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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games

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Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#171

Post by shombaboor »

eieio wrote: post #146
memorabilia wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did only one bot acted on the page at a time or multiple bots controlled the checkboxes at once when there were many small pics/elements to form the 1000x1000 image? I meant to ask did multiple people draw on the canvas at the same time or it was only one person/bot at a time?

(i'm the author) there were a bunch of bots run by different people, but for the most part they coordinated in the discord so that they weren't fighting over the same "territory" at one point there was a group not in the discord trying to draw in the same place as the people in the discord, which lead to the bots constantly changing checkboxes to try two different images! but it was mostly cooperative

what was the technical nature of the bot, a local shell bash/python script running constantly to make curl-esque requests the clicks on defined parts of the grid? Or something on top of the browser like a chrome extension? I'm curious because I wonder what the defense would be against it (I'm naive to such things).

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#172

Post by cdelsolar »

That email server story could have been written almost verbatim by me. In high school (this was around 1998 or 1999) I also wrote a mass-mailer bot to spam my friends. I showed my friend how to do it, then he modified it a bit but left it running too long and it ended up crashing the school's mail server. I was terrified for a bit because I thought this is the kind of thing that gets you expelled, or suspended. But our CS teacher (Hi Mr. Zamansky) talked to us for like 10 seconds, essentially saying "hey guys, knock it off, ok?" and it was all good.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#173

Post by r3trohack3r »

adityapurwa wrote: post #29

I don’t know. Reading this made me tear up a bit. I learned software engineering when I was in junior high school. I learned it because I sucked at math, and I want to write programs that solve my homework. Then I continue writing LAN chat, HTTP server, Anti Virus, and a lot more things just because it was fun to do. It was fun, it was challenging, it was rewarding, it was amazing. Now that I’m working, with the endl…

I feel like we have an entire generation of engineers lost in the SaaSification, over-abstraction, over-branding of everything.

I think we need to give junior engineers permission to not care about "whats becoming an industry standard" and "HN front page frameworks/vendors/tooling/etc". It's okay to stop caring about whether or not what you ship is perfectly engineered; the state of the art isn't close to perfect either when you get into the guts of it.

For ongoing skill development, spend more time reading books, manuals, and research papers. Spend less time following software thought leaders on YouTube and X, less time chasing the shiny new thing on the HN frontpage.

Just build. Roll up your sleeves. Find the flow. And just build.

(Note: this is really bad advice if your goal is to learn how to LARP as a senior engineer, land a comfy job at FAANG, go on the conference circuit, and build an audience on social)

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#174

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

asolove wrote: post #2

This part is so important: > The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then. Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far. And adults who aren’t authorities over them except ins…

Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers.

I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentation, it gave the impression of a blinking cursor. It looked like a broken computer, but simply pressing Escape would get out of it.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that these were Macs, so they didn't even have DOS or Windows.

Anyways, a teacher saw it and thought I had hacked/broken the computer and sent me to the principal that didn't think it was funny and punished me by making me spend the second half of my lunch period with the school IT guy for the next 2 weeks so I could shadow him and see how much vandalism he has to deal with.

When I saw him the first time, he was like "Wait, what did you do?" and I recreated it. He thought it was funny as hell and thought it was ridiculous for them to act like I broke a computer.

We had a lot of fun hanging out. Even after my punishment was over, I still frequently went to his office to chat or walk around and fix computers.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#175

Post by seattle_spring »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #174
asolove wrote: post #2

This part is so important: > The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then. Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far. And adults who aren’t authorities over them except ins…

Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers. I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentati…

Heh. I made a Visual Basic 6 program that showed a static screenshot of the desktop. I did this because I only got a few hours in the evening to use the family computer, but if i ever got up to use the bathroom my dad would "play one game of bejeweled real quick" that would sometimes end up taking the entire evening.

When I tried using it, he lost his fucking shit and went berserk.

At least it taught me how to be a better parent

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#176

Post by seattle_spring »

bjackman wrote: post #132
asolove wrote: post #2

This part is so important: > The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then. Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far. And adults who aren’t authorities over them except ins…

I did almost exactly the same thing at my school (brought down the system with a VB6 script that wrote infinite text files to networked storage). They sent my mum a letter accusing me of terrorism. At the time I thought I was pretty ridiculous and unfair (lucky my mum agreed), but now looking back with adult eyes I also see it as an almost criminal level of disregard for the job of raising children. Just absolutely i…

Yup, absolute insanity. My good friend was expelled because he used "net send" while our teacher was giving a presentation. Wasn't even anything vulgar.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#177

Post by seattle_spring »

hunter2_ wrote: post #49

> The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial. This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagi…

At least you were actually using the parking spots for yourself and friends. Bots become truly problematic when they're used for reselling.

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#178

Post by seattle_spring »

data-ottawa wrote: post #9

I really enjoyed this post, it brings me back to when I was in high school learning java and I made an app that took over your whole screen with a grid of “x” buttons where only one of them actually closed the window. When someone left their computer unlocked I would pop in a a floppy disk and run the program then leave. We had an IT guy at our school who would always ask us what we were up to which we would answer h…

> He never got mad at us for figuring out how to get Halo CE or Starcraft or other games running over the network

I had found out that Quake 2 could be run without admin privileges, so I installed it on a bunch of computers throughout my school. Lots of people got into it, but I ended up getting in huge trouble including suspension and parents being called because I "ruined the Internet." The IT person insisted that networked games take up all of the bandwidth and that i had "hacked the computers" to gain admin permissions to install.

As an aside, I seem to have a story for lots of comments in this thread!

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#179

Post by appplication »

hunter2_ wrote: post #49

> The typical ways that folks - especially folks who don’t program - bump into bots are things like ticket scalping and restaurant reservation bots. Bots that feel selfish and unfair and antisocial. This reminded me of how a ski resort, Palisades Tahoe, implemented free but scarce parking reservations for weekend parking last winter. Since it's one of the most popular ski destinations from the Bay Area, you can imagi…

During Covid I was forced to write a bot just to sign up for swim lane reservations at our local pool. Spots opened up at midnight two calendar days before. Most folks looking to regularly swim at 7am don’t make it a habit of starting up to midnight, and all spots were always booked up by the time I would wake up at 6am. So I wrote myself a bot, which was surprisingly fun and effective!

Re: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

#180

Post by psadri »

One of the most profound lessons I learnt early in my career: if you give people a ”canvas” you will be surprised/blown by how they use it.

Found this out with one of the first Yahoo UGC products,Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner. Again with Yahoo! Pipes and then again with Polyvore.

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