Silk – Interactive Generative Art (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Silk – Interactive Generative Art (2011)

weavesilk.com

85 pointsbluemars26 comments

This has been around since 2011 at least, I remember playing this in the apple store at the mall when I was bored waiting for my parents. Cool to see it resurface on HN!

I think I found this on stumbleupon when I was really stoned back in the day

It'd be cool to see a 3D version of this that creates objects that you could print on a 3D printer. I think there's something so memorizing and satisfying with this type of symmetry.

Holy scope creep

It's like, one extra float? ;)

For real though, I had an amazing realization in the shower one time that I could implement 3D rotation without learning linear algebra (or god forbid quaternions) by just doing three 2D rotations. A few hours later I had a rotating monkey!

Yes. You did do that. But the monkey wasn't too happy. And you have been banned from the zoo. So was it really the correct approach? ;-)

And then you discovered gimble lock, and to fix that you just need one extra float...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2089615

I totally remember that post. I think I spent 30 minutes just clicking around on it back then. Very nice.

Wow thats from a time when generative art meant programming to do something and not ai slop

For those on mobile, either go on a desktop or change your user agent so you get to use the website instead of an ad for a $3 app.

Interesting strategy to make a cool free website with the potential to go viral, and then act like it's behind a paywall for only some part of the population. Is this common?

The site itself works for me on mobile, though.

I feel like this is unlikely to go viral -- these drawing apps have been around for over a decade.

This one has been popular for a decade IMO. I remember playing with it in college. To my mind this is the viral one and there are some additional knock offs.

Software engineers who measure their income in multiples of median household income refusing to pay $3 for an app that has been entertaining people for over a decade now never ceases to surprise me.

Maybe if you're considering changing your user agent to play with this, you're interested enough to spend $3. I did about 5 years ago and still get enjoy that app.

Personally I would love a world were a tiny trickle of the revenue software developer generate would trickle down to people making cool things for fun. Who knows, if that happened we might have more developers out there doing thing other than trying to sell ads.

I refuse to use the web without adblock but most of the websites (or apps I use) are supported by ads. What do?

A few have a "pay to remove ads" option, but most do not, and the ones that do, I use infrequently enough that I can't justify the price. There seems to be no good solution for paying for the "long tail" of content and services.

Clay Shirky wrote an essay (I forget which one) on this subject like 20+ years ago, about how the main issue with micro transactions isn't even technical but it's the mental cost associated with each transaction.

I think this could be solved if the system were "set it and forget it" -- you give it a weekly budget and it just distributes it among the sites you spend the most time on.

Brave browser actually tried something very similar with their BAT (with their own ads instead of user provided funds), but it never caught on.

Yet we tip 15%+ — so it is clearly cultural

Looks like just apple devices. It runs fine for me on Chrome/Android and using a number of other agents I've tried. Amusingly, the "download on the app store" button with apple logo is present on the desktop version of the site as well.

Many desktop apps on macOS are distributed via the App Store also.

First time hearing about this and it's very memorizing. Lofi music in the background and you are set.

I see people ITT saying "memorizing", do they all happen to mean "mesmerizing"?

I see people ITT saying "all", do they both happen to mean "both"?

Do you mean person ITT saying all? Whether it’s two people or a dozen people, if there are people ITT, using the same word, then they’re all using the word.

They „could of“ meant that.

:-)

This is a Winamp visualizer.

Very nice!

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