Show HN: Jumble, a Lifetime of Art on the Scrapheap
mm-dev.rocks
I do care about accessibility, but this project is poor in that respect. You need JS. If your machine is even a little slow it will probably look like a flip-book animation. My art is available in more accessible formats elsewhere --- this is just a bit of fun.
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Ok I'm being overly dramatic, art isn't necessarily on the scrapheap.
This past couple of years I've seen my two lifelong loves and skills --- painting and programming --- devalued alongside the rise of LLMs. I've had the knee-jerk reactions, been through the fear, then come to acceptance that we are where we are. The sands have shifted.
I appreciate that for those who haven't (yet?) developed artistic skills it might be satisfying to be able to type a prompt and get an immediate picture. In itself I don't want to deride that, it's a new thing and I'm sure some people will make well of it. Creativity hasn't gone away. And I know the world doesn't owe a living to me or other artists, musicians, writers or practitioners of any craft (including programmers). I do feel sad that it seems to be becoming less cool or worthwhile to spend(/'waste') time deep learning a skill. When I paint I do enjoy the end result and I am working towards it, but the experience is so much more than that. The doing of it is rewarding on such a deep level. I hope we don't lose that feeling as a species and just become detached directors of disembodied action.
Anyway I thought chucking all my artwork into a big virtual pile might be interesting, a bit different to the usual online gallery formats. You have to rummage around to find stuff, like a jumble sale. You might miss some bits. Who cares.
I've been learning some Three.js and wondered how it would cope with the task (over 100 paintings on board, paper, card, stretched canvas). I decided to use Rapier as the physics engine as I'd heard good things about it in terms of performance.
I've only been dipping toes into AI: `sigoden/aichat` (which is really nice) in the terminal, a little Cursor, some experiments with RooCode. I had no experience with WASM or Rapier, not much with Three.js. As a move towards acceptance of the new state of play I decided I'd dive in and try 'vibe-coding' the entire project with Cursor.
I probably don't have anything original to say about working with LLM coding assistants; suffice to say there was awe, disgust, love, hate, and a feeling of loss. I got the job done, it isn't too buggy. I learned a lot about working with LLMs, what they're good at and bad at. I learned a little about Three.js, Rapier and 3D graphics. Gut feeling is that I learned quite a lot less than I would have if I'd waded in the mud myself. How much that matters? I'm honestly not sure.