Your Quiet Friend

  When AI Becomes the Judge: Inside the Plaid Pattern Elo Experiment There's something deeply satisfying about a great plaid. The way colors interlock. The rhythm of thick and thin lines. The unexpected harmony of a single accent stripe cutting through a sea of muted tones. But here's the question nobody really has a good answer to: what makes one plaid objectively better than another? I've been running an experiment to find out — and the live leaderboard is starting to get really interesting. The Setup: Infinite Plaids, One Brutal Tournament The premise is simple, but the implications are wild. A PHP generator produces plaid patterns from random seeds — every integer is a unique, deterministic design. Seed 187987 will always render the same plaid. Seed 113057 will always render a different one. The space of possible patterns is effectively unlimited. An automated battle page pulls two random seeds at a time and renders them side by side. Instead of a human picki...

  Purkara: A Digital Wishing Well Where You Chant, Earn Merit, and Send It Out Tucked away at a quiet little URL — purkara.com — sits one of the more genuinely original spiritual web experiments I've come across in a while. It's called Purify Karma Radio ("Purkara" for short), and the tagline says it all: "Listen to the chant audio, earn chant-count merit, and dedicate it to causes." It's part Buddhist practice, part participatory web app, part digital wishing well. And once you start scrolling through its activity feed, it's hard to look away. What Is Purkara? At its core, Purkara is a streaming chant of the famous mantra Om Mani Padme Hum — the six-syllable mantra of compassion central to Tibetan Buddhism. As you listen, the site tallies a chant count on your behalf. You then "transfer" those accumulated chants to a cause of your choosing: a loved one, a stranger who needs it, an animal, a place, an idea — even an inanimate object like...