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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source

I recently came across the concept of "useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write. These could be anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems. I'm curious to hear about the most interesting or creative "useless" programs the HN community has written. What was your motivation? What unexpected challenges did you face? Did you learn anything valuable from the experience? Some examples to get the ball rolling: 1. A program that prints the lyrics of "99 Bottles of Beer" in binary. A text-based game where you play as a semicolon trying to find its way to the end of a line of code. A script that translates English text into Shakespearean insults. Share your creations, no matter how quirky or impractical. Let's celebrate the joy of coding for coding's sake!
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ajxs ◴[22 Oct 24 23:48 UTC] No.41919953[source]▶
A long time ago I wrote a useless, but fun program that attempts to programmatically recreate a source image by randomly placing randomly sized, randomly coloured rectangles onto a canvas. If the result of this random application of colour is closer to the source image, it's kept, otherwise the changes are discarded. Over time, it gets reasonably close to the source image.

https://ajxs.github.io/pbp/

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IAmGraydon ◴[23 Oct 24 00:45 UTC] No.41920380[source]▶
Isn’t this basically how stable diffusion works?
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1. NotAnOtter ◴[23 Oct 24 03:13 UTC] No.41921419[source]▶
This is like the tech reporter's version of stable diffusion.

Does it have some similarities? sure. Is it easier to understand than actual stable diffusion? yes.

Is this basically how stable diffusion works? Not even close.