6 ms·

Geocities Forever – neural network generated geocities pages

143 points by laacz 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
versteegen 10y ago
The generated English (and a number of other languages) doesn't make a lick of sense (certainly not comparable to decent NN language models), and there's HTML and JS visible all over the place. But they certainly look a lot like typical geocities pages. How do you generate HTML and JS with NNs? I wish there were an explanation somewhere. Maybe that's the reason that there's so much invalid HTML.
- jxdjsks 10y ago
  It looks a lot like the stuff I produced a while back with an rnn. I just fed the rnn raw web pages for a giggle. It does surprisingly well, often managing to close braces correctly. It really goes to show how good the browsers are at dealing with junk html. I was thinking about trying to jointly train the html and an image of the webpage, in the vague hope that you might be able to go from image to webpage. One day. Probably quite soon...
- jnpatel 10y ago
  Agreed about wishing there were an explanation. It's not clear to me that NN are the best way to get interesting Franken-pages. Maybe a Markov chain instead?
  - drdeca 10y ago
    Markov chains can't keep track of nested stuff though I thought? I suppose that NNs have some sort of limit to how many layers they handle, but I thought they tended to learn nesting fairly well, unlike markov chains? I could be wrong about this.
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    The best way is to have the NN generate the HTML / CSS / JS code and then use a markov chain to create content to populate the page with. It also has to do with quality of input. The texts on geocities pages aren't exactly pinnacles of clear and legible language. Same with the HTML.
- gwern 10y ago
  It could just be char-rnn output inside a very simple HTML wrapper. I found that a char-rnn can produce a lot of syntactically valid CSS with lots of URLs, so CSS+some HTML+image URLs is entirely possible: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#training-a-neural-net-to-generate-css http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#training-a-neural-net-to-g... The template here looks like it would go "<script src="jquery.js"></script> <script src="sha1.js"></script> <script src="links.js"></script> <script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-4209567-5', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script> <html> ...[until generation limit, ~1600 characters; note the absence of any valid closing tags] The low quality of the text might reflect the demands of simultaneously modeling text+HTML+CSS in a too-small RNN or insufficient training (training a high quality char-rnn/torch-rnn to convergence on the entire Geocities corpus, or even just a few hundred megabytes, could take weeks).
  - gwern 10y ago
    Yes, it turns out to be char-rnn/torch-rnn: 'RNN was 512-node, 3-layer' https://twitter.com/aanand/status/728738421758414849 https://twitter.com/aanand/status/728738421758414849 He wasn't training on his own computer so aside from being much too small (for modeling at least 3 languages, text+HTML+CSS, I would start with 1k neurons and go up from there), it probably wasn't trained to convergence either. The 50MB size is maybe a bit on the small size but probably not the root cause of the low text quality.
jnpatel 10y ago
In case it's not clear (it wasn't to me), refreshing the splash screen and clicking the big `Enter` will show you a different generated page.
- joelgrus 10y ago
  As will clicking any of the links on one of the generated page.
KON_Air 10y ago
just in case didn't know or need detox; http://www.oocities.org/ http://www.oocities.org/
l33tbro 10y ago
Aren't all of these just available at the Wayback Machine? Was really hoping this person found a way to display original pages correctly with their images intact.
- drdeca 10y ago
  These are randomly generated based on things from geocities.
  - drauh 10y ago
    Where does the neural network come in?
    - yolesaber 10y ago
      The HTML contents of geocities pages are the input to the NN which then creates the page you get when you hit ENTER
davesque 10y ago
I think the takeaway here is that it generates even remotely valid HTML in addition to remotely coherent content. I'm not sure why they include those irrelevant promotional quotes on the landing page. Also, zero details on the properties of the network they used.
- scandox 10y ago
  The quotes are for fun I reckon. They have that homemade quality. Like something you'd see on the back of a book self published by yer Mammy
- corndoge 10y ago
  sometimes I think its better to leave out the details and just let the experience be, not everything needs a how-its-made blog post and the lack of that here feels refreshing in a way.
jamespitts 10y ago
This is high art. Congrats.
namuol 10y ago
This has to be the most interesting way to fuzz-test a browser's rendering engine.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  Modern browsers are supposed to have finally standardised on how to deal with garbage HTML like this, but it'd be interesting to see if that's actually the case.
supernintendo 10y ago
