9 ms·

Show HN: isometric.nyc – giant isometric pixel art map of NYC

• reb 9mo ago
  This is so cool! Please give me a way to share lat/long links with folks so I can show them places that are special to me :)
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    oh wow that's such a good/obvious idea, i'll see if I can whip it together tonight
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
  Appreciate that writeup. Very detailed insights into the process. However those conclusions left me on the fence about whether I 'liked' the project. The conclusions about 'unlocking scale' and commodity content having zero value. Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh.
  • dreadlordbone 9mo ago
    Does it really matter that much that a sewage treatment plant couldn't exist without automated sensors? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    At the risk of rehashing the same conversation over and over again, I think this is true of every technology ever. Personally I'm extremely excited about all of the creative domains that this technology unlocks, and also extremely saddened/worried about all of the crafts it makes obsolete (or financially non-viable)...
    • anonymous908213 9mo ago
      Do you seriously believe this[1] makes any craft obsolete or financially non-viable? [1] https://files.catbox.moe/1uphaw.png https://files.catbox.moe/1uphaw.png This is a fairly cool and novel application of generative AI[2], but it did not generate pixel art and it's still wildly incoherent slop when you examine it closely. This mostly works because it uses scale to obfuscate the flaws; users are expected to be zoomed out and not looking at the details. But the details are what makes art work. You could not sell a game or an animation like this. This is not replacing anybody. [2] It's also wholly unrepresentative of general use-cases. 99.99999999% of generative AI usage does not involve a ton of manual engineering labour fine-tuning a model and doing the things you did to get this set up. Even with all of that effort, what you've produced here is never replacing a commercially viable pixel artist. The rest of the world slapping a prompt into an online generator is even further away from doing that.
  • DANmode 9mo ago
    > Where does that leave you and this project? Does it really matter that much that the project couldn't exist without genAI? Maybe it shouldn't exist then at all. As with alot of the areas AI touches, the problem isn't the tools or use of them exactly, it's the scale. We're not ready for it. We're not ready for the scale of impact the tech touches in multitude of areas. Including the artistic world. The diminished value and loss of opportunities. We're not ready for the impacts of use by bad actors. The scale of output like this, as cool as it is, is out of balance with the loss of huge chunk of human activity and expression. Sigh. If you don’t see these tools as a way for ALL of us to more-intimately reach more of our intended audiences, whether as a musician, marketer, small business, whatever, then I don’t know if you were really passionate or excited about what you were doing in the first place.
• detectivestory 9mo ago
  beautiful!
• k1rd 9mo ago
  Really nice.
• bigwheels 9mo ago
  Very impressive result! are you taking requests for the next ones? SF :D Tokyo :D Paris :D Milan :D Rome :D Sydney :D Oh man...
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Really want to do SF next. Maybe the next gen of models will be reliable enough to automate it but this took WAY too much manual labor for a working man. I’ll get the code up soon if people wanna fork it!
    • sujayakar 9mo ago
      I'd absolutely love to play with this. one idea I had is to train another model to create bitmaps of sidewalks and roads and add a simulation for pedestrians and cars. day/night cycle would also be so cool!
  • devilsdata 9mo ago
    Really would love to see Tokyo, Kyoto, or Sydney.
  • wedog6 9mo ago
    How about Staten Island next?
    • rob74 9mo ago
      I second that! I know that Staten Island isn't that well liked by the other boroughs, but the only time I visited New York so far, I stayed at an AirBNB (actually it was a HomeAway) there and have pleasant memories of seeing Manhattan in the distance through the window and using the ferry each morning to get there...
• xnx 9mo ago
  > This project is far from perfect, but without generative models, it couldn’t exist. There’s simply no way to do this much work on your own, Maybe, though a guy did physically carve/sculpt the majority of NYC: https://mymodernmet.com/miniature-model-new-york-minninycity04/ https://mymodernmet.com/miniature-model-new-york-minninycity...
  • pavel_lishin 9mo ago
    Huh, the linked instagram account is no longer available :/
    • lionsdan 9mo ago
      TikTok content is still up https://www.tiktok.com/@balsastyrofoam300 https://www.tiktok.com/@balsastyrofoam300
    • ggsp 9mo ago
      I still see it at https://www.instagram.com/minninycity04 https://www.instagram.com/minninycity04, with two video posts
  • fwip 9mo ago
    I got a recommended video in Youtube just the other day, where a bunch of users made NYC in Minecraft at a 1:1 scale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZouSJWXFBPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZouSJWXFBPk Granted, it was a team effort, but that's a lot more laborious than a pixel-art view.
    • ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
      Related: New York City is being recreated at 1:1 scale inside Minecraft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665589 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46665589
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    This project is awesome, and I love that there are people who are driven enough to make something with so much craft, attention, and duration. That being said I have three kids (one a newborn) - there's no possible way I could have done this in the before times!
• xnx 9mo ago
  I see you used Gemini-CLI some but no mention of Antigravity. Surprising for a Googler. Reasons?
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    I used antigravity a bit, but it still feels a bit wonky compared to Cursor. Since this was on my own time, I'm gonna use the stuff that feels best. Though, by the end of the project I wasn't touching an IDE at all.
• squigz 9mo ago
  Hugged to death? :(
  • RationPhantoms 9mo ago
    Seems so. Shame! Really wanted to see this.
    • tptacek 9mo ago
      You really, really do. It's quite something.
      • RationPhantoms 9mo ago
        It's back and wow, it's incredible!
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Should be back online now!
• fuckyah 9mo ago
  [dead]
• jesse__ 9mo ago
  > Slop vs. Art > If you can push a button and get content, then that content is a commodity. Its value is next to zero. > Counterintuitively, that’s my biggest reason to be optimistic about AI and creativity. When hard parts become easy, the differentiator becomes love. Love that. I've been struggling to succinctly put that feeling into words, bravo.
  • NelsonMinar 9mo ago
    I agree this is the interesting part of the project. I was disappointed when I realized this art was AI generated - I love isometric handdrawn art and respect the craft. But after reading the creator's description of their thoughtful use of generative AI, I appreciated their result more.
  • pimlottc 9mo ago
    Where’s the love here? There are artists who dedicate their lives to creating a single masterwork. This is someone spending a weekend on a “neat idea”.
    • jesse__ 9mo ago
      You're inferring that time invested per project is directly proportional to love for the craft, which I disagree with strongly. Taking a weekend to explore a new medium is an act of interest/love in the craft. Is Robert Bateman any less dedicated to a life of art than Michelangelo was? Maybe, maybe not, but I think we can both agree they produced quick sketches, and dedicated their lives to producing incredible art. I expect artists will experiment with the new tools and produce incredibly creative works with them, far beyond the quality I can produce by typing in "a pelican riding a bicycle".
      • pimlottc 9mo ago
        It’s not necessarily directly correlated, but it’s a decent signal. What’s the signal here?
• dormento 9mo ago
  Not working here, some CORS issue. Firefox, Ubuntu latest. Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://isometric-nyc-tiles.cannoneyed.com/dzi/tiles_metadata.json https://isometric-nyc-tiles.cannoneyed.com/dzi/tiles_metadat.... (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing). Status code: 429. Edit: i see now, the error is due to the cloudflare worker being rate limited :/ i read the writeup though, pretty cool, especially the insight about tool -> lib -> application
  • flaviolivolsi 9mo ago
    Not working here either. Two different errors with two different browsers on Arch. - Chromium: Failed to load tiles: Failed to fetch - Zen: Failed to load tiles: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
    • jen20 9mo ago
      Same in Safari on macOS here, FWIW.
    • cannoneyed 9mo ago
      Yeah I'm gonna blame Claude (and my free plan) for this one. Fixing!
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      • cannoneyed 9mo ago
        Cloudflare caching should be back. Turns out that there were a lot of tiles being served, who could have seen that coming?
• lagniappe 9mo ago
  Failed to load tiles: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
• tptacek 9mo ago
  So, wait: this is just based on taking the 40 best/most consistent Nano Banana outputs for a prompt to do pixel-art versions of isometric map tiles? That's all it takes to finetune Qwen to reliably generate tiles in exactly the same style? Also, does someone have an intuition for how the "masking" process worked here to generate seamless tiles? I sort of grok it but not totally.
