I think there's a severe problem with this implementation. By using wrapping, I can't write "boobs" and have everyone else read my graffiti without them having having the same zoom wrapping point.
This problem is traditionally solved by attempting to teach the aliens how to decode the pattern inside the pattern itself. For example a rendering might look like
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x _ _ x _ x _ x x x _ x _ x _ _ x _ x _ x x x _ x _ x _ _ x
x _ _ x _ x _ x _ _ _ x _ x _ _ x _ x _ x _ x _ x _ x _ _ x
x _ _ x x x _ x x _ _ x x x _ _ x x x _ x _ x _ x _ x _ _ x
x _ _ x _ x _ x _ _ _ _ x _ _ _ _ x _ _ x _ x _ x _ x _ _ x
x _ _ x _ x _ x x x _ _ x _ _ _ _ x _ _ x x x _ x x x _ _ x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
x _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ x
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
The idea is that the aliens can figure out first that these opening and closing sections have periodicity 30, and because they are so repetitive they do not contain the actual data bits, but then there is a central section which does contain complexity.
So then they will hopefully alight upon the idea of looking at the code two-dimensionally, and adjust their browser width until the lines all line up, at which point they get the custom message.
How long did you spend crafting this comment? Be honest.
I could imagine doing that with Vim, but I don’t think I could do it in less than ten minutes. And then I’d get sidetracked about whether to represent empty checkboxes with _ or - or a Unicode box.
IIRC these messages usually have their dimensions equal to primes, to help the aliens a little bit - for example the Arecibo message was 1679 = 73 * 23 bits. We're hoping the aliens have the sense to recognize a product of two primes.
Slightly, yes! The Arecibo message was 73×23 bits, with the hope that the aliens would break lines after 23 bits. But,
i f . t h e s
n e i l a . e
s . l i k e .
o r t s u o b
p h e d o n .
w . r e d r o
e . a r e . k
c s . a d n i
r e w e d . o
a . e h t . n
r e c i b o .
e g a s s e m
. a n y w a y
and that's to say nothing of spiraling orders etc.
You could sorta kinda claim that most OLED displays are not rectangular [1], since only green is at full resolution, with blue and red being at a partial resolution, by sharing those sub pixels between "logical" pixels.
Note for anyone confused, this is about AMOLED displays commonly used in phones and some OLED laptops from a few years ago.
W-OLED and QD-OLED have unconventional layouts compared to LCDs but every pixel has the complete set of sub pixels (RGB for QD-OLED, RGBW for W-OLED) so it looks more like this:
Just mentioning as while AMOLED phones being the majority of OLED displays seems plausible to me, it's likely not what people in this thread are picturing when they see OLED.
There's a link in the bottom-left corner, haven't checked, but reads like an accompanying reddit tool (since there's no real plugin system, guess it's a web app requiring credentials)
No, no, it's a feature. Your message has been cleverly hidden behind a modern day scytale cipher. Intended recipients must know the correct screen width.
You announced it on the FediVerse, where it has already been boosted almost 700 times as I write this 4 hours later, and it spread to Reddit within 2 hours of that, as you know because you replied to the Reddit post. There is definitely going to be an initial spike of activity, given those. (-:
Love seeing things go viral off the fediverse, it's not designed to push the end of the spectrum out and more organic examples like this might help bring another layer of user adoption.
Ironically, I was looking to see whether Hacker News and anyone else had picked it up, from the FediVerse post. Bing found the Reddit thread from "One Million Checkboxes" as the search query. It's the second search result as I type this.
If you have time, one cool suggestion for gamification would be to do a SHA-256 hash of the binary values of the checkboxes and display current hash and the lowest hash so far.
it's a tiny flask server, a bitset stored in redis, updates broadcast (too frequently! but i don't want to change it now) via websockets, and react-window to only render the checkboxes that are in view.
I'll do a writeup when i finish putting out fires!
Each time a checkbox is checked, a backend job asks ChatGPT to analyze the board state and write a script using Brainfuck that updates the checkbox states and runs it directly in production.
You said crypto but you forgot where running it in production writes the checkbox change event to the blockchain. Checkbox display states only get read from the blockchain, obvi. Otherwise how could it possibly be secure
Checkboxcoin will be a separate product though, that's for the funding
I don't think you can put out a fire like this. Should have tried some kind of webrtc and Kademilia network and crypto to eventually communicate all updates.
