Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I will try to give you the benefit of the doubt then and not extrapolate from your relatively benign feelings as it pertains to a creative art project any capacity for you to take up engineering projects that would make the world worse.

You get your votes back from me.

This doesn't really look like pixel art; it looks like you applied a (very sophisticated) Photoshop filter to Google Earth. Everything is a little blurry, and the characteristic sharp edges of handmade pixel art (e.g. [0]) are completely absent.

To me, the appeal of pixel art is that each pixel looks deliberately placed, with clever artistic tricks to circumvent the limitations of the medium. For instance, look at the piano keys here [1]. They deliberately lack the actual groupings of real piano keys (since that wouldn't be feasible to render at this scale), but are asymmetrically spaced in their own way to convey the essence of a keyboard. It's the same sort of cleverness that goes into designing LEGO sets.

None of these clever tricks are apparent in the AI-generated NYC.

On another note, a big appeal of pixel art for me is the sheer amount of manual labor that went into it. Even if AI were capable of rendering pixel art indistinguishable from [0] or [1], I'm not sure I'd be impressed. It would be like watching a humanoid robot compete in the Olympics. Sure, a Boston Dynamics bot from a couple years in the future will probably outrun Usain Bolt and outgymnast Simone Biles, but we watch Bolt and Biles compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. Likewise, we are extremely impressed by watching human weightlifters throw 200kg over their heads but don't give a second thought to forklifts lifting 2000kg or 20000kg.

OP touches on this in his blog post [2]:

   I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. [...] This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. In the end, the quality of art is defined by the quality of your decisions - how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say.

I would argue that in some case (e.g. pixel art), the slog is what makes the art both aesthetically appealing (the deliberately placed nature of each pixel is what defines the aesthetic) but also awe-inspiring (the slog represents an immense amount of sustained focus).

[0] https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu...

[2] https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc

100% - I originally wanted to do that but when I realized how much manual work I'd have to do just to get the tiles generated I had to cut back on scope pretty hard.

I actually have a nice little water shader that renders waves on the water tiles via a "depth mask", but my fine-tunes for generating the shader mask weren't reliable enough and I'd spent far too much time on the project to justify going deeper. Maybe I'll try again when the next generation of smarter, cheaper models get released.

Interestingly enough even the big guns couldn't reliably act as judges. I think there are a few reasons for that:

- the way they represent image tokens isn't conducive to this kind of task

- text-to-image space is actually quite finicky, it's basically impossible to describe to the model what trees ought to look like and have them "get it"

- there's no reliable way to few-shot prompt these models for image tasks yet (!!)

Haha I had to throw in the towel at some point and Staten Island didn't make the cut. Sorry (not sorry)