Reminds me of an artwork that compiled shots of clocks and watches from movies into a 24 hour cycle. The journalist reporting on it was so entranced they kept visiting at different times of day/night
I just happened to use it at 7:41 and there's no quotes for that time according to the JSON files in the other comment. It instead gave me a quote that indicated it was 2:34
Here's another excerpt, this time from the novel "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway, that mentions the time 07:30:
"I woke up late in the morning. The sun was hot on my face, and I had a headache. I had been drunk the night before, but I remembered everything that had happened. I lay in bed for a while and listened to the sounds outside. There were birds singing in the trees and the sound of people walking on the street. I looked at my watch. It was 7:30. I got up and went to the window. The sky was blue and cloudless. It was going to be a hot day."
Prompt: Using literary references. State a quote that mentions the current time 9:54pm.
Answer: One literary reference that mentions the current time of 9:54 pm is from the novel "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald. In Chapter 3, Nick Carraway, the narrator, says, "I looked at my watch and it was four o'clock. Gatsby's house was still empty when I left - the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine own and the air was thick with the sounds of the summer. By 9:54 pm, when the guests began to arrive, the air was alive with chatter and laughter, and the lights from Gatsby's mansion spilled out onto the lawn, illuminating the darkness with a warm glow."
ChatGPT just isn't the right tool for the job to find concrete information. LLMs hallucinate too readily. They have no knowledge, they're just running probabilities on what's the most likely response, and the most likely answer in its experience is rarely "uh idk."
If you need the literal opposite of this site, I made Sit. (https://sit.sonnet.io) which is not even a clock, but a timer for sitting down and doing f*ck all.
I like the idea of this project, we need more semi-useless toys in our lives. I almost wish that every piece of software I use were customisable and themeable like Winamp. (or certain every-day objects ranging from fashion to gadgets to human skin via tattoos)
Yup, that's one of the reasons I added the intro modal with a call-to-action:)
The handler triggering full screen (el.requestFullscreen) needs to be in the same call stack as a user interaction event. Same with triggering audio playback programmatically.
I'm actually using audio as a fallback to prevent the device from falling asleep (via nosleep.js, modern APIs do exist, but I don't trust Apple with PWAs).
it eventually loads, it's transferring >10MB into the "GPU" as a texture, as well as starting the overall meta-meta simulation. I am using a junk oneplus and it took about 15-20 seconds to start, but after that it was smooth like butter.
It is a fun experience. You go in there with no instructions and no idea what is going on. You quickly figure out how you can interact with it and what is going on within that little world and try and make sense of it. Then you notice the title and try and piece that in with that model you've just created. And then you get to wonder if you are reading too much into it and it is just a fun little toy someone built or if there is some artistic story.
Yo I'm glad you like it!! I made it over a few days by giving instructions to GPT-4. About 80% of the time it would get my desired functionality exactly right. When I named it society.htm it looked and worked a lot differently, but I think the name still applies. I've started writing a readme for it but got distracted with other projects. Here is the github for it https://github.com/mnenoff/society-htm
I had something akin to a religious experience when I saw this for the first time, and reading the explanation blew my mind. One of the coolest things I've ever seen on the internet.
I'm curious about why exactly this is so anxiety-inducing. I have multiple hypotheses: a) the way the numbers only come together for a moment means you need to concentrate. b) the feeling of objects being flung towards you. c) the color scheme. d) the frenetic, jittery movement of the blocks, kind of like insects. e) The large number of objects moving unpredictably makes it hard to track. f) The passage of time. g) Every 10 seconds, the digits get pounded and blocks fly at you.
This is probably over-analysis, but it's interesting that so many people have the same reaction to this page.
For me it's simply the fact that the blocks get destroyed every second. It really enhances the 'time is fleeting' feeling. Every second is unique and you're never ever getting it back.
It makes me worry about the invisible minions that are pushing the blocks into place. They only have a second, blocks are falling, how can the get it to the right numbers in time? But as soon as the numbers are legible, the blocks for the next number are already falling, and the invisible minions must jump straight to working on those blocks without a moments rest, second after second, nonstop for eternity.
