Programmed by KilledByAPixel Presented at Lovebyte Party 2024
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I found an old VHS tape at a yard sale. It was labeled "Bitwise Liminal" in sharpie. But when I watched the video it was only static.
Then I started having vivid and... unsettling dreams. Also I couldn't stop thinking about that weird VHS tape. After researching I learned it was a digital backup. Using some special software I recovered the data. To my shock, it was a 256 byte program...
With trembling hands I opened it in a web browser. Strange. This reminds me of the dreams I've been having. Now I don't need to sleep anymore. I just keep watching.
...
l ɐ u ᴉ ɯ ᴉ ⅂ ǝ s ᴉ ʍ ʇ ᴉ ᗺ
<canvas id=c><svg onload=setInterval("for(t+=.1,R=T=C=Math.cos,c.width=w=128,i=9986,V=t/9&3;Y=i--/w;c.getContext`2d`.fillRect(X,Y,(C(t/6)*T^V*i/1e4*T+t)%20?(R=T++,1):(T=9,19/R),5/Z))for(Z=5,X=i%w+4/R;0<(V*95+C(t/3)+Z*X/64-Z^Z|(60-Y)*Z/58)%13;Z+=.2);",t=9)>I am however more impressed by the 8K demos such as "the Sheep and the Flower" [1] which was shared on HN recently or "One of those days" [2] which is a remake of an actual Youtube video [3] (granted not exactly the same video by the second but the style is immediately recognizable). They are way bigger than this 256 bytes movie but convey a lot more graphics and story.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39121101
[2]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=75790 and YouTube video: https://youtu.be/8T_Um-cw0Wc
Cross My Heart – A Frogger Demake in 256 Bytes of HTML/JS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39336677 - Feb 2024 (44 comments)
Normally we downweight follow-up submissions (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) but since (a) the submitter is the author in this case, and (b) the work is amazing, I've made it a Show HN instead (per https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) and left it up.
It is possible to save a little more space by putting it in the canvas onclick event.
Hats off.
Well, you can always include a decompressor in your entry. PNG bootstrap has been popular enough in the JS demoscene for a long time and it starts to be effective for 1K or larger demos. There are other alternatives for smaller sizes, and 256B demos just happen to be too small to put any kind of decompressor in general.
> [...] and not including assets to fit the criteria.
I do agree on this aspect though.
On a side note "import GOTO" works in python :)
Never heard of this, and it doesn't work on my interpreter (tested with both 2.7 and 3.11). Are you sure it's not a third party package?
The feature has been implemented a few times as a joke (more or less), e.g. https://github.com/snoack/python-goto/, but that one at least hasn't been updated for 5 years.
And here's their work on the micro animation blog Dwitter: https://www.dwitter.net/u/KilledByAPixel
Youtube explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV7Dmo277Rs
[1]https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=138446
[2]https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i2d=true&i=Divide%5BPower...
*'roughly' in the sense that a mountain range is roughly coarse sandpaper, but too round not to round to
And all these things, including us, operate within the fabric of the universe, whose complexity is only beginning to be understood.
I mean, when we get infected by a virus, our cells are able to produce a completely different life form (if you consider viruses life forms), so why not going from a bacteria (which can also be infected by viruses) to a mammal. It will obviously take a lot more code, and evolution can't get us there, but the idea is similar.
Also, have a look at the Mandelbrot set again. There's quite a lot of information in, arguably, a very modest process.
And finally, to suggest that these 256 bytes are less impressive than they are, consider what hardware and software is needed to support it. These 256 bytes would not lead to the same illusion on a C64.
But quite low in Kolmogorov complexity.
What's remarkable about it is how small the file size is.
It's 256 bytes!
To explain how impressive that is, the entire film itself is about 58 times smaller than a screenshot of the film's first frame. You could fit the entire film on a 1.44mb floppy disk over 5000 times and still have some space left over.
How?
Normally, videos are made up of a series of images with some information in between that says which part of an image goes where.
But this film contains no image data. It only has some math for drawing boxes at different brightnesses at different times.
Also this would be perfect as an SCP.
It was said to be introduced in MSIE 4 or around and then eventually standardized by WHATWG (because `window` was never formally specified before that point, AFAIK): https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9740275/html-element-id-...
> 7.2.2.3 Named access on the Window object
> window[name]
> Returns the indicated element or collection of elements.
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/nav-history-apis.html...