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Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

killedbyapixel.github.io

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Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#61

Post by Timwi »

john-tells-all wrote: post #18

Their work is always jaw-dropping. Here is some explanation of the tools they use: https://frankforce.com/tools/ 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

That “YouTube explanation” doesn't actually explain how any of the Dweets work. Don't get me wrong, his work is amazing, I loved seeing it and I'm excited to listen to him show it off; I'm just saying that anyone looking for a detailed walkthrough of how any of it works, that video will disappoint.

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#62

Post by cal85 »

cdelsolar wrote: post #24
javajosh wrote: post #12

A minor note: this is the first time I've seen an svg embedded in a canvas purely for it's onload event. Within this context the canvas is referred to by its (bare) id. How strange and wonderful!

Why is that allowed? I didn’t realize one could do that in js.

If you nest any valid elements inside an unknown element like ..., browsers just ignore the invalid wrapper element but still display the nested children. This fact is exploited by spec authors when introducing new tags to allow backwards compatibility: elements like canvas, video and audio all specifically allow optional children that are automatically hidden - but they won't be hidden in older browsers that don't know about the new elements. This allows you to easily define arbitrary fallback content for older browsers that don't support the new elements, just by nesting children in them.

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#63

Post by ebiester »

penteract wrote: post #20
asadhaider wrote: post #16

The author has more content at https://killedbyapixel.github.io/TinyCode/

And more at https://www.dwitter.net/u/KilledByAPixel/top

My first thought on seeing the source was dwitter - it's such a fun community to peruse!

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#64

Post by junon »

cal85 wrote: post #59
phs318u wrote: post #35

Is there an annotated version breaking down each part of this for us lesser mortals?

I've had a stab at decompressing the code by hand, adding comments and meaningful var names where possible. I still don't understand the maths in it... https://github.com/callumlocke/bitwise-liminal-expanded

Just a guess, the speedup is probably due to you caching the 2d context.

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#65

Post by gigabates »

cal85 wrote: post #59
phs318u wrote: post #35

Is there an annotated version breaking down each part of this for us lesser mortals?

I've had a stab at decompressing the code by hand, adding comments and meaningful var names where possible. I still don't understand the maths in it... https://github.com/callumlocke/bitwise-liminal-expanded

Looks like the maths is a kind of raymarching loop if you want to read up on it.

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#66

Post by GuB-42 »

ivan_ar wrote: post #27
sowbug wrote: post #25

Stuff like this makes me believe that the entirety of life really could be encoded in DNA. I've read that if you gzipped the human genome, the file would be about 4MB, which intuitively seems too small to represent a human. But if this behavior can emerge from 256 bytes, then clearly my intuition is off.

Is a misconception that DNA is enough by itself to replicate a living being, there are biological bases in the embryon that need to be pass down from the parent as biological infraestructure for the new being to form.

But in theory, would it be possible to genetically engineer a simple life form, like a bacteria, to eventually produce a human, in a process similar to the kind of metamorphosis you see in insects. Of course, this the bootstrapping code would take quite some space, but if we could do that (at least in theory), it essentially means that all you need to make practically any living being is a single generic cell and a few megabytes worth of data encoded as DNA.

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.

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#67

Post by CmdrKrool »

Timwi wrote: post #61
john-tells-all wrote: post #18

Their work is always jaw-dropping. Here is some explanation of the tools they use: https://frankforce.com/tools/ 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

That “YouTube explanation” doesn't actually explain how any of the Dweets work. Don't get me wrong, his work is amazing, I loved seeing it and I'm excited to listen to him show it off; I'm just saying that anyone looking for a detailed walkthrough of how any of it works, that video will disappoint.

This video is a couple of years old but it seems to get more into the steps of how he might go about things (disclaimer - I haven't watched the whole thing yet, just scrubbed through). https://portal.gitnation.org/contents/how-to-make-amazing-ge...

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#68

Post by spartanatreyu »

mapreduce wrote: post #60

Can someone explain to me what are we seeing in the short film? I see some black and white animation with boxes moving and some noisy lines on it. But I'm not sure I understand what it means. Anyone can help me understand?

That IS the film.

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.

Re: Show HN: Bitwise Liminal – A Short Film in 256 Bytes of Code

#69

Post by adammarples »

spartanatreyu wrote: post #68
mapreduce wrote: post #60

Can someone explain to me what are we seeing in the short film? I see some black and white animation with boxes moving and some noisy lines on it. But I'm not sure I understand what it means. Anyone can help me understand?

That IS the film. 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 tha…

And if you want boxes of different brightnesses then boy is it a good movie
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