I was way too focused on how slow this is running on my phone, sometimes skipping two seconds even. So I had no chance to actually think about what I'm seeing in a deeper way.
I came to say the same thing, but that was me looking at it's practicality as a clock.
If you zone out a bit and watch, you can see each tick form the time and quickly collapse, drawing a parallel to the nervous ephemeral nature of life. Being able to get that feeling from a clock is pretty neat.
Since those numbers don't assemble from previous numbers, they could as well start assembling earlier. Apparently the designer thinks it's visible long enough (he's wrong).
I think the coolest thing is the assembly itself, which wouldn't be the case with your idea even if it would be more readable.
I apologize for being rude with my joke but their stuff (https://oimo.io/works) is so mind-blowing that I just want to let them do their thing and fully embrace their vision without external interference.
I find it invigorating in a way - there's a constant stream of fresh new seconds coming your way, moments you've never before seen in your life and so could hold anything in them.
But I can understand the anxiety a lot of people seem to be feeling at this: I had (and have) a similar response to WaitButWhy's [Your Life in Weeks](https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html) post.
One of the cooler articles I read on HN was about how Mandarin speakers consider the past spatially in front of them and the future spatially behind them. This is the opposite of English, which tends to consider the past as "behind us".
The English way is based on movement: we are moving forward into the future and our past is what we are leaving behind.
The Mandarin way is about knowledge: we can see the past (hence it is in front of our eyes) while we cannot know the future (as it is behind us.)
Even if, linguistically, Mandarin doesn't speak of looking forward towards the future, China is known for strategically investing and planning for payoffs multiple decades/generations into the future.
Language does affect thought, but apparently, in this case, speaking of not being able to see the future apparently doesn't preclude actively shaping it.
Sweet, a Yugo Nakemura for the 21st Century. Anyone who doesn’t remember yugop.com, it was a site of beautifully cool experiments with Flash and Actionscript 1/2, the guy really was an inspiration to so many of us trying to figure out what to do with the web.
Yugop (the website) was such an inspiration: it questioned the way we interact with our devices in a playful way. I can say that it influenced my work and career…!
At Paddington station in London there's a clock on the side of a building that appears to have someone inside it, manually drawing on the hands each minute. Its pretty neat
I've heard of this before and while this is a really cool idea, it makes for a very bad clock, because you sometimes have to wait for several seconds to tell how much time it is.
I'm not passionate enough to try and (machine-)translate it, even though I would've really liked to understand how you make collision handling work backwards (especially since the simulation clearly seems to have energy dissipation)...
I liked the life one too. The x61.51 framerate has no movement at all other than the shapes changing and I don't really know why. I'm assuming it must be a framerate where my brain can't actually parse any movement but I have no idea.
Also, not sure if this is intentional or some ios specific bug/unintended feature, but you can do a quick 2-finger “zoom” motion, lift up your fingers, and it’ll keep zooming in at a constant speed. Then you can “steer” with one finger. It is mesmerizing.
Playing with it a bit more, it feels really intentional. You really have to… for lack of a better phrase “fling yourself inwards” with the zoom to get it to keep moving.
The level of dread felt is like taking just a wee bit too much acid and feeling the universe collapsing in and exploding back out on itself. Not that I've ever experienced that.
When I was younger, I was impressed by the technical feat of demos like this.
Nowadays, while still impressive, the technical mystery has faded somewhat. What's even more impressive to me though is the discipline, time and motivation management to deliver something of this caliber. Hats off!
I agree, except when we were younger, these were also greater technical feats.
Back when VRML was trying to be a thing, I suggested "they" stop wasting their time on uber nerdy games with arcane controller patterns, and just produce a 3D window manager with really nice transitions to use for ordinary desktop things.
VRML was definitely weird / ahead of its time. Reading about it at the time, and only having modest hardware, I was under the impression that the powerful machines back then could render VR in realtime. Heh 20+ years later and we're still not fully there yet.
