I discovered this page like back in 2015 and I am grateful to find it on hackernews again, I forgot even its name in the meantime.
Bjorkbat [3 hidden]5 mins ago
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.
jgord [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
yreg [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
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.
jgord [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I wonder when peak demoscene occurred .. some of those mini code demos seem artistically and technically innovative.
Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.
binarygit [3 hidden]5 mins ago
THAT WAS TOTALLY WICKED!!
harel [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I don't know what this is, but I like it
ale42 [3 hidden]5 mins 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...
pocksuppet [3 hidden]5 mins ago
and it sounds like "cash money"
ale42 [3 hidden]5 mins 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).
1f60c [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
keepamovin [3 hidden]5 mins 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.
MarcelOlsz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
You're the man now, dawg.
neom [3 hidden]5 mins 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_ [3 hidden]5 mins ago
An all-time classic, glad to see it's been unchanged for at least a decade
And you dip dip, dip...
m000 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
How can I self-host this?
flawn [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Just for the legacy of this, I need to make sure this never vanishes
HN.zip
Song name is: Windowdipper from ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ by Jib Kidder
https://jibkidder.bandcamp.com/track/windowdipper
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.
https://ambient.garden/
https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/
https://terra.layoutit.com/
https://ambigr.am/hall-of-fame
https://autism-simulator.vercel.app/
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.
Such a simpler time.
Made me lose interest in browsing real quick
Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.
And you dip dip, dip...
good times
There's an actress called Cashae Monya
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm13392714/