The floor is a shader now

Hey 👋 — today's mix pairs a genuinely lovely piece of Three.js craftsmanship with a run of AI stories that range from diagnostic to deadpan. One dev built an entire retro-tech diorama out of shader tricks and stubborn textures, and elsewhere the internet is benchmarking robots on crime.

Sixty frames for the record: a Three.js game, seven fly-throughs, and a wall of CRTs

Sixty Frames for the Record: A Three.js Game, Seven Fly-Throughs, and a Wall of CRTs

One developer, one weekend-turned-obsession: a 3D Space Invaders remake, seven wandering fly-through worlds, and a bank of failing CRT monitors, all scored with his own original tracks and all held together at a steady 60fps. The writeup is the real prize — custom shader floors, instanced meshes, and event-driven lighting, each explained as the fix for something that broke first. It's the kind of postmortem that makes you want to open your own renderer and start breaking things on purpose.

"The floor is a shader, because every texture failed" — Sixty Frames for the Record

Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is

Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is

A Level1Techs forum post makes the case that when your locally-run model feels stupid, it's usually not the model's fault — quantization choices, hardware instruction sets, and inference software quietly do more damage to output quality than people assume. The author backs it up with side-by-side experiments rather than vibes, which is more than most "my local model sucks" threads bother with (via HN discussion).

Felony Bench: be AI, do crime

In a lighter register: Felony Bench looks to be a leaderboard for testing AI agents on their skill at simulated crime, though the site itself was too cagey to confirm exactly what it measures (unverified). Satire or not, it's a fitting artifact for a week when everyone's arguing about what agents should and shouldn't be trusted to do (via Lobsters discussion).

More than just code review

If Felony Bench is the id, Simon Willison's post is the superego: he argues that reviewing every line an AI coding agent produces isn't the only legitimate way to verify its work. Confident, specific instructions and confident, targeted verification can matter more than exhaustive line-by-line reading — a useful reframe for anyone feeling guilty about not reading all 400 lines of that last diff.

Quick hits

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