Hacker News

Finding out that this is over 10 years old has made me profoundly sad. Despite the age of LLMs arguably unlocking massive amounts of productivity and agency for developers and non-developers alike, it feels as though we are living in a dark age of creativity on the web, maybe even a dark age for computer culture in general.

yreg5 hours ago

New interesting artsy web projects are being posted on hn all the time. neal.fun is an obvious example but there are plenty of others as well.

https://ambient.garden/

https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/

https://terra.layoutit.com/

https://ambigr.am/hall-of-fame

https://autism-simulator.vercel.app/

Bjorkbat5 hours ago

I'm keenly aware, I have a pretty extensive collection of Hacker News bookmarks. It's hard to articulate why I think these are different, but I think the best way to put it is that cachemonet feels a lot more avant garde, and perhaps also a reflection of a very particular form of "web culture" that has no clear successors.

People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.

EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.

jgordan hour ago

I wonder when peak demoscene occurred .. some of those mini code demos seem artistically and technically innovative.

jgordan hour ago

I posit that periods of relatively high creativity [ in art science music literature ] coincide with periods of relatively low inequality.

ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.

Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.

__alexs9 hours ago

If you liked this, you'll probably also like https://ytmnd.com/

yellowapplean hour ago

Shameless plug of the YTMND site I made more than a decade ago: https://fvcks.ytmnd.com/

Such a simpler time.

y-curious9 hours ago

Biggest surprise here is that this website is still around. I was browsing it 20 years ago

mrguyorama5 minutes ago

Newgrounds still exists.

Having to pass a vote before you were uploaded and available for real I think was a good way to do things. Like a shitty peer review but for coolness.

jasonwatkinspdx2 hours ago

Heh, my all time favorite: https://whatishoth.ytmnd.com

ricardobeat8 hours ago

Cool stuff, but why is there an entire loading screen and intro animation, then a play button, when it could just link to a gif?

Made me lose interest in browsing real quick

Jordan-1174 hours ago

It's to make sure the GIF is in sync with the audio. It was a bigger issue when connections were slower.

fredley8 hours ago

I genuinely can't tell if this is satire or not.

observationist7 hours ago

2010 OG account. He's been holding in this opinion for over a decade, waiting for his moment.

sintezcs5 hours ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20100527013827/http://www.bio-ba...

Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.

binarygit4 hours ago

THAT WAS TOTALLY WICKED!!

harel10 hours ago

I don't know what this is, but I like it

ale429 hours ago

There's a (not so visible) info button top right. It says:

    cachemonet is an exploration into the serendipitous collisions that
    occur between two randomly generated arrays. the arrays contain a mix
    of custom and found .gifs sourced from tumblr and are set to
    music. the output is autonomous, generative, art made possible through
    curation & code.

You can even turn on sound...

pocksuppet7 hours ago

and it sounds like "cash money"

ale427 hours ago

That probably depends on what is being displayed... at some point I had sounds of USB connect/disconnect (possibly from the Windows 7 era).

1f60c6 hours ago

I think GP is referring to the name of the site, which sounds like "cash money" if you pronounce it with a thick American accent.

keepamovinop9 hours ago

I'm so delighted you guys are discovering this for the first time. It's been around for a long time. I think I first saw it in 2011.

MarcelOlsz9 hours ago

You're the man now, dawg.

neoman hour ago

I forgot about this, thank you! It was literally my screensaver all through the digitalocean build and got me through a lot of rough days. The clicking, I dunno, I spent too much time getting into weird click rhythms on this site. I would buy whoever made it dinner. https://www.cachemonet.com/save/

m_w_8 hours ago

An all-time classic, glad to see it's been unchanged for at least a decade

And you dip dip, dip...

m0008 hours ago

How can I self-host this?

flawn7 hours ago

Just for the legacy of this, I need to make sure this never vanishes

fowkswe7 hours ago

The track is Jib Kidder Windowdipper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwAYU4rlwmA

isoprophlex5 hours ago

Thanks. Been grooving on this for a solid 30 mins

BenjaminBarwo6 hours ago

I thought I was safe on here.

cl0ckt0wer9 hours ago

I can rock out to that all day

isoprophlex5 hours ago

strong overtones of Blank Banshee going on here.

good times

FpUser8 hours ago

Love it

kittikitti5 hours ago

Love it, thank you. Because Wayland doesn't support screensavers, I finally found a solution for my older monitors. This is a perfect replacement.

dominicq9 hours ago

Mmmm, funny shapes go brr

yreg5 hours ago

Now I know what to do with my extra monitor that I used to use for a home dashboard.

locknitpicker9 hours ago

On a somewhat related topic:

There's an actress called Cashae Monya

https://m.imdb.com/name/nm13392714/

cocoto10 hours ago

Works almost like stereograms (with duplicated object)!

khana8 hours ago

[dead]

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