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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

#82

Post by teiferer »

soulofmischief wrote: post #77
jrmg wrote: post #28

This is amazing all round - in concept, writing, and coding (both the idea and the blog post about it). I feel confident stating that - unless fed something comprehensive like this post as input, and perhaps not even then - an LLM could not do something novel and complex like this, and will not be able to for some time, if ever. I’d love to read about someone proving me wrong on that.

I'm confident that they can. This isn't a new idea. Something like this would be a walk in the park for Opus 4.5 in the right harness. Of course it likely still needs a skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand to keep it on track or keep things performant, but it's an iterative process. I've already built my own ASCII rendering engines in the past, and have recently built one with a coding model, and there was no frict…

> skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand

But that's key here.

"A hammer and a chisel can build a 6ft wooden sculpture by themselves just fine .. as long as guided by a skilled pair of eyes and steady hands"

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

#84

Post by userbinator »

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?

More like, why have it regurgitate something likely to have been in its training data?

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

#86

Post by pjc50 »

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?

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

#87

Post by nomel »

crazygringo wrote: post #40

> I don’t believe I’ve ever seen shape utilized in generated ASCII art, and I think that’s because it’s not really obvious how to consider shape when building an ASCII renderer. Not to take away from this truly amazing write-up (wow), but there's at least one generator that uses shape: https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/ See particularly the image right above where it says "Note how the algorithm selects the…

Appears to be around 150 times slower. I suspect increasing the sample circle cell resolution would give similarly crisp edges.

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

#88

Post by soulofmischief »

teiferer wrote: post #82
soulofmischief wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confident that they can. This isn't a new idea. Something like this would be a walk in the park for Opus 4.5 in the right harness. Of course it likely still needs a skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand to keep it on track or keep things performant, but it's an iterative process. I've already built my own ASCII rendering engines in the past, and have recently built one with a coding model, and there was no frict…

> skilled pair of eyes and a steady hand But that's key here. "A hammer and a chisel can build a 6ft wooden sculpture by themselves just fine .. as long as guided by a skilled pair of eyes and steady hands"

Ok, but if you have a wooden hammer and chisel, and a steel hammer and chisel, choosing the wooden one is an artisanal choice, not a practical one. These tools enable an amount of velocity I've never had before, both in research and development.
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