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My thoughts went from "This is amazing" to "But he must have taken a lot of time and brainpower to do this" to "This is useless really" to "So what? If I wanted to do that I would take a year perhaps if I ever could" to "This is amazing"
I feel awful for pointing this out, but the author spelled Copyright incorrectly in the last line. Fortunately, he can correct it without blowing out his Ascii art by deleting the extra space between '##' and 'Quine'. I'd issue a pull request myself, but it'd be like me putting soy sauce on a piece of Jiro Ono's sushi. I am completely unworthy.
Wouldn't you also need to fix src/QR.rb.gen.rb?
I've started looking through it. It's very clever, most of it beyond my ken, but even the technique with the image template of '#'s is a treat when you start to see how it works.
This is relevant to any similar cool thing what gets submitted on HN.
"what" is interesting, "how" is much more interesting.
Today, I have seen true madness.
Wow, even the source code of the original file is arranged to look like the Star of David surrounded by the dragon-eel thing, Obfuscated-C-contest style: https://github.com/mame/quine-relay/blob/master/QR.rb
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Art that only exists for the sake of existing, without intent to express, explore, or otherwise stimulate human mind - art of that sort is garbage. There are plenty of people who vehemently defend that garbage, but it doesn't make it any less wasteful use of human time and attention. Personally, I will never respect it simply because there was a lot of effort involved.
That's a pretty caustic take on an inherently subjective matter: the appreciation of beauty. Also, in what way is this exercise not exploratory?
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The effort involved in doing this is incomparable with the things you just mentioned. This is nothing like baking a cake, more like spending thousands of dollars to build a life-sized Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks.
Who cares about whether a person should build an Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks or go try to solve cancer? Pushing humanity forward is great - and so is finding personal happiness and growth through exploration. Don't knock one or the other; in fact, don't knock any at all. Both are ways to ascribe meaning to this meaningless place.
I don't know what could cause somebody to adopt such a twisted notion, but I think the roots of it go deeper than I care to know.