  • NAR8789 9mo ago
    I think the core idea in "masking" is to provide adjacent pixel art tiles as part of the input when rendering a new tile from photo reference. So part of the input is literal boundary conditions on the output for the new tile. Reference image from the article: https://cannoneyed.com/img/projects/isometric-nyc/training_data_infill.png https://cannoneyed.com/img/projects/isometric-nyc/training_d... You have to zoom in, but here the inputs on the left are mixed pixel art / photo textures. The outputs on the right are seamless pixel art. Later on he talks about 2x2 squares of four tiles each as input and having trouble automating input selection to avoid seams. So with his 512x512 tiles, he's actually sending in 1024x1024 inputs. You can avoid seams if every new tile can "see" all its already-generated neighbors. You get a seam if you generate a new tile next to an old tile but that old tile is not input to the infill agorithm. The new tile can't see that boundary, and the style will probably not match.
    • cannoneyed 9mo ago
      That’s exactly right - the fine tuned Qwen model was able to generate seamless pixels most of the time, but you can find lots of places around the map where it failed. More interestingly, not even the biggest smartest image models can tell if a seam exists or not (likely due to the way they represent image tokens internally)
      • NAR8789 9mo ago
        I'm curious why you didn't do something like generate new tiles one at a time, but just expand the input area on the sides with already-generated neighbors. Looks like your infill model doesn't really care about tile sizes, and I doubt it really needs full adjacent tiles to match style. Why 2x2 tile inputs rather than say... generate new tiles one at a time, but add 50px of bordering tile on each side that already has a pixel art neighbor?
• tehlike 9mo ago
  Some people reported 429 - otherwise known as HN hug of death. You probably need to adjust how caching is handled with this.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Yup the adjustment was giving cloudflare 5 bucks :)
    • tehlike 9mo ago
      Hah! I thought caching stuff was free. Is it because of the workers? I assumed this was all static assets. I too have been giving cloudflare 5$ for a while now :D
      • cannoneyed 9mo ago
        yeah I had to put it behind a worker to deal with the subdomain and various other subtle caching issues. All in all cloudflare is incredible, and Claude makes it actually quite easy to deal with all the ins and outs
• cyrusradfar 9mo ago
  Insane outcome. Really thoughtful post with insights across the board. Thanks for sharing
• sanufar 9mo ago
  Seems to have been hugged to death as of now
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Should be back after some help from Claude and some money to Cloudflare
    • sanufar 9mo ago
      Class, looks amazing. The embed in the writeup looks so cool!
• blintz 9mo ago
  I was most surprised by the fact that it only took 40 examples for a Qwen finetune to match the style and quality of (interactively tuned) Nano Banana. Certainly the end result does not look like the stock output of open-source image generation models. I wonder if for almost any bulk inference / generation task, it will generally be dramatically cheaper to (use fancy expensive model to generate examples, perhaps interactively with refinements) -> (fine tune smaller open-source model) -> (run bulk task).
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    In my experience image models are very "thirsty" and can often learn the overall style of an image from far fewer models. Even Qwen is a HUGE model relatively speaking. Interestingly enough, the model could NOT learn how to reliably generate trees or water no matter how much data and/or strategies I threw at it... This to me is the big failure mode of fine-tuning - it's practically impossible to understand what will work well and what won't and why
    • blintz 9mo ago
      I see, yeah, I can see how if it's like 100% matching some parts of the style, but then failing completely on other parts, it's a huge pain to deal with. I wonder if a bigger model could loop here - like, have GPT 5.2 compare the fine-tune output and the Nano Banana output, notice that trees + water are bad, select more examples to fine-tune on, and the retry. Perhaps noticing that the trees and water are missing or bad is a more human judgement, though.
      • cannoneyed 9mo ago
        Interestingly enough even the big guns couldn't reliably act as judges. I think there are a few reasons for that: - the way they represent image tokens isn't conducive to this kind of task - text-to-image space is actually quite finicky, it's basically impossible to describe to the model what trees ought to look like and have them "get it" - there's no reliable way to few-shot prompt these models for image tasks yet (!!)
• cannoneyed 9mo ago
  Author here: Just got out of some meetings at work and see that HN is kicking my cloudflare free plan's butt. Let me get Claude to fix it, hold tight!
