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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#231

Post by Netcob »

I didn't expect it to be that useless.

I like to experiment with home automation things, and recently I added a feature to my system where I could push notifications with images to my phone (pretty much everything I do is entirely self-hosted btw). Then a Valetudo update came out - Valetudo is a FOSS replacement for the cloud services usually required for supported robot vacuums. You root your robot, block it from phoning home, install Valetudo, and now you have a robot that won't spy on you unless you specifically tell it to.

So the update introduced a feature where photos with obstacles recognized by the robot are available via the UI/API. So I put something together where I'll get the pic sent as a notification immediately.

In effect, it's like I've subscribed to the most boring instagram feed of the world. Just random low-quality pictures of items in my apartment. The low quality and weird perspective actually makes it look intentional or filtered, as if a mouse is being forced to make a collage for photography class but doesn't feel inspired at all.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#233

Post by Woshiwuja »

Timwi wrote: post #230

I invented a programming language where you use Unicode box-drawing characters to draw a structure of boxes and lines: ╓───╖ ║ ! ║ ╙─┬─╜ ┌───╖ ╔═══╗ ┌─────┴─────┤ > ╟──╢ 2 ║ │ ╘═╤═╝ ╚═══╝ ╔════╗ ┌───╖ │ │ ║ −1 ╟──┤ + ╟─┴─┐ │ ╚════╝ ╘═╤═╝ │ │ ┌─┴─╖ │ ╔═══╗ │ │ ! ║ │ ║ 1 ║ │ ╘═╤═╝ │ ╚═╤═╝ │ │ ┌─┴─╖ ┌─┴─╖ │ │ │ × ╟──┤ ? ╟──┘ │ ╘═╤═╝ ╘═╤═╝ └─────┘ │ The language is called Funciton (pronounced: /ˈfʌŋkɪtɒn/) and the above…

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#234

Post by defanor »

Last year, I went for an explicitly useless project of this kind, which would probably qualify as an "elaborate ASCII art generator": ray tracing into ASCII graphics, in Emacs Lisp [1].

Afterwards, after (or during?) AoC 2023, inspired by both that project and AoC, I wanted to work on something similarly fun and useless, and composed a RISC-V emulator in Emacs Lisp [2] (RV64GC, but with unfinished floating-point operations; emulates a few Linux syscalls, so can run some programs, like dash).

Other exploratory and educational projects tend to be pretty useless as well, but not always so explicitly, and then questioning their usefulness may spoil the fun.

[1] https://codeberg.org/defanor/3d.el/

[2] https://codeberg.org/defanor/rv.el/

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#235

Post by foxhunt »

I spend way to much time creating small little projects. You tell me.

GitHub events in space.

https://github-event-well-foxhunt.vercel.app/

A funky tool to visualize Text embeddings.

https://venedig.vercel.app/

A website for an Exkursion.

https://dordogne.vercel.app/

Another one.

https://bretagne.vercel.app/

Throw sh*t at the wall and see if it sticks. (On your Phone or Desktop)

https://will-it-stick.vercel.app/

It's falling is it?

https://react-pixi-test-foxhunt.vercel.app/

Go nuts with points on your screen.

https://quorum-sensing-reasonable-havanese.vercel.app/

Drawing with physics?!

https://convos.art/

Some funky animation with a spinning spiral.

https://spinning-spiral.vercel.app

Three balloons.

https://balloons-three.vercel.app/

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#236

Post by yurishimo »

gazook89 wrote: post #112
sshine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like having this kind of animation on my homepage, too. Currently I just have an animated GIF background, but I've had some animated ASCII art in the past. I'm currently working on animating a fractal drawn with HTML Canvas. Your houses and pencil style are very cute, I feel inspired to make something similar. I'd like if clicking in the same place would grow whatever's there.

For graphics, check out KM Alexander

Im totally using some of these on my next personal site redesign! The charm is fantastic and cozy <3

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#237

Post by meowster »

JoachimS wrote: post #191

The weirdest, though personally very useful program I've written was the 'Renklämma reheater' program I wrote as a student. For those that don't know a Renklämma is basically a folded piece of soft flat bread with raindeer meat inside. (Ren is Swedish for raindeer, and 'klämma' is something folded over and squeezed together - very logical.) For an image on what a Renklämma looks like, see (and yes, the official name…

That's horrifying, lol.

That reminds me of this:

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#238

Post by yurishimo »

andrewgleave wrote: post #219
jinay wrote: post #96

When I was first learning computer vision, I wrote a program that could tell the time from an image of a clock [1]. I had no purpose for it besides the fact that it seemed like a cool problem to try and solve. Years later, I get an email from a stranger in Korea, asking me how to run my program. Why would he want to use my silly program? Turns out you can adapt the code to read analog pressure gauges which is really…

This is very similar to when I used OpenCV to read the angle of a cardboard knob I pinned on the wall in my office to change the volume on Spotify!

That is a super cool idea! Kinda sad that it doesn’t make much sense outside of a very particular use case scenario. Much more practical to mount a potentiometer to the wall for any sort of fixed installation.

It might be cool adapt for a mobile office setup where you’re only present in one location for a few days but still want some automated creature comforts.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#239

Post by eloisius »

ajxs wrote: post #76

A long time ago I wrote a useless, but fun program that attempts to programmatically recreate a source image by randomly placing randomly sized, randomly coloured rectangles onto a canvas. If the result of this random application of colour is closer to the source image, it's kept, otherwise the changes are discarded. Over time, it gets reasonably close to the source image. https://ajxs.github.io/pbp/

Fun. At a very high level this is similar to what Gaussian splats do. You nudge Gaussians, that start out as random blobs in 3D space, in a direction that minimizes a cost between their projections into known camera poses and input images.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

#240

Post by yurishimo »

Netcob wrote: post #231

I didn't expect it to be that useless. I like to experiment with home automation things, and recently I added a feature to my system where I could push notifications with images to my phone (pretty much everything I do is entirely self-hosted btw). Then a Valetudo update came out - Valetudo is a FOSS replacement for the cloud services usually required for supported robot vacuums. You root your robot, block it from ph…

Could you use this to build your own “poop detector” where an object is routed around until you confirm with the robot if it’s “safe” to proceed in that area?

I love my robot vacuum but I dare never run it when I’m not at home for fear or smearing poop all over my floor on accident. Sadly I didn’t shell out enough money for a bot with superior object detection.

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