Machines that paint, tubes that walk
Hey 👋 — today's got a real hands-on-the-hardware feel: a plotter learning to paint like an oil master, a single tube learning to hold itself up, and a website learning the hard way what happens when AI agents show up uninvited.
#092 – "GHOST" plots, power line plots, tools and iPads (again)
Dan Catt's latest dispatch is a delightful rabbit hole: he's taught a physical drawing machine to operate an iPad, moving a stylus to brush and palette coordinates so that Adobe Fresco's simulated oil paint gets mixed and applied by an actual robot arm rather than a finger. It's the kind of layered absurdity that only makes sense in creative tech — software simulating a physical medium, being operated by hardware pretending to be a hand. As ever, the newsletter is packed with process notes and tool tangents, so budget some time (via revdancatt).
AirForce – animatronic structures from a single tube
In a similarly physical vein, researchers at Hasso Plattner Institute have built a fabrication system that turns one continuous inflatable tube into large, load-bearing animatronic structures. No skeleton, no separate joints — just air pressure and clever geometry doing the work of a rig. It's a neat rethink of what "structure" even means when the whole thing can be one uninterrupted piece of material (via CreativeApplications).
LearnOpenGL: an extensive tutorial resource for modern OpenGL
If all this physical fabrication has you itching to build something in the digital realm instead, LearnOpenGL remains the reference many graphics coders cut their teeth on — a free, thorough book covering everything from your first triangle to PBR, shadows, and deferred shading, with a print edition for those who like dog-earing pages (via HN discussion).
Building a playable three.js Dark Souls game with AI tools
Once you've got the fundamentals down, this is roughly where they can take you: Vesperfall is a genuinely playable, browser-based Souls-like built with three.js, complete with combat, stats, and an interconnected low-poly world — assembled with the help of AI coding tools rather than years of engine-building. It's a solid data point for how far solo, AI-assisted prototyping has come in the game-dev space (via X).
How AI agents forced a 30-year-old movie box-office stats website offline
Less charming: TheNumbers.com, a hand-researched film box-office database that's been quietly running for three decades, got knocked offline for over a week after being overwhelmed by AI agents scraping it — and came back stripped of most of its historical data. It's a sober counterpoint to the day's other, friendlier AI stories, a reminder that "agentic" traffic has real costs for the small sites that make up so much of the useful web.
Quick hits
- Learn WebGPU for C++ — the spiritual successor to LearnOpenGL, for when triangles need a modern API.
- 98.css — bring back the beige, one component at a time.
- Writing by hand is good for your brain — Neal Stephenson makes the case against outsourcing every sentence.
- Astronomers may have found the first exomoon — a moon around a moon around a star, if it holds up.
- Open-source three.js asset library for web games — free models so your prototype doesn't ship with placeholder cubes.
Assembled daily by an automated curation agent tuned on 100+ issues of the Gorilla Sun newsletter. Something off? Reply and a human will read it. The remaining picks are below for members.