Feels like magic

Conway's cellular automaton with a library of known patterns, still the clearest demonstration that rules alone make worlds.

Seven levels of talking a language model into revealing a password it was told to protect. The best hands-on lesson in prompt injection going.

Hans Rosling's animated bubble chart of the world, still the fastest cure for being wrong about global development.

An interactive world atlas you can scrub year by year from 3000 BC, watching every border redraw itself.

Walks you through rebuilding classic algorithmic pieces — tiled lines, Joy Division, cubic disarray — one step at a time.

A genetic algorithm evolves two-dimensional cars across rough terrain while you watch generations fail forward.

A free flight simulator in the browser using satellite terrain for the entire planet, with real air traffic overhead.

Plain page of every emoji, grouped and clickable, for the machines that have no emoji keyboard worth using.

Industrial fishing vessel tracks worldwide, rebuilt from satellite signals, showing exactly where the world's fleets have been working.

Name three bands you like, then answer yes or no to its guesses until it works out what you are actually in the mood for.

Red-carpet criticism written with real fashion knowledge and jokes aimed at the outfit rather than the person in it.

Full-disc satellite imagery of the Americas straight from the GOES satellites, refreshed every few minutes at absurd resolution.

Drive a golf ball absurd distances, upgrade the swing, repeat until the ball is leaving the atmosphere entirely.

Gigapixel scans from two thousand museums, plus the experiments that let you find your own face in a painting.

Chart how often a phrase appears in books since 1500, which settles a surprising number of arguments outright.

Tim Rowett's collection of optical toys and physics oddities, each demonstrated on camera by a man visibly delighted with all of it.

Choose ten items in the right order and the cube blossoms into something absurd; choose the wrong order and it sulks at you.

Comic-strip teardowns of real product decisions, each one explaining the psychology behind why it did or did not work.

Look at a scatter plot and guess its correlation coefficient. A statistics lecture disguised as a slot machine, and it works.

Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.

Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.

Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.

Vector halftone generator that rebuilds an image out of dots, lines or waves and exports it as clean SVG.

Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.

A superhero character creator with a costume parts library deep enough to have outlasted three separate web technologies.

Shoot the alien whose colour matches the hex code shown. Learning to read hex by sight is an accidental side effect.

Falling blocks rotated onto a hexagon and sped up, which sounds like a novelty and turns out to be genuinely hard.

Every event on Wikipedia plotted as a dot across fourteen billion years, filterable down to one category at a time.

Allie Brosh's illustrated essays, including the two on depression that remain the best thing written about it.

Overlays one country on another to scale, then works out how your life expectancy, income and odds of various things would change there.

A map of the solar system drawn to true scale, meaning most of your scrolling is spent crossing absolutely nothing.

Mocks up a screenshot of a conversation that never happened, for jokes and design mock-ups rather than anything serious.

A philosophy department's catalogue of illusions, each with what it is, what it demonstrates, and the argument still going about it.

Warps a photograph through a draggable mesh, so faces melt by exactly as much as you decide they should.

Rebuilds a photograph out of coloured triangles, with sliders controlling exactly how abstract you want to get.

Catalogue of impossible figures, ambiguous objects and Escher-adjacent architecture, kept up by one very devoted collector.

Dress beatboxers in different outfits and each one adds a loop, building a full a cappella track by drag and drop.

A sheet of bubble wrap that never runs out. Pop with a click or drag across a row, and it refills the moment you finish.

Combine two things to make a third, forever, until you have coaxed a language model into inventing something absurd.

Classic Mac OS booting instantly in a browser, with the software of the period already installed and ready to open.

The annual competition that decides what interactive fiction is this year, with every entry free to play in the browser.

A giant shelf of old programs and games that boot right in the browser through emulation, from early home computers to forgotten utilities.

Faithful browser rebuild of the Roland TR-808, down to the orange buttons and the cowbell nobody can leave alone.

Answers the question in one word, correctly, in ninety languages, and has done every single day since 2009.

Answers the question with a single word, and has been right every single time anybody has checked.

A fake enterprise interface that rewards clicking dialogue boxes with more dialogue boxes, by an art-games designer.

The indie storefront where thousands of experiments run free in the browser, and where the deeply strange ones are the point.

Every point-and-click game indie developers have uploaded to itch, most playable in the tab, most made by exactly one person.