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    We should be back online! Thanks for everyone's patience, and big thanks to Claude for helping me debug this and to Cloudflare for immediately turning the website back on after I gave them some money
• cannoneyed 9mo ago
  Sorry about the hug of death - while I spent an embarassing amount of money on rented H100s, I couldn't be bothered to spend $5 for Cloudflare workers... Hope you all enjoy it, it should be back up now
  • Octoth0rpe 9mo ago
    > while I spent an embarassing amount of money on rented H100s Would you mind sharing a ballpark estimate?
    • KolmogorovComp 9mo ago
      (Not OP) Judging by the clues in the article and trial/error, probably ~1000USD for the project.
  • storystarling 9mo ago
    Curious if the H100s were strictly for VRAM capacity? Since this is a batch job and latency doesn't really matter, it seems like you could have run this on 4090s for a fraction of the cost. Unless the model size was the bottleneck, the price to performance ratio on consumer hardware is usually much better for this kind of workload.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• honeycrispy 9mo ago
  This is kind of beautiful. Great work! I mean it.
• ivangelion 9mo ago
  Want to thank you for taking the time to write up the process. I know you'll get flak for the agentic coding, but I think it's really awesome you were able to realize an idea that otherwise would've remained relegated to "you know what'd be cool.." territory. Also, just because the activation energy to execute a project like this is lower doesn't mean the creative ceiling isn't just as high as before.
  • cyrusradfar 9mo ago
    I was amazed only saw one comment mentioning the agentic coding and it was overwhelmingly positive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724639 The reality is, this is a HUGE project to do with no GIS / image gen experience without Gen AI.
• gregsadetsky 9mo ago
  amazing work! gemini 3.5 pro reverse engineered it - if you use the code at the following gist, you can jump to any specific lat lng :-) https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/c4c1a87277063430c26922b1ad0b6e86 https://gist.github.com/gregsadetsky/c4c1a87277063430c26922b... also, check out https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/?debug=true https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/?debug=true ..! --- code below (copy & paste into your devtools, change the lat lng on the last line): const calib={p1:{pixel:{x:52548,y:64928},geo:{lat:40.75145020893891,lng:-73.9596826628078}},p2:{pixel:{x:40262,y:51982},geo:{lat:40.685498640229675,lng:-73.98074283976926}},p3:{pixel:{x:45916,y:67519},geo:{lat:40.757903901085726,lng:-73.98557060196454}}};function getAffineTransform(){let{p1:e,p2:l,p3:g}=calib,o=e.geo.lat*(l.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)-l.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)+g.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng-l.geo.lng);if(0===o)return console.error("Points are collinear, cannot solve."),null;let n=(e.pixel.x*(l.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)-l.pixel.x*(e.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)+g.pixel.x*(e.geo.lng-l.geo.lng))/o,x=(e.geo.lat*(l.pixel.x-g.pixel.x)-l.geo.lat*(e.pixel.x-g.pixel.x)+g.geo.lat*(e.pixel.x-l.pixel.x))/o,i=(e.geo.lat*(l.geo.lng*g.pixel.x-g.geo.lng*l.pixel.x)-l.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*g.pixel.x-g.geo.lng*e.pixel.x)+g.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*l.pixel.x-l.geo.lng*e.pixel.x))/o,t=(e.pixel.y*(l.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)-l.pixel.y*(e.geo.lng-g.geo.lng)+g.pixel.y*(e.geo.lng-l.geo.lng))/o,p=(e.geo.lat*(l.pixel.y-g.pixel.y)-l.geo.lat*(e.pixel.y-g.pixel.y)+g.geo.lat*(e.pixel.y-l.pixel.y))/o,a=(e.geo.lat*(l.geo.lng*g.pixel.y-g.geo.lng*l.pixel.y)-l.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*g.pixel.y-g.geo.lng*e.pixel.y)+g.geo.lat*(e.geo.lng*l.pixel.y-l.geo.lng*e.pixel.y))/o;return{Ax:n,Bx:x,Cx:i,Ay:t,By:p,Cy:a}}function jumpToLatLng(e,l){let g=getAffineTransform();if(!g)return;let o=g.Ax*e+g.Bx*l+g.Cx,n=g.Ay*e+g.By*l+g.Cy,x=Math.round(o),i=Math.round(n);console.log(` Jumping to Geo: ${e}, ${l}`),console.log(` Calculated Pixel: ${x}, ${i}`),localStorage.setItem("isometric-nyc-view-state",JSON.stringify({target:[x,i,0],zoom:13.95})),window.location.reload()}; jumpToLatLng(40.757903901085726,-73.98557060196454);
  • polishdude20 9mo ago
    That second link shows controls but does not have any water effects?