GeoCities was the spark that ignited my interest in programming. I can remember hacking together awful HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a Sonic the Hedgehog fan page as early as middle school. Now the "home page" has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter. The culture of the Internet has changed and future generations are spared the need to even think about tables or color codes (unless they actively pursue web development). And sure, there's undeniable value in convergence. But part of me will always miss those magical days of animated GIFs sliding across my CRT.
- pmtarantino 10y ago
  That's my case too. I think somebody should study how fan pages made by 90s kids were the motivation for a generation of programmers.
  - rangibaby 10y ago
    I carefully followed this page carefully to make a Dragonball fan page using MS frontpage. I also added "cool" touchs like comet cursors, midi music, and MP3 files with the extensions changed so Xoom wouldn't reject them. http://labrocca.com/htmlementary/ http://labrocca.com/htmlementary/
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  https://neocities.org https://neocities.org
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    I will confirm that's why I made it. Doesn't look like web sites are going to be replaced by a neural network anytime soon. Not sure if I prefer the Orwellianism of social networks to a Borg cube at this point.
badloginagain 10y ago
I know some developers who write code like this: index var menubar = 'solid //speed of NS message master pathwave seconds // Don't edit below! var message="./www.oocities.com/Wraith.js"); //for yellow you are browsers var message="Merry You are moving your source code, it you should you have decide to one of the counter." var yvAlt = 10; var xpos=mysteps - var ypos=new Array(); function snowNS() { if (document.all) { // show position var a = slide.obj - expires.length; msg += (de_coselect(dy); if (remarks < red.focus); i <= cool ; //if layer is the area b = obj.visibility = eval(window) } // end hiding craft // set the link is the window // showdown down for idiot swd obj = document.getElementById(e); if((obj.top=top[i]+spring) setTimeout("move( tmLn.left+":"+minutes") + musionhamessages; } // End Created by GeoCities Home Page Generator Yahoo! GeoCities - father_gabriel's Home Page function Help(daLink) { var helpWnd=window.open(daLink,"help","width=500,height=500,scrollbars=yes,dependent=yes"); } // COLOR HEAD1 HEAD2 LINE1 BODY
bobbygoodlatte 10y ago
I like to imagine randomly clicking "Enter" and having today's Drudge Report pop up
donatj 10y ago
This literally makes my day. They should bring back Geocities
Pitarou 10y ago
Is there an archive of TimeCube we can train this thing on?
- ajosh 10y ago
  The first page I saw reminded me an awful lot of the time cube page.
  - rspeer 10y ago
    Yeah, why would you even need to seek out Time Cube-like input? I got a page with a large bold, italic, underlined link that said "CLICK HERE TO BE GOD 4".
mortenjorck 10y ago
I do see one missed opportunity here, and that was to frame this project not as a NN-based Geocities page generator, but as a mystery. Imagine instead a much more cryptic domain name and no landing page - just a random page each time (but keeping the shareable links). No credits or attributions, inviting speculation. It could have been the next Horse_ebooks!
meeper16 10y ago
aol -> geocities -> frienster -> myspace -> facebook -> _next_
rspeer 10y ago
It's about time that the Library of Babel had a Web presence.
larvaetron 10y ago
Reminds me of the days of sites like hell.com
phreeza 10y ago
I got an entire website inside a <marquee> tag, chrome showed it moving across the screen. Didn't know such a thing was possible, i am impressed. Also, looking at the actual page source, it makes no sense whatsoever, so this is probably saying more about the fault tolerance of modern rendering engines than about the NN used to generate these pages :)
code_research 10y ago
The brokenness was not the dominant factor of geocities, more the individualism in using a limited set of design resources. This project should be tuned more into that direction. Is the source available?
- nefitty 10y ago
  Well, it took me about 5 minutes of clicking through oocities to find this: http://www.oocities.org/tokyo/4633/xindex.html http://www.oocities.org/tokyo/4633/xindex.html
owenversteeg 10y ago
Anyone want to start posting the most interesting sites they got? I'll start: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/ef582a29d49c0447347774cb7efcc836bd07669e.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/ef582a29d49c0447347774cb7efc... http://www.geocitiesforever.com/4ade38484ae7d646b2c603cf21aaa60d6612011d.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/4ade38484ae7d646b2c603cf21aa... This one has a fascinating layout and a bunch of different languages: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/a6f8354b522a6cc573db0ddb5e073c145c31d266.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/a6f8354b522a6cc573db0ddb5e07... This one is a huge mess: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/0d92d6d58a7f18c3a81060cf1c997fe2b3ed19dc.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/0d92d6d58a7f18c3a81060cf1c99... This one is an experience: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/186fdd2501f72c7c9088678f1a0677149ec86eec.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/186fdd2501f72c7c9088678f1a06...
jrnichols 10y ago
I feel like I just hacked too much time. o.O

