top as the final stage: the union of the soul with the divine. That room at the top is the camarín, and its dome is one of the most extraordinary interiors in Spain... Every surface is covered in white and gold plasterwork. There is no empty space anywhere. The Baroque called this horror vacui, the horror of the void: the conviction that a space meant to represent heaven should not contain a single bare patch of stone. Out of that plasterwork emerge angels, flowers, birds, and mirrors. The mirrors are not decoration alone. They catch the light pouring in through the windows of the drum and throw it around the chamber, so that the gold seems to move and the whole room appears to shimmer and breathe. This wonder was built by people who believed that if you wanted to show a human being what heaven might feel like, you did not describe it to them. You built a room, and you let them climb into it... -- -- -- If you enjoyed this, I write a weekly newsletter read by over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us here: If you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible.show more

It is not possible to kill enemy dogs in... Indiana Jones and the Great Circle; you can only scare them into a docile state with the whip or gunfire. If the player points a gun at a defeated dog and pulls the trigger, Indy will check his gun instead of firing.show more

A driver caught on surveillance camera flying through an... intersection in Murray Utah and the internet is going crazy trying to figure out who is at fault here - this is exactly the kind of reckless driving that turns a normal afternoon into a tragedy in a split second. Intersections are already one of the most dangerous spots on any road and when somebody decides the rules don’t apply to them everybody around them becomes a victim of that decision. Watch the video and drop your verdict in the comments.show more

wait what?? Seedance 2.0 went crazy with this prompt... 🦾 This is real early 2000s home video footage shot on a VHS camcorder at a crowded public swimming pool. The video has the typical grain, color, and soft quality of consumer video from that era. The camera is very shaky and handheld, filming from the side of the pool. On the diving board there is a very fat man wearing a homemade jetpack made out of what looks like metal tubes and bottles strapped to his back. A group of people around the pool are cheering and laughing, hyping him up. The guy runs and jumps off the diving board, then activates the jetpack mid-air. He manages to fly a few meters forward over the pool, but the jetpack starts struggling under his weight. He slowly loses height and ends up crashing into the water with a big splash. Right after he falls in, another fat guy with a mullet haircut jumps into the pool holding a can of beer. He swims over to the guy with the jetpack, who is still half-floating with the device on, and hands him the beer. The jetpack guy takes it and starts drinking while still in the water. Everyone around the pool goes crazy cheering and laughing at the whole scene. The camera movement is extremely shaky and reactive the entire time, with constant motion, motion blur during the jump and the crash, and the typical imperfections of someone filming with an old camcorder in a crowded place. There are several fast, unplanned cuts as the person filming tries to follow the chaos. Natural sound only: people cheering and laughing, the sound of the jetpack, the big splash when he crashes, and general pool ambience recorded with the camcorder microphone. The result must feel like authentic raw early 2000s home video of someone casually filming an absolutely ridiculous moment at a public swimming pool. Now is your turn! Tweak it and share it 🫡show more

Elon Musk gave the entire entertainment industry its expiration... date, and he is the one building the thing that kills it. Musk: “My guess is that we see the first compelling half hour, pure AI show next year.” Next year. A complete show generated entirely by AI. No writers. No actors. No cameras. No sets. No crew. No studio. Just a prompt and enough compute to render a reality that never physically existed. And shows are the easy part. Musk: “I say probably we’re maybe three years away from AI does the whole video game.” A show plays the same way every time. A game has to generate a living world that reacts to every decision in real time across every single frame. That is a fundamentally harder class of problem. And Musk put three years on it. Right now a single AAA title takes seven years and half a billion dollars across thousands of engineers and artists just to ship it. Musk is describing a world where one person types a paragraph and gets something comparable. The entire value proposition of a multi-billion dollar industry lives inside that gap. And it closes in thirty-six months. But the prediction is not the story. The person making it is. This is not an analyst speculating from the sidelines. This is the man building the largest AI compute clusters on the planet. The man who built xAI from zero in under two years. The man stacking hundreds of thousands of GPUs into facilities designed to do exactly what he is describing. When Musk says three years, he is not guessing about what someone else might eventually ship. He is reading you a delivery date off his own roadmap. Every media company on Earth is valued on a single assumption. That quality content is expensive and difficult to produce at scale. That one assumption is the structural foundation underneath every studio, every network, and every publisher in existence. Musk is dismantling it with raw compute. The studios still parading thousand-person production teams are not demonstrating strength. They are advertising the exact cost structure that one person with a prompt and a GPU allocation is about to make irrelevant. And it does not stop at entertainment. If AI can generate an interactive world that responds to human input in real time, it can generate anything. Advertising. Architecture. Training simulations. Product design. Every industry built on humans manually constructing visual experiences frame by frame is sitting on the same countdown Musk just read out loud. Now zoom out. Because this is not just an industry story. For the entire history of human civilization, the distance between imagining a world and actually creating one required thousands of people, millions of hours, and billions of dollars. That distance built Hollywood. That distance built the gaming industry. That distance made content scarce and studios powerful. Musk is collapsing that distance to zero. When the gap between imagining something and it existing disappears, every business model built on the difficulty of creation disappears with it. That is not disruption. That is a full inversion of how human beings create. Musk did not make a casual prediction on that podcast. He told you what he is building. He told you the timeline. And he told you which industries do not survive it. The entertainment industry is still debating whether this future is real. Musk is not part of that debate. He is building. And he just told you the delivery date.show more

Under the hood of every gaussian splat lives a... point cloud - what this mean is we can do some really cool things! With points and particles being so relative - you can actually treat them as if they were the same. Here we're using INSYDIUM X-Particles to drive a nexus particle simulation from the millions of splat points directly. This opens the doors to tons of creative opportunities for splats via XP with the full stack of modifiers and controls to take your splat assets to the next level! Rendered with OTOY Octane 2026show more