4 ms·
I keep making things out of checkboxes (2021)
- bluedino 3y agoI remember in the Visual Basic days, guys got really creative with games etc they would build by just using standard Windows Controls (UI elements), and no bitmaps.
- sdrothrock 3y agoIf the author also used the checked/unchecked disabled states, that might open up more possibilities with four values to with rather than just two. :)
- verisimi 3y agoMaybe he doesn't know about that .. someone ought to drop him an email.
- simonbarker87 3y agoThrow in the indeterminate state and he’s got another state with slight visual difference, might be able to add a little texture/depth maybe.
- inopinatus 3y agoYou can also use required checkboxes to make form elements (and their contents) in entirely separate DOM subtrees match the :invalid state, with hilarious opportunities for CSS.
- jezzamon 3y agoVery related: Doom rendered via checkboxes https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
- sebstefan 3y agoOh god I was going to say, this has to be the next step and then it's over
- maCDzP 3y ago“After checking with Bryan that he wasn't implementing this himself, I took the nerd snipe bullet for him…” I love that - wholesome.
- bombcar 3y ago> While I still have you, did you know that Bill Gates once digitally superimposed himself into DOOM to promote Windows 95? No, no I hadn't. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN0K58EfJSg&t=44s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN0K58EfJSg&t=44s Different era.
- dools 3y agoDoctor doctor! I keep making things out of checkboxes! Please complete this form and have a seat.
- skrebbel 3y ago> I’m starting to feel guilty spending months tinkering on these things when I’ve got the tools and skills to put actually useful stuff into the world. I feel like Superman, using his powers to fry an egg. What’s the point of skills if not for stuff like this? I mean if I was Superman I’d totally use my powers to fry an egg.
- bflesch 3y agoAmazing, my whole chromium 122.0.6261.94 on gnome arch linux became unresponsive with this demo. I think this kind of stuff is a good way to find security vulnerabilities :)
- burrish 3y agoI'm really glad someone made him do bad apple
- lopis 3y agoThe moment I saw the interactive demos I was so sure Bad Apple was coming. I was not disappointed.
- bjackman 3y agoHaha, when first learning programming I implemented Conway's Game of Life using a table of checkboxes. I remember I showed it to my mentor and he cracked up. He thought it was very creative but to me it had just seemed like the obvious tool for the job. Glad to see I'm not the only one!
- Suppafly 3y agoI clicked thru to the article specifically to see if he had conway's game of life.
- laurentlb 3y agoInteresting idea, but it just looks like a 1-bit image, and it feels limited (replacing a pixel with a checkbox doesn't bring much in the examples). It reminds me of the demo "Tides" (in the sense of demoscene) made out of sliders. The concept is well executed and synced with music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUTPlQzfz1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUTPlQzfz1k
- simpaticoder 3y agoSeems like a wholesome venture to me. After all the very foundations of computing rely on the ability to differentiate between two states. It is only by convention we call them "1" and "0", and historical circumstance that we (mostly) use vast arrays of nanoscale transistors in SRAM and DRAM to represent almost all modern states. But any system that has (at least) two distinguishable states is a valid basis for computation. So projects like this are not just fun but remind us of the fundamental arbitrariness of our interpretations. The next project I'd like to see from him (assuming he's not serious about quitting!) is the use of checkboxes to represent the layout of RAM in a simplified computer, and the state of a CPU registers and pc, such that the grid represents an input and a sequence of binary-encoded instructions. Might be simpler to define your own architecture, or pick a simple one like ARM. Using this, implement a simple, ideally recursive, algorithm like finding the gcd of two inputs. (Hopefully the state is actually stored in the checkboxes and not just treated as a rendering of some other more conventionally modeled internal state, such that if you slowed down execution and started clicking you'd get...interesting results.)
- bryancoxwell 3y agoLove this. I also thought nerd sniping meant something completely different. Should have known it was an XKCD thing.
- jessekv 3y agohttps://xkcd.com/356/ https://xkcd.com/356/
- kookamamie 3y agoThe checkboxing (conversion from image to boxes) could use some better dithering algorithms - with blue noise, perhaps?
- compumetrika 3y agoI'm a little surprised no one has pointed out yet that this is incredibly close to cellular automata, which Wolfram has show can get you Turing completeness among other things.[1] Wolfram's "New Kind of Science" almost certainly has tons of fun things for the author to play around with if so inclined. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Simple_programs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science#Simple...
- mjburgess 3y agoThis is a great way of teaching browser js (dom manipulation, etc.). I always think, for most people, building games (ie., building play time) is the best route into engineering of any kind.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoChallenge to make a good chatgpt prompt to play with this?
- hacker_newz 3y agoWhy?
- stronglikedan 3y agoSeems like the disabled attribute could be leveraged here to make even more engaging animations.
- hacker_newz 3y agoI was expecting a Game of Life implementation.
- AlienRobot 3y ago>I soon realized that converting images gets you 90% of the way to converting video so that became my next task. Heh, cool, but where is bad apple? >Bad Apple on HTML Checkboxes Damn...
- seabass 3y agoI think it's awesome that one of the first comments suggested that he ported DOOM to the checkbox renderer, and then 3 days later someone else actually implements it: https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes https://healeycodes.com/doom-rendered-via-checkboxes
- flanbiscuit 3y agoThis is really cool! Also the cool thing about using <input type="checkbox"> is that updating the checked status of each input doesn't cause reflow (as far as I can tell according to: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a). And using JS to check/uncheck an input doesn't update the DOM. If you inspect the DOM of https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/ https://www.bryanbraun.com/checkboxland/ you see absolutely nothing changing as all of the animations are running. That helps keep things speedy.
- Suppafly 3y agoWhat, not Conway's game of life made out of checkboxes?
- cushpush 3y agoKnown to dabble in genius works.