Hacker News Reader

Comment by aljmyl | Hacker News Reader

This is a generative art tool I've made for plotter drawings.

The UI is not the most intuitive and variables has been named badly - sorry for that.

You may want to switch "randomize" off, so all variables are in use. Try out frepeatx and frepeaty, while randomization is on.

View on HN

Funny thing, for some inexplicable reason playing around with the sliders made my feel agressive, not against something in particular but an overall feeling ( that's the best I can describe it ). At first I thought it was the unreal faces, but after reading about the randomness I figured out it was the jumping between completely unrelated faces.

After switching off randomness I immediately felt calmer due to the smoothly changing faces.

Very interesting! My immediate reaction/name for the feeling I had would be frustration. Your comment made me think about the possible connection between those two feeling and low and behold I quickly found this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frustration–aggression_hypothe...

it made me angry too. i got the urge to jump on here and berate the creator for rationalised reasons. it's because the random flipping in response to your reasoned movement feels like an something between an insult and an assault

You should check out a talk about the myth of objective.

Love the faces your tool makes! So wonderfully weird. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

Reminds me of some of the characters from the old Moomins cartoon. https://www.dw.com/image/47520360_303.jpg

the first one it generated for me looked like Aunt Flo from Bod...

I'm curious, why not build the UI to be more intuitive to begin with? Is it really easier to name things y2, y3, etc. than even a simple descriptor?

Genuinely curious, I know it sounds like I'm demeaning. I really am not trying to!

I took a look at this and thought, wow, this would be great for generating plotter art. Good job!

I hope you realize the extreme effect the completely outrageous decision to have randomize on by default has on people. Turn it off before someone goes crazy for real.

Very cool. Just saw your old post asking about how to form a career around art and technology. I'm also interested in the same.

Got a contact?

Nope.. Lets team up.

"randomize" should be off by default. otherwise it simply looks like it's glitching when you touch any slider

Agreed. Otherwise it undermines the point of having controls.

If the random feature adjusted the settings then it might be a bit more acceptable but leaving them the same whilst drawing a dramatically different face breaks their "control" nature.

Once random is off, it's great fun!

Just came here to say the same thing. "randomize" should be off by default.

As did I!

Yep, I thought it was broken. Maybe a "randomize" button instead that you can press to randomize all variables would work better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com