    • gregsadetsky 9mo ago
      As far as I can see, OP tried to implement water shaders but then abandoned this idea.
• _0xdd 9mo ago
  Nice work! But not all of NYC. Where's the rest of Staten Island?
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Haha I had to throw in the towel at some point and Staten Island didn't make the cut. Sorry (not sorry)
  • anArbitraryOne 9mo ago
    Not to mention much of long island and the bronx
• _august 9mo ago
  This is very cool, it would be awesome if I could rotate it as well by 90 degree increments to peek at different angles! I loved RCT growing up so this is hitting the nostalgia!
• Kkoala 9mo ago
  Nice, very cool! Reminds me of https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-new-york/ https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-...
• relium 9mo ago
  Very cool. Street names with an on/off toggle would be nice.
• filoleg 9mo ago
  This is awesome, thanks for sharing this! I am especially impressed with the “i didn’t write a single line of code” part, because I was expecting it to be janky or slow on mobile, but it feels blazing fast just zooming around different areas. And it is very up to date too, as I found a building across the street from me that got finished only last year being present. I found a nitpicky error though: in Brooklyn downtown, where Cadman Plaza Park is, your webite makes it looks like there is a large rectangular body of water there (e.g., a pool or a fountain). In reality, there is no water at all, it is just a concrete slab area.
  • teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
    The author had built something like this image viewer before and used an existing library to handle some of the rendering.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    the classic "water/concrete" issue! There's probably a lot of those around the map - turns out, it's pretty hard to tell the difference between water and concrete/terrain in a lot of the satellite imagery that the image model was looking at to generate the pixel images!
• natufunu 9mo ago
  One thing I learned from this is that my prompts are much less detailed than what author has been using. Very cool work and great write up.
• cheschire 9mo ago
  > I’m not particularly interested in getting mired down in the muck of the morality and economics of it all. I’m really only interested in one question: What’s possible now that was impossible before? Upvote for the cool thing I haven’t seen before but cancelled out by this sentiment. Oof.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    I mean this pretty literally though - I'm not particularly interested in these questions. They've been discussed a ton by people way more qualified to discuss them, but I personally I feel like it's been pretty much the same conversation on loop for the last 5 years... That's not to say they're not very important issues! They are, and I think it's reasonable to have strong opinions here because they cut to the core of how people exist in the world. I was a musician for my entire 20s - trust me that I deeply understand the precarity of art in the age of the internet, and I can deeply sympathize with people dealing with precarity in the age of AI. But I also think it's worth being excited about the birth of a fundamentally new way of interacting with computers, and for me, at this phase in my life, that's what I want to write and think about.
    • cheschire 9mo ago
      I appreciate the thoughtful reply. I will try to give you the benefit of the doubt then and not extrapolate from your relatively benign feelings as it pertains to a creative art project any capacity for you to take up engineering projects that would make the world worse. You get your votes back from me.
  • pimlottc 9mo ago
    This is basically the inversion of the famous Jurassic Park quote. “Never mind if we should. What if we could?”
• nzeid 9mo ago
  Amazing. Took forever but I found my building in Brooklyn as well as the nearby dealership, gas station, and public school.
• ProjectBarks 9mo ago
  I was extremely excited until I looked closer and realized how many of these look like ... well AI. The article is such a good read and would recommend people check it out. Feels like something is missing... maybe just a pixelation effect over the actual result? Seems like a lot of the images also lack continuity (something they go over in the article) Overall, such a cool usage of AI that blends Art and AI well.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Yeah it leaves a lot to be desired. Once you see the AI it's hard to unsee. I actually had a few other generation styles, more 8-bit like, that probably would have lended themselves better to actual pixel-art processing, but I opted to use this fine-tune and in for a penny in for a pound, so to speak...
