Recursive Drawing | Hacker News Reader

Recursive Drawing

recursion.mandalagaba.com

184 pointsLiriel36 comments

Whether you like this or feel like it's not as powerful as you'd like, try http://recursivedrawing.com/ in a similar vein with discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951255. It's simultaneously simpler and more expressive than this tool in my opinion.

Amazing demo video buried in those comments: http://vimeo.com/41822151

Very simple and expressive, indeed!

Made by this guy: http://tobyschachman.com/

Unfortunately no SSL, so I won't be enabling JS.

You can clone the repo, audit the code, then host it yourself if you want to: https://github.com/electronicwhisper/recursive-drawing/tree/...

If you're worried about someone MITM'ing you and injecting malicious code on random webpages you should be using a VPN.

Unless your local network or ISP is particularly bad VPNs only make it worse IMHO.

Yes, and you can trust your ISP and/or VPN and you have no way to tell if the origin web server is compromised and is serving malicious JS. HTTPS or not.

Indeed, my tool is very much centered around the drawing experience. It's all about the pen strokes, not the placement of established shapes.

The game Engare [1] is another enjoyable way to explore this kind of thing - a more spirographical approach though.

[1] http://www.engare.design/

'Spirographical'. Excellent word. I knew immediately what you were saying.

I love this game's music.

This lets you make something that looks oddly similar to a street map of a city: https://imgur.com/a/aE3RbgK

A similar tool is called L-Studio, an Android app that lets you define a drawing grammar and use it as a recurrent drawing tool.

The app is called L-System Studio (Lindenmayer Fractals) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playposse....

Thank you for the correction!

A very related item: Context Free Art -- you can program your drawing with beautiful recursion:

https://www.contextfreeart.org/

Trying to use this with Firefox 66.0.3 on Windows 10 desktop. Have uBlock Origin but tried disabling it. Every few seconds, it refreshes. What am I doing wrong, and how do I, as a user, find instructions to fix what I'm doing wrong? I would like to draw or generate something.

Hey I'm the guy who wrote this, sorry about the trouble. Do you have an unconventional connection at the moment? (Cell hotspot, proxy or VPN)?

I'm happy to go into the tech details if you want, but I'd look there first.

I tried Chrome and it's the same behavior as Firefox, so connection could be it. It's not terribly weird - corporate LAN. There could be some element of "proxy" in there, but I'm not using a VPN right now.

On my phone, on the Wifi, it does seem to work, though! (But the Wifi has different rules; for example, they block Facebook, LinkedIn, etc on Wifi, but not on the LAN.)

The only other thing - I know they block some cloud storage on the LAN. Is that a requirement?

Looking in Dev Tools, I don't specifically see anything blocked or failing to load.

(edited to add) Do you require Third Party Cookies? I see a lot of Warnings in the console: "Request to access cookie or storage... was blocked because we are blocking all third-party storage access requests and content blocking is enabled."

Well it looks like you're perfectly capable of handling a full response :) Here's what's going on exactly:

In our great age of surveillance, there are cases where companies, even ISPs have web proxies in place. The problem here is that my website makes heavy use of websockets on port 7340. Most proxies haven't caught up to websockets yet because it's still a fairly new tech.

So my website sees you connect from one IP (the proxy) on port 443 and another IP (unproxied external IP) on port 7340. And it's not too happy about that because it thinks someone is trying to get to the websocket without going through the front door and establishing a session.

Of course there's also cases where people have proxies because they have malware installed... There's is a very fine line between malware and surveillance wouldn't you know it? :)

I do have the usual stats gathering JS on there which is what's triggering uBlock and cookies, but they are 100% non-essential to the good running of the site. The websocket on the other hand isn't unfortunately.

I'm not sure what I should do if anything, I've had a few folks report this so maybe I need to do something. Or maybe I can be ok with the fact that corporate networks with non-standard rules will break things. Tough call...

Anyway, thank you for giving me more details to think about this. And sorry it doesn't just work for you. It should definitely work from home :).

Thank you for the quick and thorough response! I will definitely try this from home. I love web tools (I wrote a really terrible wireframe tool when I discovered Ajax back in 2006 and it's still alive, and still terrible, but last I checked a lot of people played with it!) and from what I've seen of samples and screenshots, it's very neat and visually interesting.

I was able to completely lock up my Mac with some odd combo of settings, had to quit Safari (after about 30 seconds of everything being dead). Didn't think that was possible in a browser.

Oh it's very much possible. Threading, GPU, webassembly. Browsers are as desirable today for computing as the machine they are running on.

You might be interested on an article I wrote a year ago which made a splash here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16509947

Recursion scale closer to 1 and ‘flexible angle’ result in much crazier pasta, for me.

This is nice - is there any way to find out who wrote it?

in fact, this was already posted in the past [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17600629], which is when I suggested them to include recursive drawing, but that user doesn't seem to be active around here

you can go to their blog / contact us if you need to get in touch with them

Wow holy shit. I had forgotten about this thread which is indeed what put the seed in my brain for adding recursive drawing.

I knew I read about it somewhere and the idea go wedged in my brain until it was implemented. That's pretty much how everything works :) But it's kind of cool to see the exact moment of inception from months ago.

Yeah I remember googling this and not being able to stop thinking about it. The same was true for tessellations and radial symmetry before that.

What a fitting conclusion that we both find ourselves here with your suggestion implemented. I'm indeed not active on HN but I do show up when my servers get hammered by it :).

Thank you for the idea, I hope you're satisfied with the implementation :)

If you go to the pro facet of the site (https://pro.mandalagaba.com) you'll see you can mix radial symmetry, with tessellation, with recursion... If you like it all, you can have it all in one pen stroke :).

Let's just say that baking recursion in was extremely complex. I had to sit down in front of my computer for a couple of hours every night for a good 2 months to have it implemented and free of bugs.

So... you got any other good ideas? :)

Hahah, congratulations on completing the implementation! You might not believe it, but I visited the page just two days ago and saw the updates! I wanted to show mandalagaba to one of my little cousins, let him play with it for a bit. I connected my laptop to the tv screen, and then a mouse with a long cable to the laptop, so we wouldn't have anything in the way... we started playing with some fluid simulations, which are super fun... sadly, I couldn't get mandalagaba to work afterwards, I don't know if the HDMI connection caused some problem with the detected resolution, or if there was any other temporary issue... we had fun anyway, I'll definitely show him the page another day.

Really amusing to meet again. I don't have any new idea in mind which doesn't kinda lead mandalagaba to become a full fledged image edition program (layers, brushes, some effects, changing hues and tones, etc.), but if I come up with something nice I'll tell you. As seen in this thread, maybe devices (like a drawing compass) with multiple articulations? (you might also find some inspiration with polar coordinates and waves in this nice video about fourier transforms by 3Blue1Brown [https://youtu.be/spUNpyF58BY?t=233], like at 3:53 or 5:14). Keep up the good work!

It is I, the implementor. Showing up here on HN having been summoned by my servers screaming for resources.

If you want to get in touch, feel free to send an email to the contact address on the website and I'll get it.

having fun https://imgur.com/2x33moE

Very nice :) Take a look at this one too: https://i.imgur.com/8MhUbHh.jpg

not by me, by an obviously talented artist.

Am I missing the reset button somewhere?

"New session"

What is it, an L-system?

from wikipedia:

An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial "axiom" string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into geometric structures.

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