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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.455s | 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!
1. sammot ◴[] No.41924073[source]
This whole stupid dog enclyopedia was an escalating series of generative AI scaling experiments and pointlessnesses:

https://www.thewoofbook.co.uk/

The quirkiest / most impractical aspect was responsive, same-width, stylised dog names.

Some dogs have short names (Pug), some long single-words (Dalmatian), some simply spitefully awkward (Cavalier King Charles Spaniel).

I wanted them all--and any future additions--to look similar, silly, and good.

https://www.thewoofbook.co.uk/testing/pageTitles

The final solution calculated relative weights for each letter then boshed the combined word weight in to a CSS variable. Some weights got (a variety of) word-break approaches and most names had primary and secondary styles with different weights. Took me weeks to work out the approach.

Pure stubborn idiocy; I’m deeply proud.