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Comment by fogleman | Hacker News Reader

(Developer of Primitive here.)

Love seeing people use my software in different ways! If this looks interesting to you, try it out:

Also, I made a Twitter bot that posts samples every 30 minutes based on "interesting" Flickr photos using randomized Primitive settings:

https://twitter.com/PrimitivePic

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Aren't you the guy who writes all the graphics stuff in Go too? How do you find time to do all this???

What do you do with all of your time? :)

Why Hacker News of course! Thanks for sharing.

I went ahead and used it yesterday to change the background image of my site to save a couple (426kb) of bytes on page load. While you recommend using smaller image sizes, it still worked well on a 1920 x 1080 image and only took ~10 minutes to run in the background with n = 2500.

I did add an additional step (as lots of extra triangles are generated with a large n like this), which is to put it through SVGOMG[1] to optimize out some of those extra bits.

That cut the generated SVG image size about in half, which I think is an excellent amount of bytes saved for relatively little effort. You can see the result on my site linked in my profile, or compare the PNG and SVG files from the source on my GitHub in this commit[2].

[1]https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/

[2]https://github.com/Adamantcheese/adamantcheese.github.io/com...

I suppose someone would write one eventually, but I don't really see the motivation to build or use libraries like SVGO for most use cases.

If you GZIP compress an SVG to SVGZ then you are going to save way more bytes, and if you have a half-decent webserver and a browser this side of 1999 it should do that automatically - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_compression#Compression_s...

Slightly off topic, but for the first time I've seen a "lol" domain :). Did you not have any apprehensions using it, like people might not take the product seriously?

Kinda, but I figured it would stand out so I went for it.

I love this, for budding visual artists it is a great way to see how basic shapes and seemingly simple colors come together to create evocative images.

Thanks - this is my favorite aspect of it as well!

This looks great! I would definitely pay the $10 for an iOS version. I can see myself playing around with this on an iPad Pro for hours, especially with drawing mode.

Don't really know how it works, though I wonder if some of the filters in Prisma are implemented in similar ways.

Cool software, thanks again, I used it for https://github.com/globalcitizen/svglover and https://github.com/globalcitizen/zomia

Your twitter bot sometimes produces images that look like unintentional art. Awesome job!

Well, that's the idea!

Honestly your twitter bot (and some of the other art bots) may be the best content on twitter. I thought it was cool that I could interact with your bot. Great work!

Hey, you're that guy who did "minecraft in 500 lines of python".

Awesome! Are you aware of ports to any other language?

I have a JS "port" (not a 1:1 reimpl): https://github.com/ondras/primitive.js

That's incredible

Very cool. Anything like this available for Windows?

You can download Golang and run it yourself from the windows command line. To make it easy to use, open the command window from the location your "go get" downloads to (usually in your documents there's a folder called "go"), then instead of using "primitive <options>", use "go run main.go <options>. Works like a charm.

very cool, so much better than seeing images constructed from cat and dog faces

Well, this is awesome!

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