143 points by laacz 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

The generated English (and a number of other languages) doesn't make a lick of sense (certainly not comparable to decent NN language models), and there's HTML and JS visible all over the place. But they certainly look a lot like typical geocities pages. How do you generate HTML and JS with NNs? I wish there were an explanation somewhere. Maybe that's the reason that there's so much invalid HTML.

jxdjsks 10y ago
It looks a lot like the stuff I produced a while back with an rnn. I just fed the rnn raw web pages for a giggle. It does surprisingly well, often managing to close braces correctly. It really goes to show how good the browsers are at dealing with junk html. I was thinking about trying to jointly train the html and an image of the webpage, in the vague hope that you might be able to go from image to webpage. One day. Probably quite soon...
jnpatel 10y ago
Agreed about wishing there were an explanation. It's not clear to me that NN are the best way to get interesting Franken-pages. Maybe a Markov chain instead?
- drdeca 10y ago
  Markov chains can't keep track of nested stuff though I thought? I suppose that NNs have some sort of limit to how many layers they handle, but I thought they tended to learn nesting fairly well, unlike markov chains? I could be wrong about this.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  The best way is to have the NN generate the HTML / CSS / JS code and then use a markov chain to create content to populate the page with. It also has to do with quality of input. The texts on geocities pages aren't exactly pinnacles of clear and legible language. Same with the HTML.
gwern 10y ago
It could just be char-rnn output inside a very simple HTML wrapper. I found that a char-rnn can produce a lot of syntactically valid CSS with lots of URLs, so CSS+some HTML+image URLs is entirely possible: http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#training-a-neural-net-to-generate-css http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#training-a-neural-net-to-g... The template here looks like it would go "<script src="jquery.js"></script> <script src="sha1.js"></script> <script src="links.js"></script> <script> (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){ (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o), m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m) })(window,document,'script','https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga'); ga('create', 'UA-4209567-5', 'auto'); ga('send', 'pageview'); </script> <html> ...[until generation limit, ~1600 characters; note the absence of any valid closing tags] The low quality of the text might reflect the demands of simultaneously modeling text+HTML+CSS in a too-small RNN or insufficient training (training a high quality char-rnn/torch-rnn to convergence on the entire Geocities corpus, or even just a few hundred megabytes, could take weeks).
- gwern 10y ago
  Yes, it turns out to be char-rnn/torch-rnn: 'RNN was 512-node, 3-layer' https://twitter.com/aanand/status/728738421758414849 https://twitter.com/aanand/status/728738421758414849 He wasn't training on his own computer so aside from being much too small (for modeling at least 3 languages, text+HTML+CSS, I would start with 1k neurons and go up from there), it probably wasn't trained to convergence either. The 50MB size is maybe a bit on the small size but probably not the root cause of the low text quality.

jnpatel 10y ago

In case it's not clear (it wasn't to me), refreshing the splash screen and clicking the big `Enter` will show you a different generated page.

joelgrus 10y ago
As will clicking any of the links on one of the generated page.

KON_Air 10y ago

just in case didn't know or need detox; http://www.oocities.org/ http://www.oocities.org/

l33tbro 10y ago

Aren't all of these just available at the Wayback Machine? Was really hoping this person found a way to display original pages correctly with their images intact.

drdeca 10y ago
These are randomly generated based on things from geocities.
- drauh 10y ago
  Where does the neural network come in?
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    The HTML contents of geocities pages are the input to the NN which then creates the page you get when you hit ENTER

davesque 10y ago

I think the takeaway here is that it generates even remotely valid HTML in addition to remotely coherent content. I'm not sure why they include those irrelevant promotional quotes on the landing page. Also, zero details on the properties of the network they used.

scandox 10y ago
The quotes are for fun I reckon. They have that homemade quality. Like something you'd see on the back of a book self published by yer Mammy
corndoge 10y ago
sometimes I think its better to leave out the details and just let the experience be, not everything needs a how-its-made blog post and the lack of that here feels refreshing in a way.

jamespitts 10y ago

This is high art. Congrats.

namuol 10y ago

This has to be the most interesting way to fuzz-test a browser's rendering engine.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Modern browsers are supposed to have finally standardised on how to deal with garbage HTML like this, but it'd be interesting to see if that's actually the case.

supernintendo 10y ago

GeoCities was the spark that ignited my interest in programming. I can remember hacking together awful HTML, CSS and JavaScript for a Sonic the Hedgehog fan page as early as middle school. Now the "home page" has been replaced by Facebook and Twitter. The culture of the Internet has changed and future generations are spared the need to even think about tables or color codes (unless they actively pursue web development). And sure, there's undeniable value in convergence. But part of me will always miss those magical days of animated GIFs sliding across my CRT.