This gives me a huge hit of nostalgia for Flash and ActionScript - ActionScript 3 was my introduction to OOP, design patters, and something akin to "game programming".
I remember browsing Flash demos like this with all sorts of really neat effects, UI tidbits, etc.
Creating a little physics engine in AS3 was super fun. I never really got over how fun it was to write code like "this.parent.rm(this)"
Not sure if it's the same making demos like this, but it feels like it!
On the topic of clocks, have anyone seen any examples of physical representations of time flowing or filling in in a block like way, like an easier to read hourglass.
Imagining this up on my next Zoom, suspect everyone will start talking much much faster and we might get through more but be knackered by the end of the call.
I figured it was something like that as well. Looks visually impressive if you don't know the trick. I had thought about assigning edges and guaranteeing they met in the backstage area, then almost as quickly realized it'd be way easier to take the solid, break it into pieces that fly off, then do that, time-reversed, in the backstage.
Sorry for the asside, perhaps we could add a rule that single name tools need a short description in the thread title. The top two threads are titled "Clock" and "Astral" and you don't know what they are going to be until I click out to the external site or try to guess from comments.
I enjoy that. When i see some minimal descriptor with a ton of upvotes, I enjoy the suprise of what it's going to be. Also, as the creator posting it I feel you should be able to describe it how you please as long as it's accurate.
No it isn't, it's extremely accurate but it's minimally (or concisely) descriptive.
To be "extremely descriptive" it would need to describe it in enough detail to consider extreme (what kind of clock, what does it look like, how is it made, etc).
The current title is like calling a Rembrandt painting "Picture"; completely accurate, but hardly capturing its essence (nor "extremely descriptive").
I see your point, bit I think it depends on what you are comparing it to.
I think the problem is that a lot of titles are neither accurate nor descriptive, and in that comparison “Clock” beats a lot of them as well as covering the essence of 75% of what you are going to be looking at.
If this had been described as “Time” that would’ve left you wondering.
The other is easy, because the page has some text: "Astral: Next-Gen
Python Tooling". If you send an email to the mods, they may agree and fix it.
This one is difficult because the page has no text and the mods usually don't want to make a title from thin air. "3D animated clock" may be good, but it may be hard to convince the mods to change it.
The guidelines ask to use the original title. The tag line or the subtitle is many times a good alternative. If the title is too bad, sometimes a representative sentence is OK, but not cherry picking too much.
I think the author of the clock might want to keep the name enigmatic while factually correct. There are many interpretations, images, and connotations which the animation may invoke in a viewer, and the author might not want to force any particular one. So staying enigmatic here is the right move, I think.
The Astral thing is different: it's about announcing a commercial company, and not having spent time on crafting a good description that would appear in link aggregators like HN is their loss of opportunity and outreach. Good thing that posting and discussing it here uncovered the issue.
staying enigmatic might be the right move for the author, but that doesn't mean the cost should be borne by us.
The reason that we have traffic jams at rush hour is that it is in each person's self interest to enter the highway, but as a collective it creates a greater negative for all than the benefit to the one (see economic negative externality). When you merge into a crowded highway, 1000 people behind you move back one car length; if you had the choice of waiting 1000 cars to enter (and for each of all the people in front of you and behind you) would you do it?
on HN people are endlessly interested in daylight savings, processor clock speeds, UTC, the year 2038 problem, etc. A whimsical clock could be considered a waste... of time, and would it really spoil the whimsy all that much for the whimsical minority?
I did pick the wrong post for this comment I think, of course this isn't so bad. It's ambiguous tools and startups that I wish would put more info in the title.
In 2023 though there is more to a click than a simple HTML request, and while I do, not everyone has cheap and fast internet, or fast devices.
It would just make it easier to know if you are about to waste your time and get a facefull of tracking JS, subscription popups and marketing BS for no reason or if you might actually gain something for the click.
Give it a minute or so to see what happens...