When AI can't draw a pelican

  1. Why every AI-drawn pelican looks the same: A blog post digs into why LLMs asked for an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle all converge on the same ugly shape, tying it to a new benchmark showing frontier models trail human designers badly at UI creativity. (arcfu.com)
  2. AI is mass decompiling old games: A piece weighs the upside of AI-powered decompilation, letting preservationists port and remix old games, against the uncomfortable fact that any software can now be cloned wholesale. (simonwillison.net)
  3. Faster Fourier transforms, or just a faster benchmark: A technical takedown argues OpenAI's celebrated 'faster FFT' algorithm is less a math breakthrough than an exploit of how the benchmark is measured, with a solid refresher on Cooley-Tukey along the way. (argmin.net)
  4. Claude, don't touch my lump: An essay pushes back on the 'lump of labor' fallacy behind AI-job-loss panic, noting that past waves of automation never produced permanently rising unemployment because people kept inventing new work. (experimental-history.com)
  5. Tree Appreciator, a three.js game about noticing trees: After a three-hour prompt session with Claude Opus, Simon Willison ended up with a working spot-the-difference game comparing algorithmically generated trees, complete with music and achievements. (simonwillison.net)
  6. Living Forest, where trees grow, die, and sprout again: A newly released sim lets you chop and gather wood from a living ecosystem whose trees grow, wither, collapse, and resprout on their own clock. (unverified) (yetartgame.itch.io)
  7. Annotated 2D physics demos built with OPENRNDR: A creative coder walks through a batch of 2D physics sketches made with OPENRNDR's orx-force-2d library, explaining the logic behind each one for anyone wanting to tinker along. (makertube.net)
  8. A guided 3D museum of Leonardo da Vinci's world: This browser-based 3D museum reconstructs Leonardo da Vinci's era in code, carefully labeling what's documented fact versus educated reconstruction. (museumofages.org)
  9. Art in the postdigital condition: Artists Chris Dorland and Josephine Meckseper talk painting, hybridity, and what's left of postmodernism now that digital production has been swallowed by deep-learning pipelines. (rightclicksave.com)
  10. (not) solitaire: A browser solitaire variant adds daily limits, achievements, and a choice between cozy and crowded table modes, turning a familiar card game into a small daily ritual. (notsolitaire.com)
  11. Fitting background patterns exactly with calc-size(): A CSS tutorial uses the experimental calc-size() and round() functions to make a repeating background pattern fit its container's height exactly, avoiding the stretching that background-repeat: round causes. (ishadeed.com)
  12. Three ghost galaxies and what they say about dark matter: Three unusually diffuse galaxies appear to be missing dark matter entirely, likely the scars of an ancient collision, and their existence chips away at alternative theories of gravity. (quantamagazine.org)

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