TASBot piped 1.2M inputs a second through an SNES to 'run' Portal
At AGDQ 2017 the tool-assisted speedrun robot used controller-port inputs as a data bus — buffer overflows became a loader executing streamed opcodes.
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300 RECENT CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDSQLDoom renders Doom with 1,300 lines of SQL — 89 CTEs as a game engine at 35fps
Lukas Vogel turned a relational database into a game engine: tables hold the world state, and 1,300 lines of SQL render 35 Doom frames a second.
Read the caseA $200 robot cracks a SentrySafe combination lock in about half an hour
SparkFun's founder brute-forced a $120 safe via three shortcuts — error tolerance, try ordering, a telltale notch — from four months of tries to 73 minutes.
Read the caseSFBARF put renters into housing hearings; SF's first westside upzoning passed 11-0
Housing hearings drew only objectors, so Sonja Trauss organized renters to show up and speak — the upzoning that stalled in 2016 passed 11-0 a year later.
Read the caseKTH disguised its repair bot as a junior dev — GitHub merged five of its patches
KTH researchers created a fake engineer, 'Luc Esape', so their bug-fixing bot Repairnator could submit patches blind — and human moderators accepted five.
Read the caseStranded javelin thrower mailed himself from London to Australia in a cargo crate
Broke in London in 1964, Reg Spiers used his airport cargo job knowledge — air freight cash on delivery, max crate size — to ship himself home to Adelaide.
Read the casePoisonTap: Samy Kamkar's $5 Raspberry Pi Zero ransacks a locked PC in 30 seconds
A locked screen guards the login prompt, not the network stack — a $5 board posing as the network gateway walks off with a computer's cookies.
Read the casePeru made water utilities fund pre-Incan 'water planting' out of customer bills
Peru's laws turned water bills into watershed funding: 40 of 50 utilities now collect MRSE money to revive amunas that store wet-season water underground.
Read the caseRunners planted code via Ocarina of Time, then hot-swapped cartridges to crack Paper Mario
Paper Mario runners chained an effects-matrix overflow with an Ocarina of Time ACE write and N64 RAM persistence to warp to the credits.
Read the caseA mayor's letter, not a rewrite, freed most 421-g conversions from rent stabilization
New York traded tax breaks for rent limits to revive Lower Manhattan — then one letter from Giuliani read the limits down to apartments under $2,000 a month.
Read the caseNatera's $349 cash price beats insurance: one test billed $4,480, insurer paid 45 cents
Natera texts patients a $349 ‘prompt-pay cash price’ when insurance looks worse — in US healthcare the negotiated rate is often the expensive option.
Read the caseSamy Kamkar's $10 MagSpoof predicts your next AmEx card number before it exists
AmEx reissues stolen cards with predictable numbers; Kamkar built a $10 device, MagSpoof, that cycles to the next card the moment one is declined.
Read the caseLyft priced its riders' minutes: 3.7M fares turned a marketplace into a value-of-time lab
Lyft randomized fares and wait times across 3.7M riders to measure time's value: $19 an hour, 50% higher at rush hour — above the government's $14.
Read the caseHealdsburg halved water use with real-time meters, recycled water and visible stakes
The wine town capped residents at 74 gallons a day, subsidized minute-by-minute meter apps, banned irrigation — and trucked in recycled water so yards survived.
Read the caseRotterdam's Hub drops a prefab apartment into empty offices in days, not years
Havensteder and Kraaijvanger's Hub is a removable housing kit — kitchen, shower, toilet, heat — that turns vacant offices into homes and back again.
Read the caseGujarat put its solar panels over irrigation canals — saving land, water and watts
Canal-top solar in Gujarat turns 80,000 km of waterways into power plants: the shade cuts evaporation and algae, and the water cools the panels.
Read the caseGCHQ hid Britain's first portable encrypted phone inside ordinary briefcases
A GCHQ engineer gutted two store-bought briefcases into Brahms, Britain's first portable encrypted phone, keyed by daily paper tapes and used by Thatcher.
Read the caseSandemans and Guruwalk made tours free upfront — guides pay per head, travelers tip after
The 'free' tour model prices at zero to remove trust friction, bills guides a few euros per guest who shows up, and lets tips set the real price.
Read the caseIndia's Feluda test put CRISPR on a paper strip for $6.75 Covid diagnosis
CSIR-IGIB's CRISPR strip test matched PCR accuracy — 96% sensitivity, 98% specificity — in under an hour, readable like a pregnancy test.
Read the caseEVE's $60 monocle riots ended with the players' own elected council brokering calm
A $60 vanity monocle and leaked memos set off in-game riots; CCP flew the player-elected council to Iceland, and its inspection calmed the mob.
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