also, seems like they have another project https://feel.thatsh.it/ and I'd love to find that song as well if you can help haha
keepamovin 20 hours ago [-]
That song is also pretty nice. I wonder if that was an earlier project?
flawn 1 days ago [-]
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 1 days 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.
yreg 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
I wonder when peak demoscene occurred .. some of those mini code demos seem artistically and technically innovative.
keepamovin 21 hours ago [-]
I believe the demoscene is still ongoing, especially in France. Would love to understand why that is (French tech: parallel early teletype internet, high demoscene, more open approach to UFOs (GEIPAN) - French don't seem obviously "that different" to Americans, but there's obviously something different going on).
Bjorkbat 18 hours ago [-]
To me demoscene is kind of synonymous with the Amiga, so I would argue that peak demoscene lines up with the rise and fall of the Amiga brand.
So I think that's maybe the other differentiator between web experiment and art, because demoscene has a very distinct but difficult to describe cultural element that makes me identify it as art.
keepamovin 21 hours ago [-]
This is a good description. Well done.
jgord 1 days 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.
keepamovin 20 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if that's true. The Renaissance was peak creativity, but also high inequality - from peasants to the Medicis. Chinese and Japanese art seemed to flourish during wealthy imperial times, but decline during war, where the blender of chaos made people much more equal. Chinese art surged back in the last two decades in new modern forms.
Basquiat thrived during peak 1980s New York, and had a rags to riches trajectory, I think. Art is not generally something people get to "as a hobby" when they have time among normal life. The artist mindset is different: you need to do it. It's survival. Not about money. You have to express and create. You probably don't choose like other people.
The true creatives find a way with what they have. This is not to denigrate people who take up painting or photography as a hobby and often produce high quality stuff. It is to distinguish separate experiences. It's also to highlight that "great creativity" comes from a psychic imperative and visceral drive on part of the people who do it.
harel 1 days ago [-]
I don't know what this is, but I like it
ale42 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
and it sounds like "cash money"
ale42 1 days 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 1 days 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.
ale42 4 hours ago [-]
Indeed, I just understood the same when reading it again... I answered too quickly
keepamovin 1 days 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.
I've had a few sprints where this has just looped for hours haha
BenjaminBarwo 1 days ago [-]
I thought I was safe on here.
cl0ckt0wer 1 days ago [-]
I can rock out to that all day
neom 1 days 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/
keepamovin 20 hours ago [-]
You're welcome. The site has also got me through lots of crazy programming sprints, somehow! haha. That along with looping the "Architect " scene from the Matrix.
Edit: Shit i didn't know there was a screensaver. You're the OG how you discover that! :)
FpUser 1 days ago [-]
Love it
dominicq 1 days ago [-]
Mmmm, funny shapes go brr
isoprophlex 1 days ago [-]
strong overtones of Blank Banshee going on here.
good times
kittikitti 1 days 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.
Now I know what to do with my extra monitor that I used to use for a home dashboard.
keepamovin 20 hours ago [-]
Hahah, excellent!
cocoto 1 days ago [-]
Works almost like stereograms (with duplicated object)!
keepamovin 20 hours ago [-]
You mean those magic eye type things where you cross your eyes and see 3D? I love those. In fact that would be a cool Cache Monet variant to create. Get AI to produce two appropriate stereographic views of the same animated GIF, then it's like Cache Monet in 3D. Simple concept but not trivial I imagine.
Song name is: Windowdipper from ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ by Jib Kidder
https://jibkidder.bandcamp.com/track/windowdipper
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.
So I think that's maybe the other differentiator between web experiment and art, because demoscene has a very distinct but difficult to describe cultural element that makes me identify it as art.
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.
Basquiat thrived during peak 1980s New York, and had a rags to riches trajectory, I think. Art is not generally something people get to "as a hobby" when they have time among normal life. The artist mindset is different: you need to do it. It's survival. Not about money. You have to express and create. You probably don't choose like other people.
The true creatives find a way with what they have. This is not to denigrate people who take up painting or photography as a hobby and often produce high quality stuff. It is to distinguish separate experiences. It's also to highlight that "great creativity" comes from a psychic imperative and visceral drive on part of the people who do it.
Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.
And you dip dip, dip...
Edit: Shit i didn't know there was a screensaver. You're the OG how you discover that! :)
good times
There's an actress called Cashae Monya
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm13392714/
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.
Such a simpler time.
Made me lose interest in browsing real quick