pmtarantino 10y ago
That's my case too. I think somebody should study how fan pages made by 90s kids were the motivation for a generation of programmers.
- rangibaby 10y ago
  I carefully followed this page carefully to make a Dragonball fan page using MS frontpage. I also added "cool" touchs like comet cursors, midi music, and MP3 files with the extensions changed so Xoom wouldn't reject them. http://labrocca.com/htmlementary/ http://labrocca.com/htmlementary/
voltagex_ 10y ago
https://neocities.org https://neocities.org
- kyledrake 10y ago
  I will confirm that's why I made it. Doesn't look like web sites are going to be replaced by a neural network anytime soon. Not sure if I prefer the Orwellianism of social networks to a Borg cube at this point.

badloginagain 10y ago

I know some developers who write code like this: index var menubar = 'solid //speed of NS message master pathwave seconds // Don't edit below! var message="./www.oocities.com/Wraith.js"); //for yellow you are browsers var message="Merry You are moving your source code, it you should you have decide to one of the counter." var yvAlt = 10; var xpos=mysteps - var ypos=new Array(); function snowNS() { if (document.all) { // show position var a = slide.obj - expires.length; msg += (de_coselect(dy); if (remarks < red.focus); i <= cool ; //if layer is the area b = obj.visibility = eval(window) } // end hiding craft // set the link is the window // showdown down for idiot swd obj = document.getElementById(e); if((obj.top=top[i]+spring) setTimeout("move( tmLn.left+":"+minutes") + musionhamessages; } // End Created by GeoCities Home Page Generator Yahoo! GeoCities - father_gabriel's Home Page function Help(daLink) { var helpWnd=window.open(daLink,"help","width=500,height=500,scrollbars=yes,dependent=yes"); } // COLOR HEAD1 HEAD2 LINE1 BODY

bobbygoodlatte 10y ago

I like to imagine randomly clicking "Enter" and having today's Drudge Report pop up

donatj 10y ago

This literally makes my day. They should bring back Geocities

Pitarou 10y ago

Is there an archive of TimeCube we can train this thing on?

ajosh 10y ago
The first page I saw reminded me an awful lot of the time cube page.
- rspeer 10y ago
  Yeah, why would you even need to seek out Time Cube-like input? I got a page with a large bold, italic, underlined link that said "CLICK HERE TO BE GOD 4".

mortenjorck 10y ago

I do see one missed opportunity here, and that was to frame this project not as a NN-based Geocities page generator, but as a mystery. Imagine instead a much more cryptic domain name and no landing page - just a random page each time (but keeping the shareable links). No credits or attributions, inviting speculation. It could have been the next Horse_ebooks!

meeper16 10y ago

aol -> geocities -> frienster -> myspace -> facebook -> _next_

rspeer 10y ago

It's about time that the Library of Babel had a Web presence.

larvaetron 10y ago

Reminds me of the days of sites like hell.com

phreeza 10y ago

I got an entire website inside a <marquee> tag, chrome showed it moving across the screen. Didn't know such a thing was possible, i am impressed. Also, looking at the actual page source, it makes no sense whatsoever, so this is probably saying more about the fault tolerance of modern rendering engines than about the NN used to generate these pages :)

code_research 10y ago

The brokenness was not the dominant factor of geocities, more the individualism in using a limited set of design resources. This project should be tuned more into that direction. Is the source available?

nefitty 10y ago
Well, it took me about 5 minutes of clicking through oocities to find this: http://www.oocities.org/tokyo/4633/xindex.html http://www.oocities.org/tokyo/4633/xindex.html

owenversteeg 10y ago

Anyone want to start posting the most interesting sites they got? I'll start: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/ef582a29d49c0447347774cb7efcc836bd07669e.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/ef582a29d49c0447347774cb7efc... http://www.geocitiesforever.com/4ade38484ae7d646b2c603cf21aaa60d6612011d.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/4ade38484ae7d646b2c603cf21aa... This one has a fascinating layout and a bunch of different languages: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/a6f8354b522a6cc573db0ddb5e073c145c31d266.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/a6f8354b522a6cc573db0ddb5e07... This one is a huge mess: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/0d92d6d58a7f18c3a81060cf1c997fe2b3ed19dc.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/0d92d6d58a7f18c3a81060cf1c99... This one is an experience: http://www.geocitiesforever.com/186fdd2501f72c7c9088678f1a0677149ec86eec.html http://www.geocitiesforever.com/186fdd2501f72c7c9088678f1a06...

jrnichols 10y ago

I feel like I just hacked too much time. o.O