Pedro Brás
Experiments, and what they showed.
Three write-ups on how language models behave — one of them a null result — and seven real-time graphics scenes, one idea each.
Notes
- Right Individuals, Wrong Crowd Population-level response simulation An off-the-shelf LLM predicts one person's survey answer well, but reproduces a population's response distribution no better than random guessing.
- Read or Remembered Faithfulness evaluation on market commentary Changing the prices tells a model reading its input apart from one reciting memorised history. A local 8B model declined rather than recited — the method holds, the headline is a null.
- Autocarro, Not Ônibus A small language model trained from scratch An 84M-parameter model learns European Portuguese rather than Brazilian, and a control trained on the other variety proves the corpus did it. Which machine trained it made no difference at all.
Experiments
- Robot Dancing Skeletal animation, bloom & live reflections 8.7 MB of Mixamo FBX became an 824 kB glb, converted in headless Chromium.
- Collision Testing Controllable character & collision The physics engine ships as a real .wasm asset. Embedded as base64 it was a 2.2 MB chunk; separately cached it is 193 kB and a binary.
- Data Visualization Live World Bank indicators and USGS quakes on a globe 7.7 MB of globe plates re-encoded to 1.2 MB of WebP, with a 1k set for phones.
- Audio Spectrum Radial spectrum with a spectrogram waterfall Bars and waterfall read the same history texture in their vertex shaders, so one row is uploaded per frame and nothing else.
- Domain Warping Domain-warped fbm as terrain you can fly over Two octaves where the flat version had six. Sampled per vertex, detail the mesh cannot resolve becomes needles, not texture.
- Emergence GPU boids and a curl-noise flow field, one pipeline Neighbour search is O(n²) in the shader, so the agent count is the whole budget.
- Solar Sandbox Grow the sun & fling gravity-bent meteorites Planets a few dozen pixels wide draw the 1k plates; the full-size ones would be megabytes a viewer never sees.