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I asked Claude build a physically accurate O'Neill cylinder you can walk around

https://island-three.gruberbuilds.workers.dev/
25•bilsbie•2h ago

Comments

AmazingEveryDay•2h ago
> The sunlight here comes from its mirrors, and its "gravity" comes from its spin.

Where do the clouds come from? The AI?

ben_w•1h ago
I can't use the site on my phone, can barely even read any of the text, so I don't know the text you're quoting.

If you are asking if clouds in such a structure are realistic, I'd expect so: clouds do form naturally in even much smaller spaces, e.g. one of the NASA buildings, I forget if it was the Saturn V or Space Shuttle assembly building or both.

nickff•1h ago
The Vertical Assembly Building was used for both the Apollo Program and the Space Shuttle, though it had much more ‘headroom’ for the latter. From what I’ve read the rumors of clouds forming inside of it are actually a myth, though there are condensation and airflow issues. I don’t have citations handy as it’s been a while (decade) since I’ve read this.
T-A•1h ago
They were in the original 1970's renderings too:

https://nss.org/o-neill-cylinder-space-settlement/

Given Earth-like gravity and Earth-like atmosphere, a sufficiently large structure will also have Earth-like clouds.

Jtarii•1h ago
Takes forever to load, runs terribly and looks awful.
iagooar•39m ago
Not my experience at all.
Jtarii•29m ago
Motivated by this comment I decided to give it another shot, the tab crashed immediately upon clicking the "fly" button.
Retr0id•10m ago
I managed to get a whole 5fps
notfried•1h ago
I saw the landing page and I was like, "no way, Claude built that in real-time? Incredible." And then it loaded and it looked like a videogame from the 1990s. Pretty impressive for AI to have built it , and for something like that to run in the browser, but it's so clunky and ugly that I couldn't try it for more than a few seconds.

I hate it when products promise something so breathtaking in posters or trailers that is utterly detached from how the products looks or works. I might have tried it longer had that landing page not set this high of an expectation.

Overselling a product may getting you a higher conversion rate up to a point, but it will only hurt you and crater the rest of the funnel.

Avamander•53m ago
I suspect it needs a few tokens spent on optimization and clean-up.
petronic•58m ago
Just a heads up - this site managed to choke WindowServer on MacOS 27/Safari long enough to trigger a watchdog reboot.

I never managed to load it and had to rush to kill its tab after the OS restarted and it began choking the machine again.

embedding-shape•12m ago
Indeed, it also froze both Firefox and Chrome running on Arch with a Threadripper 9970X. Not sure what kind of hardware is able to run this webpage.
dekhn•6m ago
Wow, I opened it on my workstation (high-end intel w/ 64GB RAM and a 5090 with 32GB VRAM) and it hung my Chrome.

Oh- I see, was supposed to click something on the screen. Now it's running at 60FPS.

RobotToaster•53m ago
Anyone else getting this error on android chrome?

>HipparcosGraphics error on arm valhall: device lost: A valid external Instance reference no longer exists. (tap to close; a screenshot to @gruberbuilds helps fix it)

RobotToaster•41m ago
update: I just tried it on firefox on windows and it works fine there.
hoelle•52m ago
Neat. I enjoyed the NPCs chatting about life onboard.
Angostura•48m ago
On iOS Safari:

Island Three could not start

Range consisting of offset and length are out of bounds

Reloading the page may help. A screenshot of this to @gruberbuilds on X helps fix it.

I’m not on X

aarontian0•47m ago
This is crazy Claude built this.
OutOfHere•39m ago
Over half the people can't run it right or at all. Why not share some representative walkthrough videos?
xg15•32m ago
The weirdest experience in this must be to never know if you're walking uphill or downhill.
Sharlin•17m ago
The further uphill you walk the easier it becomes as the apparent gravity decreases.
maxlin•32m ago
I've had an idea to build something similar - or more specifically, a game in this form, since I saw Eric Bruneton's Rendezvous With Rama video, now about 15 years ago.

Never did hand code it, even though I gained a lot of the skills and work in gamedev. This makes me feel time is running out to implement it with some of the unique twists I had in mind that become apparent with something like this ...