How else do you propose a toaster generate heat to make the toast? At least it's not the thermostat so it thinks the AC needs to constantly be running. So there's quite a bit of positive logic in the toaster decision
Just an idea, but make it an internet game. Have a level 2,3,4.
The question is under what circumstances should that game switch to the next version. The idea I had was if all 1Million boxes are unchecked, but this is the internet someone would make it their life’s mission to keep one box checked.
IDK, I think you hinted upon something fun that we all like, it’s the Twitch vs thing, where everyone can interact and our total capacity makes the experience. This is also like the reddit/r/place which was also very fun.
I think you have a genuinely interesting idea, how can you grow it, nurture and change it to hit the true itch of humanity?
Is it ok if I try to write a script to uncheck all the boxes? I don’t want to spam your server and ruin it for everyone if there’s no rate limiting.
(I wince mentioning this publicly; still have flashback trauma from when some HNer wrote a script to download as much data as possible from our Firebase and got a $1k bill overnight.)
Hi! Sorry it took me a bit to get to this, I've been hacking to keep the server up for the last several hours.
Lots of people are botting, I don't think there's anything wrong if you bot too. There's a tiny bit of client-side rate limiting and originally i had server side rate limiting too, but I got rid of that a while ago (I was cutting anything I could to speed things up).
I am very late to this but as of now I think it has cost me about $85, although that will go up a little more quickly once I go through the bandwidth buffer I have with digital ocean (shouldn't be too bad tho)
I love some stats and details on this, what kind of traffic are you seeing etc. Do you have a way to determine how many boxes in your visitor checks/unchecks? 97% of your pictures from Hacker News etc. Congrats on the hit!!!! Fun playing with it!!!
At first I was clicking the top but people kept unchecking my stuff. Why can't we (we ? who's that we ?) all get along toward clicking them all ?
So I figured there would be less people fighting down the window, right ? For a while I was alone. It was a boring and meaningless job but it felt peaceful.
Then I met someone who's also checking boxes, 5 seconds top, they are gone. Okay, then I kept scrolling, checking boxes. Then, I don't know why... I scroll back up, just a little bit, just 2 lines of boxes, just to... goddammit there are random unchecked boxes now and I didn't see nobody unchecking them !
I jumped to a random spot, very far down. I decided to write HELLO in checks. I didn't get past the H before someone found me and griefed it. Must this 1 million checkbox ledger of art, devolve into madness? No matter how far I scroll there is nothing discernable. A wasteland of meaninglessness. This is just chaos.
I did the same, but started writing Fudge, to keep it clean. I got to FU and someone finished it with CK. It made me laugh much harder than it should have.
Such a strange reflection of ourselves that I had the exact same intent and methodology as you.
I’m sure that we were not alone, and there were many of us appeasing the goblins in our brains yelling for order, diligently checking boxes row by row (or some other orderly pattern). If I had landed on the page with every box checked, I would have felt a sense of doneness and left it in that perfect state. It’s so hard to empathize with all these maniacs here who would destroy that beauty just to write “boobs” ;)
// Navigate to your page
await page.goto('https://example.com'); // Replace with the actual URL
// Click all checkboxes
await page.$$eval('input[type=checkbox]', checkboxes => {
checkboxes.forEach(checkbox => checkbox.click());
});
// Close the browser
await browser.close();
})();
I'm proud of myself for getting the chill alert without even running a script, just frantically tapping with my fingers!
The problem is you need to send 467k (current count of checked boxes) websocket messages and backend(s) are already dying for ~1 hour. Good luck with that, I only played for some time by clearing first 1000 boxes every few seconds.
Even after you send those 467k messages they need to be sent to (I assume) few thousands browsers each, so you need to wait for 467M messages to go through :D
ok, fair point. i like treasure hunting. i should keep my private boxes locked.
and that makes me think of a new version of the game: actually hide treasures in some of the boxes. cookies, and also colored keys. keys allow you to lock (or unlock) boxes of a matching color. each key can only be used once.
This ain't gonna work for 1,000,000 checkboxes. You could try using requestAnimationFrame or querying only non-checked checkboxes querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]:not(:checked)') or not calling checkAllCheckboxes for all mutations.
