parrot.live | Hacker News Reader

parrot.live

github.com

249 pointsjasonthorsness52 comments

Wow! Surprised to see this on the front page.

I built this about 8 years ago on a whim, and it blew up. Only recently did I learn there was a memory leak, after getting a big traffic spike that caused an OOM.

Over the years it’s burned through several TB of bandwidth per month.

I built ascii.live to support different animations for fun, although I don’t have as much time to review PRs as I’d like.

> Over the years it’s burned through several TB of bandwidth per month.

I hope you're hosting it on Hetzner (or somewhere else with a generous traffic plan). They give you 20TB traffic per month.

Or if you're running a bunch of smaller projects, get a dedicated server with Hetzner and enjoy unmetered connection.

Ooh, I had a coworker who had one with zoidberg dancing once, though it seems to be dead now so maybe he didn't renew the domain. He probably used ascii.live!

There's an actual parrot emoji now for your GitHub description

Author's github history looks like an absolute coding machine

Spending a little bit of my free moments throughout the day interacting with coding agents on my phone, it's almost impossible to not have solid dark green for every day.

These charts are less useful than they have ever been for determining how much code a person writes, but they are probably a good metric overall to measure the productivity gains going on in the industry overall.

This sounds like hell.

wow, using coding agents from your phone is interesting. what's your workflow look like?

With ChatGPT Codex connected to GitHub it's pretty neat. From my phone I throw some tasks at it and go about my day and then check in with it later. After giving it some time, I come back and look at what it's done and kick off some more or look at diffs and create PRs right from my phone. It's fairly limited in what can be done from the phone so you'll need to have a laptop for anything more involved than eg spelling errors, but it's a very interesting view of the future.

This is the way.

many of those commits are in private repos.

I've seen people pushing e.g. weather data to GitHub in regular intervals blowing up their commit numbers.

Just check this to find crazy numbers: https://committers.top/

The days with lots of commits start rather abruptly at the end of 2023, so it being some sort of automation seems plausible.

Lots of organic explanations for that.

A lone developer can get away with infrequent commits at no practical cost. Maybe something happened in 2023 that made them a more prolific committer.

Makes me think a life changing burn out is coming soon.

I burn out if I don't take weekends off, its nasty.

I wonder what happened on May 11th

And what happened in Nov 2023

Reminds me of smithers.el

https://gitlab.com/mtekman/smithers.el/

Reminds me that I made a rainbow unicorn that jumped across your screen as a cmdline utility to be run after all tests passed. Coworkers got a good laugh if nothing else. Fun times.

Nice. I'm reminded of the IntelliJ extension that replaces progress bars with the Nyan Cat.

I still use it!

Now you can just ask an AI to write the code to show a jumping unicorn. All the magic is gone from programming!

Parrot.live uses computer generated ascii art rather than one made by a human artist. It seems as if people already don't value the art part either.

Others can ask AI to write it, but I don't have to use it. I can still write my own and use what others have written by hand.

“You can use AI to write code to show a jumping unicorn” feels pretty magic to me.

That was my attempt to be ironic.

Apologies, I was apparently not fine tuned on enough irony.

This is awesome! Are there any other things like this?

https://ascii.theater/

Sadly the domain never.gonna.give.you.up was not available.

(Damn, that's the kind of stuff we entertained ourselves as freshmen on a PDP-11 with a few terminals in 1991.)

ssh funky.nondeterministic.computer

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

telnet telehack.com

curl wttr.in

Fun little parrot! And beats installing with snap (I don't like snap).

Out of curiosity, my rudimentary measurement puts bandwidth usage at about 17 KiB/s. Some might say that's negligible nowadays, which is not that unreasonable (1 hour ~ 61 MiB). Still, my efficiency brain is tingling. I guess simply displaying chars is lower risk than running code on your computer.

Well, in some cases terminal escape seqeuences can be abused to execute code. So you shouldn't feel so safe curling random websites!

Soooo, not knowing much about either curl nor front-end.. how DOES THIS WORK?

Is this just some weird default logging in curl?

Curl just downloads the http response and prints it to the terminal. The sever streams the response and yields a frame of the video every 70ms or so. It sends control characters in the response to clear the terminal and change the color.

Short Story: this is just a website.

If you go to parrot.live from your browser it automatically redirects to the GitHub page for the project; The code for which is on line 103: https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live/blob/master/index.js#L...

You'll notice though that if you change the user agent from your browser to include the string 'curl' you can reach the site from within the browser as the redirect logic encapsulating line 103 doesn't fire.

You can do that by:

* Opening Chrome,

* Opening Chrome Dev Tools within Chrome,

* Going to the Network Tab within Chrome Dev Tools,

* Clicking on "More Network Conditions" within the Network Tab,

* Go the the "User Agent" section and type 'curl' whithout the parens,

* Navigate to parrot.live with the network tab open and you should see the ascii animation in your browser.

I figure that the response uses ascii escape sequences to control the terminal (and that curl is just piping the response to the terminal).

You have to use curl:

> curl parrot.live

Otherwise parrot.live redirects (which HN followed otherwise link here would be parrot.live).

yep: https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live/blob/f349d2788fc47ac5f...

Remonds of when you could watch ASCII Star Wars with telnet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqJrI12ruxg

Or in actual ASCII: https://asciinema.org/a/569727

Loved to death I assume. :(

  $ curl parrot.live                                                                                                                                                             

  <html>
  <head><title>504 Gateway Time-out</title></head>
  <body bgcolor="white">
  <center><h1>504 Gateway Time-out</h1></center>
  <hr><center>nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)</center>
  </body>
  </html>

That crashed my ssh session into my rapberry pi

In powershell??

curl.exe parrot.live to bypass the invoke-webrequest alias

I'd imagine it should work, so long as you use `curl.exe` and not `curl`

didn't work in powershell for me, had to do it in warp

this is what Hacker News was made for

site crashed! I cant get a response

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