Shadows come to the stylesheet

Hey 👋 — today's a study in contrasts: a browser toy that makes CSS behave like a 3D renderer, and a trio of pieces pushing back on AI hype from three completely different angles. Also, a game where your job is to sit still and follow the seatbelt sign.

Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS

Ambient CSS v3 gives ordinary DOM elements a physics-based lighting system, so buttons and cards catch light and cast shadows the way objects do inside a proper 3D renderer like Blender. Move your cursor around and watch surfaces shift the way they would under a real light source, all rendered with plain stylesheets. It's the kind of demo that makes you rethink what CSS is actually for, and it's fully playable in the browser right now (via HN discussion).

How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

Dan Luu does the unglamorous work of actually checking a pundit's track record, going back through Ed Zitron's confident claims that Meta, Google, and Microsoft were "dying" and comparing them against what actually happened since 2024. It's a useful model for reading any AI commentary, skeptic or hype-man alike: predictions are cheap, scoreboards are not (via HN discussion).

Zuzai, a new word, indicates the absence of AI

Zuzai, a new word, indicates the absence of AI

In a similarly skeptical mood, someone's proposing "zuzai" — a recursive acronym for "zuzai uses zero artificial intelligence" — as a snappier, more positive label than clunky phrases like "AI-free" or "human-generated." Whether it catches on is anyone's guess, but it's a fun bit of language design for a problem plenty of writers and artists are quietly wrestling with (via Lobsters discussion).

Not everyone needs superintelligence

Rounding out the theme, a Vycari developer makes the case that most agent work doesn't need a frontier "Ferrari" model at all — their assistant Pepper runs almost entirely on cheap, lightweight models like Gemini Flash Lite and does the job fine.

A refreshing counterpoint to the assumption that bigger models are always the answer.

Inflight Simulator

Inflight Simulator

Not a flight sim — a passenger sim. You play the person in seat 14C, following crew calls and cabin rules solo or with up to five friends, which is somehow both a very silly premise and exactly the kind of internet artifact worth bookmarking for a slow afternoon (via Waxy).

Quick hits

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