ForHackernews•30m ago
This is a website, not an O'Neill cylinder, and I can't walk around it.
ChrisMarshallNY•5m ago
I'm sure it's awesome, but my puny Mac Mini M4Pro won't render it...

Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s

https://github.com/Niko1221/Strata
511•snehesht•9h ago•253 comments

Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back

https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI
191•privacyisntdead•2h ago•100 comments

Homa: The end of TCP for AI clusters [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8WWZzoaR0
33•signa11•2h ago•5 comments

Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage

https://www.1011now.com/2026/09/30/more-questions-than-answers-about-lincolns-google-data-center-...
128•sensanaty•2h ago•161 comments

A map of every lighthouse

https://mapped.earth/lighthouses/world
140•karakoram•2d ago•63 comments

'Neanderthals Among Us' review

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/neanderthals-among-us-peter-sahlins-review
46•pepys•1d ago•38 comments

Show HN: Build with Python – a beginner course where your code draws

https://scimigo.com/en/learn/build-with-python/01-draw-with-python
15•davidwshao•3h ago•3 comments

Results from the ASIC puzzle

https://blog.janestreet.com/asic-puzzle-results/
57•eru•2d ago•22 comments

Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died

779•paveworld•21h ago•166 comments

Show HN: Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash

https://niklasroy.com/gtc/
148•r0r0•2d ago•20 comments

How to scale intent, quality, and artistry with AI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLvFTMtw4Jk
30•simonjgreen•13h ago•7 comments

Page Table Memory Consumption

https://frn.sh/pagetables/
24•shellpipe•3d ago•1 comments

All I wanted was a custom domain email

https://jacobg.co/emails-at-jacobg-co/
13•jgx0•4h ago•9 comments

A man who listens to whales

https://blue-continuum.com/the-man-who-listens-to-whales
10•dnetesn•2d ago•1 comments

Show HN: AI search for every photo and every frame of video on macOS

https://github.com/allenv0/SCM
128•allenleee•12h ago•60 comments

Bill Draper has died

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/technology/william-draper-dead.html
50•bookofjoe•9h ago•12 comments

The evolution of effective altruism

https://www.economist.com/international/2026/10/01/how-effective-altruism-conquered-the-world
45•bazzmt•8h ago•65 comments

Declaring a bird extinct: The median wait is 36 years after the last sighting

https://birdshistory.com/how-long-to-declare-a-bird-extinct/
12•Heidi_70•22h ago•6 comments

Incentives in Academic Research

https://www.msoos.org/2026/10/incentives-in-academic-research/
16•zero_k•4h ago•9 comments

Why don't more developers “use the platform”?

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/10/03/why-dont-more-developers-use-the-platform/
267•vinhnx•17h ago•272 comments

Automating my 35mm film scanning pipeline

https://shannadige.com/blog/darkroom/
49•shannadige•1d ago•37 comments

A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo

https://seriot.ch/computation/terminfo/
29•beefburger•2d ago•10 comments

The work by Valve's Timur Kristóf on improving old AMD GPUs on Linux

https://www.phoronix.com/news/XDC-2026-Valve-Timur-AMDGPU
444•speckx•1d ago•87 comments

What is going on with ceiling fans

https://mcmansionhell.com/post/829127919552151552/what-is-going-on-with-ceiling-fans
156•colinprince•3d ago•132 comments

cp: -r or -R?

https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-30/0/POSTING-en.html
69•zdw•4d ago•86 comments

Agents don't need memory, they need documentation

https://liao.gg/blog/agents-dont-need-memory
330•kmeh•1d ago•202 comments

Surely you have ultra-wideband radios on your bins too?

https://sjg.io/writing/binrange-have-you-actually-put-the-bins-out/
124•simonjgreen•1d ago•66 comments

Emitting metadata early makes building/checking Rust up to twice as fast

https://github.com/PowderworksCode/headstart
114•knuckleheads•15h ago•30 comments

LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

https://fortune.com/2026/10/01/ai-godfather-yann-lecun-has-zero-concerns-about-human-extinction-s...
372•Anon84•1d ago•670 comments

Xray-core concealed a certificate verification bypass vulnerability

https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/672
16•timbill•4h ago•0 comments