It's very cool, but it's also a shame that measuring in characters leads to the metagame of using 97 multi-byte Unicode characters that decode to 194 ASCII characters when reinterpreted. Almost everything is in the format:
Can't they just have the same agreement that Ford Prefect had with Mr Prosser? "So, assuming I'm going to use this lossless compression technique to fit 194 characters into a 140 character tweet... how about you just show the 194 characters and say that I fitted into 140 characters?"
I suppose you could make the same argument about size-based competitions at demo parties; the limit is strictly 4096 bytes but everyone + their dog is using Crinkler to compress a 12-20KB executable down to that size. In fact, part of the effort is in aligning data and tweaking constants with Crinkler's algorithm in mind, to make the raw data more amenable to compression! But at least then, it's not a constant compression (turning any 194 ASCII characters into 97 Unicode characters which with embedded decoder makes exactly 140 characters)
I love these but I wish they'd disallow the eval thing. I also which they'd added more shortcuts. Like IIRC they have `s` for `Math.sign` but so if they're going to shorten things they could have gone much further. `globalCompositeOperation` etc...
OT: we should really extend bbcode with a safe scripting language. The hilarious stuff that could happen in threaded discussions. You could have a sub set of safe instructions that get executed automatically, a larger set of instructions that require pressing a button under the comment. (And a button to view the code) Then a 3rd set that triggers permission dialogs for things like loading (1 or n) external data sets. "Uploading" files, loops that run more than 30,1000 or 10k rounds, access to camera/photos, canvas, LLM etc
You start a topic by pasting a dataset or a link to some JSON csv, xml, sql files, etc, then add a description or some other rage bate to start a conversation.
Seems much fun and a great way to start getting into coding.
What a cool concept to turn the SM 140 chars concept into a programming demo list! Is there a reverse to this that work to compress a JS script into 140 chars to help show some creative ideas without needing to fully understand the code? Also, how good is AI at generating these in your experiences?
i went super deep on 140-byte code golfing[1] back when twitter was taking off, and it changed the way i think about code. for a brief while we had a small community collaborating on byte-squeezing techniques[2], and i was constantly amazed at the creativity that this constraint brought about, from mandelbrot renderings to sudoku solvers. possibly the best part was more than a decade later when i found my golfed UUID implementation[3] deep in my employer's codebase.
I wonder what could be a criteria for demos like this that doesn’t devolve into code golf nor spawns giant files.
I’m not saying that to disparage the content mind you; it is amazing. Just wondering which potential rules could make similar results and “normal”/readable code, as that would be awesome to see.
Tried AI for a standalone html page snippet renderer[0].
I tried just feeding it snippets one by one and that worked, but the raymarching ones it could not get going until I gave it the dwitter github repos. Now most, but not all (simple to fix manually though), work.
Also interesting to see Claude is terrible at trying to write the art (the demos itself) and seeing what it tries to do; not surprising given the challenge.
32 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 54.2 ms ] threadShow HN: A Stargate in 140 chars of JavaScript - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25088683 - Nov 2020 (55 comments)
Dwitter – A social network for short JavaScript demos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13700698 - Feb 2017 (71 comments)
I suppose you could make the same argument about size-based competitions at demo parties; the limit is strictly 4096 bytes but everyone + their dog is using Crinkler to compress a 12-20KB executable down to that size. In fact, part of the effort is in aligning data and tweaking constants with Crinkler's algorithm in mind, to make the raw data more amenable to compression! But at least then, it's not a constant compression (turning any 194 ASCII characters into 97 Unicode characters which with embedded decoder makes exactly 140 characters)
https://xcancel.com/search?q=%23%E3%81%A4%E3%81%B6%E3%82%84%...
Apologies for the quick reboot of the servers. I learned from last time this happened and resized the digitalocean droplet.
You start a topic by pasting a dataset or a link to some JSON csv, xml, sql files, etc, then add a description or some other rage bate to start a conversation.
Seems much fun and a great way to start getting into coding.
[1] https://youtu.be/JsAetmgJRss?si=AxIFySX7ktzu5GL5&t=193
[2] https://github.com/jed/140bytes/wiki/Byte-saving-techniques
[3] https://gist.github.com/jed/982883
if(!window.g){gc=document.createElement('canvas');g=gc.getContext('webgl');c.parentNode.replaceChild(gc,c);k=Object.keys(g.__proto__);d='void main(){gl_';str = `g395(g41,g318())g310(g41,new Float32Array([0,0.5,0,-0.5,-0.5,0,0.5,-0.5,0]),g46);a=g322(g139)g382(a,'attribute vec3 c;${d}Position=vec4(c,1);}')g313(a);b=g322(g138)g382(b,'${d}FragColor=vec4(1,0,1,0);}')g313(b);d=g320()g302(d,a)g302(d,b)g376(d)g393(d)g435(0,3,g128,0,0,0)g406(0)g404(g12,0,3)`.replace(/g(\d+)/g,"\ng.\${k[$1]}");eval("eval(`"+str+"`)")}
I assume there are far more advanced methods than what I managed to do, so it's probably possible to actually get that to 140 characters.
https://x.com/search?q=%23postcart%20%23pico8
maybe #tweetcart is a better hash tag
https://x.com/search?q=%23tweetcart
Fractals: https://www.dwitter.net/h/fractal
Dynamical systems / chaos: https://www.dwitter.net/h/chaos
Strange attractors: https://www.dwitter.net/h/attractor
Spiral-based generative art: https://www.dwitter.net/h/spiral
Fireworks simulation: https://www.dwitter.net/h/fireworks
Procedural scenes: https://www.dwitter.net/h/scene
Wavelets (3D and 2D): https://www.dwitter.net/h/wavelet
And the most popular dweets: https://www.dwitter.net/top/all
I’m not saying that to disparage the content mind you; it is amazing. Just wondering which potential rules could make similar results and “normal”/readable code, as that would be awesome to see.
Tried AI for a standalone html page snippet renderer[0].
I tried just feeding it snippets one by one and that worked, but the raymarching ones it could not get going until I gave it the dwitter github repos. Now most, but not all (simple to fix manually though), work.
Also interesting to see Claude is terrible at trying to write the art (the demos itself) and seeing what it tries to do; not surprising given the challenge.
[0] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d8b357df-5982-48c6-be58-7...
It's the weekend! Take a journey back in time...
https://csszengarden.com/
Pretty happy with this one: https://www.dwitter.net/d/7421
It's always fun just spending 10 minutes slamming together some trig functions and see what appears on the screen.
https://www.dwitter.net/d/12850
Of course, the real magic of dwitter is the lovely community: https://discord.gg/emHe6cP
https://i.imgur.com/20f2gb8.gif
more:
https://www.autohotkey.com/boards/viewtopic.php?style=1&f=6&...