Splatting through stained glass
Hey 👋 — today's mix pairs a genuinely gorgeous piece of 3D capture with a couple of uncomfortable AI headlines and a detour into extremophile biology. Lead item first, because it deserves the spotlight.
Show HN: Immersive Gaussian Splat tour of grace cathedral, San Francisco
Someone pointed a scanner at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and came back with a fully navigable Gaussian splat you can walk through in the browser — vaulted ceilings, stained glass, the works, rendered as clouds of points rather than polygons. It's the kind of project that makes the case for splatting as an art form in its own right, not just a faster photogrammetry pipeline. Wander the nave, hover under the rose window, and marvel at how far this tech has come from the blurry early demos of a couple years back (via HN discussion).
The craft behind memorable digital experiences: inside Unseen Studio
In a similar spirit of craft, Codrops profiles Unseen Studio, a 14-year-old agency whose portfolio includes a typeface microsite and a cinematic dive into Bordeaux terroir. It's a nice behind-the-curtain look at how a shop sustains that level of polish project after project, for over a decade, without burning out or repeating itself (via Codrops).
The organisms that make Earth's harshest places home
Quanta turns its lens on extremophiles — microbes thriving in brine, subzero cold, heavy metals, and radiation that would flatten most life — and why their tricks matter well beyond biology. Good fodder if you've ever wondered what "resilient system" looks like when nature designs it (via Quanta Magazine).
Google's AI Search is endangering the open web
Meanwhile, on the AI front: a Techmeme-linked New York Times report cites Cloudflare data showing human traffic to many business websites fell roughly 40 percent between June 2025 and April 2026, with Google's AI search taking the blame for starving sites of referrals (unverified). If true, it's a sobering data point for anyone who still builds for the open web rather than for the summary box.
Sandbox escapes found in Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity
In the same unsettled mood, BleepingComputer reports researchers found sandbox escape and boundary-bypass bugs across several popular AI coding tools — Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Antigravity — by writing files that trusted components later executed without a second glance. Most holes are patched now (unverified), but it's a tidy reminder that "AI agent with file access" is still a fresh enough category that its trust boundaries are being discovered in public.
Quick hits
- Shinjuku Station in 3D — a three.js recreation of one of the world's busiest stations, minus the crowds.
- Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012) — a classic rant-slash-teardown on why your corners are lying to you.
- Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled — the AI-vs-math discourse gets a sharper, funnier framing.
- How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks — turns out counting AI prose is harder than it sounds.
- The road to epsilon-zero: Nim always ends, even with infinite ordinals — game theory meets transfinite numbers, no headache guaranteed.
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