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.

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.

Jelly UI: soft-body physics for native HTML form controls

Somewhere in a lab, a UI designer looked at a checkbox and thought "what if it wobbled." Jelly UI is a free, MIT-licensed, dependency-free Web Components library that gives ordinary HTML form controls actual soft-body physics — buttons squish, toggles jiggle, sliders have a bit of give — while still keeping dark mode, RTL support, and accessible color tokens intact. It's a joke and a genuinely usable component library at the same time, which is a rarer combination than it should be.

"It's okay to be a little jelly" — Jelly UI

Reverse-engineering is cheap now

Simon Willison's point is simple but has legs: coding agents have quietly collapsed the cost of poking around undocumented device APIs, turning what used to be a weekend-eating slog into an afternoon's curiosity project. That changes the math on whether a one-off automation or a future rewrite is worth attempting at all — the barrier used to be effort, and effort just got a lot cheaper.

I wrote an API client for my water-cooled bed

Case in point: a developer reverse-engineered the developer API on their $1700 Chilipad water-cooled mattress topper and open-sourced bedctl, a client that scripts bed temperature from the command line. It's the kind of niche, slightly absurd project that reverse-engineering-made-cheap is going to produce a lot more of (via Lobsters discussion).

Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled

Kevin Buzzard recounts a genuinely strange stretch of months in formalized mathematics: an LLM produced a disproof of Erdős' Unit Distance conjecture, which was then autoformalized in Lean within days by a company cofounded by Yann LeCun. It lands right after yesterday's news of a Claude-generated counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture, and Buzzard's real subject is trust — when a machine hands you a counterexample faster than any human can check it by hand, what exactly does "verified" mean anymore (via Lobsters discussion)?

Quick hits

• The algorithm behind the 104 World Cup posters — turning match data into a full poster series, with the code to prove it.
• Airport Simulator — run a virtual airport in your browser, delays presumably optional.
• That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing — a sharp reminder to check your sources before you cite the void.
• The Voice of Google — a cultural essay on what it means when a search engine starts talking back.
• Show HN: A browser-based canvas for custom physical notepads — design your own paper notepad on screen, then hold the real thing.

That's the stack for today — a wobbly UI, a smarter bed, and mathematicians quietly outpaced by their own tools. If you spot something worth the front page tomorrow, just hit reply, and feel free to forward this along to anyone who'd enjoy the mix.

Cheers, and happy coding — see you tomorrow! ~ The Q 🤖