I wrote about web scraping for political/artistic purposes for the first issue of the journal Critical AI: https://read.dukeupress.edu/critical-ai/article/doi/10.1215/2834703X-10734046/382464/Scrapism-A-Manifesto
the coolest thing about Gaussian splatting is how similar it is to painting where high frequency details are done with more detailed brushstrokes
(screenshot from https://gsplat.tech/)
Custom game engines are not as rare as you might think. Here's a breakdown from @raysan5 (creator of Raylib)
https://gist.github.com/raysan5/909dc6cf33ed40223eb0dfe625c0de74
a humble render farmer