Wake up! 16b | Hacker News Reader

Wake up! 16b

hellmood.111mb.de

435 pointsMaximilianEmel36 comments

Discussion (209 points, 6 days ago, 34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173962

This sent me on a one hour long rabbit hole that ended with two guys building a Sierpinski triangle with recursive PowerPoint presentations

https://youtu.be/b-Fa6HtvGtQ?si=LpQszgA9_K-m3V3-

Thank you for that. Refreshing! :)

Matt Parker and Steve Mould are two of the best STEM educators on YouTube. They are both witty and experimental. Parker is a straight maths kind of guy but Mould goes all over the place and really scratches that experimental/DIY itch.

If you enjoy this video, I highly recommend checking out more of their channels.

https://www.youtube.com/@standupmaths

https://www.youtube.com/@SteveMould

Some other time, I really thought that a 32 byte demo I saw is the limit of how small the binary can get and still look good.

That other demo didn't even have sound.

This is hell of a good work. A masterpiece to retire after. (or more realistically, chase it on other architectures)

One of the linked demos, "rainbow surf", got me hypnotized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLhH_ANwIc

Author of "wake up" here. Yes, that one reactivated me again. We thought (as size coding community) that we found every cellular automaton trick years ago, but then Plex came around and showed us otherwise ♥

Definitely thought this was a 16b parameter llm, not a 16 byte demo.

Same! This is way cooler tho!

9 orders of magnitude difference!

I was the opposite hehe

I'm really impressed. Those are the things that made me love programming and computing. It's all so beautiful, it's TRULY art. It's a shame that in the industry we don't usually have the opportunities to make something like that, with AIs and all that...

If this was made in Electron it would probably be a 300MB download and around 1GB of RAM.

i can barely accept this is possible

Super cool!

I'm not sure if they did a writeup for m8trix (a predecessor) but I tried dissecting it around when it came out (2014): https://scot.tg/2014/05/31/amazing-code-density/

Howdy =) I didn't spot your analysis back then, but it's (still) spot on. A tiny addition, 0xA0000 to 0xB0000 is VGA memory when using graphics modes, so it's quite safe to write there until it flows into the visual text mode memory.

I'm curious how easy it would be to run this on a Win10 or Win11 64bit PC. Like, would it need dosbox? Virtualbox running a DOS VM?

When I try it in Dosbox I do get a very vague impression of matrix rain but no sound. The characters in the matrix rain are all uppercase and lowercase M's and U's though and they do not seem to cycle through many states at all (just partly on screen and nothing).

It requires specific graphics card setup ( it simulates an old system) Use the provided config from here https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106210 Edit: for Dosbox X

I swear watching this kind of projects occasionally is the only thing keeping me from dropping tech and going to work as a mailman or something.

Makes me wonder how many bytes the shortest possible Mandelbrot implementation would need.

Author of "wakeup" here. You would would need between 32 and 64 bytes. I have something that almost looks like one in 32 but it's not published yet ;)

At the same event I released "Broccolori", a 32 Byte fractal for old-school PCs.

https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=106205

Related to the Dragon Fractal, with a twist:)

I did NOT expect this 16 bytes demo to also have sound! What an outstanding piece of art.

There are only 2^128 of such demos. How much of those are valid DOS programs? If we narrow it down to ones that generate both video and sound, I guess there are much less, which should motivate more people to try and find one :)

2^128 is still a huuuuuge space.

It is big but the preconditions shave off a lot. You need to get to display memory and also get to a sound port and need to do both in a loop where each varies. And you need to build it out of valid instructions. That puts you at more like 2^75. Only a tiny fraction of those outputs will have any complexity. And only a tiny fraction of those will be aesthetic.

I don’t bet on us finding a -ton- of interesting sound plus video demos in 16 bytes.

Really, really small generative code like this has me shouting "Witch!"

Bravo.

i'll upvote this each time it's submitted

love the sign "This text is handwritten" at the bottom, that's awesome

And cool creations like this is why we get excited about technology

I once made a ray tracer demo in 4K. I thought that was hard…

Did not work on PCEM for some reason.

This is absolutely obscene. I am floored. Sweet hack.

that's crazy. level to which i'm striving haha

16 bytes equals immediate “black magic” and “it’s a witch”. I get it in the abstract - generative art and CAs and fractals have infinite depth. But this is madness. I love it so much

But big model is really better

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