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ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

alexharri.com

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Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#101

Post by nxobject »

I'm playing with a related problem in my spare time - braille character-based color graphics; while we have enough precision for sharp edges, the fundamental issues with color are the still the same: if we begin with a supersampling pass for assignment, we lack precision, so we may need to do some contrast fixups afterward. I think some contrast enhancement based on your sampling schemes might be useful :) Thank you so much for posting this!

(I've previously tried pre-transforming on the image side to do color contrast enhancement, but without success: I take the Sobel filter of an image, and use it to identify regions where I boost contrast. However, since this is a step preceding "rasterization", the results don't align well with character grids.)

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#102

Post by minimaxir »

minimaxir wrote: post #61
adam_patarino wrote: post #6

Tell me someone has turned this into a library we can use

I was investigating a fun webcam-to-ASCII project so now I am tempted to take an approach at porting the logic from the blog post into something reusable.

Update: I tested a port of the OP's methodology using Claude Code/Claude Opus 4.5 with some specific performance optimizations, and per the benchmarks, converting a 1024x1024 image to ASCII takes 16 microseconds. I suspect that will decrease after some more polish/iteration but that's enough for potentially real-time generation even on mobile hardware.

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#103

Post by corysama »

mads_quist wrote: post #71
qingcharles wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's stuff like this I would have loved to know when I was doing game engine dev in the 90s.

I want to do game programming again like it's 1999. No more `npm i` or "accept all cookies" :/ rant off :)

Go make a game for the Sega Genesis https://mdengine.dev/

Or, the GameBoy Advance https://github.com/GValiente/butano

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#104

Post by awesome_dude »

echelon wrote: post #93
monitron wrote: post #72

> The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT. Wait...wh...why?!? Of all the things, actual pictures of the planet Saturn are readily available in the public domain. Why poison the internet with fake images of it?

> > The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT. > Wait...wh...why?!? It has just begun. Wait until nobody bothers using Wikipedia, websites, or even one day forums. This is going to eat everything. And when it's immediate to say something like, "I need a high contrast image of Saturn of dimensions X by Y, focus on Saturn, oblique angle" -- that's going to be magic. We'll look at the internet and Google like we lo…

I, for one, have been hoping that AI slop would cause people to be a LOT more cynical about the information they get (from the internet in particular, but from any source in general)

But it's not happened yet

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#105

Post by echelon »

awesome_dude wrote: post #104
echelon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT. > Wait...wh...why?!? It has just begun. Wait until nobody bothers using Wikipedia, websites, or even one day forums. This is going to eat everything. And when it's immediate to say something like, "I need a high contrast image of Saturn of dimensions X by Y, focus on Saturn, oblique angle" -- that's going to be magic. We'll look at the internet and Google like we lo…

I, for one, have been hoping that AI slop would cause people to be a LOT more cynical about the information they get (from the internet in particular, but from any source in general) But it's not happened yet

What statistical measures of "people" are you doing to measure this? How can you be sure nothing has changed?

Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of "it looks like AI" comments on photos and videos now. That's the new "is it Photoshop?"

I'd hold off on judgment until we get population studies on this.

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#106

Post by awesome_dude »

echelon wrote: post #105
awesome_dude wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, for one, have been hoping that AI slop would cause people to be a LOT more cynical about the information they get (from the internet in particular, but from any source in general) But it's not happened yet

What statistical measures of "people" are you doing to measure this? How can you be sure nothing has changed? Anecdotally, I'm seeing a lot of "it looks like AI" comments on photos and videos now. That's the new "is it Photoshop?" I'd hold off on judgment until we get population studies on this.

What statistical measures i use to measure is of what importance to you?

I haven't presented a measurement, just an expectation.

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#108

Post by taneq »

pjc50 wrote: post #86
monitron wrote: post #72

> The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT. Wait...wh...why?!? Of all the things, actual pictures of the planet Saturn are readily available in the public domain. Why poison the internet with fake images of it?

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moo... Are we sure the planets are real?

How can planets be real if our eyes aren’t real?

Re: ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering

#109

Post by taneq »

echelon wrote: post #93
monitron wrote: post #72

> The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT. Wait...wh...why?!? Of all the things, actual pictures of the planet Saturn are readily available in the public domain. Why poison the internet with fake images of it?

> > The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT. > Wait...wh...why?!? It has just begun. Wait until nobody bothers using Wikipedia, websites, or even one day forums. This is going to eat everything. And when it's immediate to say something like, "I need a high contrast image of Saturn of dimensions X by Y, focus on Saturn, oblique angle" -- that's going to be magic. We'll look at the internet and Google like we lo…

I’ve been having The Talk with my kids recently. They’ll say “I looked up this question and the answer was X.” And I’ll ask “was that answer on a credible website, or was it an AI summary?” And then explain, again, that LLMs are great at producing plausible sounding explanations for things, but that you have to ground-truth anything that they tell you if it’s important that it’s correct.
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