Edit: or just call querySelector('input[type="checkbox"]:not(:checked)') and do them one by one in some kinda while(true) loop
this was on purpose! I figured there have been enough collaborative internet drawing experiences (with a locked canvas that was easy to draw on) that it'd be interesting to try something a little different and see what emerged.
That said, it might be a dumb idea! But I wanted to try it.
Oh, that's a shame. The big willy I drew is only visible at exactly the width I have it set at. I wonder what random things I'm missing. It takes a while to reflow too so it's not like it's easy to resize the window and see in realtime what other people are ding.
I think having to "scan" to identify images is kind of fun! And it means the artist gets to choose the width of their own art. A lot of folks have a common screen width so there are fewer combinations than you think.
Great stuff. Little jealous, because I'd love to work on quickly scaling such experiment seeing how many people are playing with it. Sad, but having my head too burned out by corpo bullshit and my creativity level is in the basement :(
Are there any companies hiring where you can still work and not waste 90% of time on meetings and docs?
Probably too many clicks and my mind is just spitting out here instead of just dying in pain in silence :D
I think your sentiment is very common, and I’ve started writing about the underlying feeling.
The answer is no, if the answer is no for you. It turns out that people fall into one of two buckets: either your job doesn’t take over your mind, or it does. And when it does, it becomes difficult to do anything else without neglecting the job.
Most jobs are 90% meetings and docs. This is roughly the definition of a job. Startups are the exception, but those will definitely take over your mind.
My creativity level has been in the basement for the last year or so. It happens. Don’t try to fight it; try to be happy. In my experience it’s the only way to restore my creativity.
Early stage startups, or starting your own company from scratch. That seems to be the case these days. I’m in the same boat, but side projects help cope!
The article above this on HN homepage was of Claude Sonnet 3.5. So, I used Claude Sonnet 3.5 and pasted an unchecking script. Presently I am at (-150)-ish checks.
function clickTickedCheckboxes() {
// Find all checked checkboxes
const checkedBoxes = document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]:checked');
// Iterate through each checked checkbox
checkedBoxes.forEach((checkbox, index) => {
// Use setTimeout to add a delay between clicks
setTimeout(() => {
// Click the checkbox
checkbox.click();
// If this is the last checkbox, call the function again after 2 seconds
if (index === checkedBoxes.length - 1) {
setTimeout(clickTickedCheckboxes, 2000);
}
}, index * 2000); // 2000ms (2 seconds) delay between each click
});
for (const input of document.querySelectorAll('input[type=checkbox]')) {
if (!input.checked) {
input.click();
await new Promise(res => setTimeout(res, 250));
}
}
Keyboard shortcuts to scroll up/down don't work unless you click into the array of checkboxes. I think this could be fixed by adding `tabindex="0"` to the div holding the grid.
i saw checked boxes hit almost 800K and then start dropping fast.
i've seen every other checkbox get checked on the entire screen in a second. some great scripting going on and i'm sure a lot insight is being learned by watching the tech stack handle these loads.
i noticed initially log messages were showing one check box change at a time but at some point updated to batching which is great. release and optimize!
One script to rule them all ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ﾉ⌐■-■
var c=document.querySelectorAll('input[type="checkbox"]');function a(e){e<c.length&&(c[e].checked&&(c[e].click(),setTimeout(()=>a(e+1),500)),!c[e].checked&&a(e+1))}a(0);
Fun game. I tried to go way out into the sticks and was able to write some ASCII like message but then was ruined. Liked trying to draw a picture in the sand right next to the waves. One question, I assume unchecking a box will uncheck for everyone?
async function main(){
let elems = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll("#root > div > div.grid > div input")).filter(v=>!v.checked)
for(let ee of elems){
await (new Promise(resolve => setTimeout(() => {
resolve()
}, 500)))
ee.click()
}
}
this is very neat, I love this kind of experiments!
could I ask you what's your hardware configuration for handling so many WebSocket connections? I'm just curious to know what's the maximum capacity of WS connections you can reach now that you posted on HN :)
I wonder what we'd see if you could only check boxes that are adjacent to already checked boxes (you'd obviously need to seed the array with some "anchors"). How long would it take for people to clear it?
It would be fun to attempt this with crdt's and libp2p (...or similar, I don't actually know those tools well I just like the idea of getting the server out of the loop).
this is....more popular than i expected. the server's gonna be having some problems for a while
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