    • smusamashah 9mo ago
      Have you looked at retro Diffusion? https://x.com/RealAstropulse https://x.com/RealAstropulse This person shares lots authentic looking ai generated pixel art. This should give the building more realistic pixel art look. Edit: example showing small houses https://x.com/RealAstropulse/status/2004195065443549691 https://x.com/RealAstropulse/status/2004195065443549691 Searching for buildings
      • cannoneyed 9mo ago
        Yup, I'm a big fan. They'd be the first to admit that making true pixel art is very hard, and getting the AI to do it even somewhat consistently requires a lot of tuning and guardrails / processing. At some point I couldn't fiddle with the style / pipeline anymore and just had to roll with "looks ok to me" - the whole point of the project wasn't to faithfully adhere to a style but to push the limits of new technology and learn a lot along the way
    • ProjectBarks 9mo ago
      Totally understandable! I don’t want to undersell how cool this project was! Thank you so much for sharing!
• dsmmcken 9mo ago
  Just curious, about how long did this project take you? I don't see that mentioned in the article.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    We had our third kid in late November, and I worked sporadically on it over the following two months of paternity leave and holiday... If I had to bet, I'd say I put in well over 200 hours of work on it, the majority of that being manual auditing/driving of the generation process. If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so I had to do a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated. All told I probably put in less than 20 hours of actual software engineering work, though, which consisted entirely of writing specs and iterating with various coding agents.
    • mrandish 9mo ago
      > If any AI model were reliable at checking the generated pixels, I could have automated this process, but they simply aren't there yet, so I had to do a lot more manual work than I'd anticipated. Since the output is so cool and generally interesting, there might be an opportunity for those forking this to do other cities to deploy a web app to crowd source identifying broken tiles and maybe classifying the error or even providing manual hinting for the next run. It takes a village to make a (sim) city! :-)
      • cannoneyed 9mo ago
        Yeah I'll get the code out there soon - it's just very vibe-y right now, the repo is a bit of a mess since I never bothered to organize things. The secret sauce is really in the fine-tuning, can definitely get those datasets/models public on oxen.ai too
• potatowaffle 9mo ago
  > What’s possible now that was impossible before? > I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. ... This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. Of course, there’s a case to be made that the very act of doing this manual work is what refines your instincts - but I think it’s more of a “Just So” story than anything else. In the end, the quality of art is defined by the quality of your decisions - how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say. Great insights here, thanks for sharing. That opening question really clicked for me.
  • anonymous908213 9mo ago
    That quote seriously rubs me the wrong way. "Dragging little boxes around" in a DAW is creative, it constitutes the entire process of composing electronic music. You are notating what notes to play, when and for how long they play, what instrument plays them, and any modifications to the default sound of that instrument. Is writing sheet music tedious? Sure, it can be, when the speed of notating by hand can't keep up with the speed your brain is thinking through ideas. But being tedious is not mutually exclusive with being creative despite the attempt to explicitly contrast them as such, and the solution to the process of notating your creativity being tedious is not "randomly generate a bunch of notes and instruments that have little relation with the ones you're thinking of". This excerpt supposes that generative AI lets you automate the tedious part while keeping "the quality of your decisions", but it doesn't keep your decisions, it generates its own "decisions" from a broad, high-level prompt and your role is reduced to merely making decisions about whether or not you like the content generated, which is not creativity.
    • cannoneyed 9mo ago
      I'd say that deciding where a transient should go" is creative, manually aligning 15 other tracks over and over again is not (not to mention having to do it in both the DAW and melodyne)... I agree that "push button get image" AI generation is at best a bit cheap, at worst deeply boring. Art is resistance in a medium - but at what point is that resistance just masochism? George Perec took this idea to the max when he wrote an entire novel without the letter "E" - in French! And then someone had the audacity to translate it to English (e excluded)! Would I ever want to do that? Hell no, but I'm very glad to live in a world where someone else is crazy enough to. I've spent my 10,000 hours making "real" art and don't really feel the need to justify myself - but to all of the young people out there who are afraid to play with something new because some grumps on hacker news might get upset: It doesn't matter what you make or how you make it. What matters is why you make it and what you have to say.
• weinzierl 9mo ago
  Probably the best pre-AI take of the isometric pixel art NYC is poster from the art collective eboy. In the early 2000s their art was featured in MoMA (but I don't remember the NYC poster specifically). https://www.eboy.com/products/new-york-colouring-poster https://www.eboy.com/products/new-york-colouring-poster
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    This is so good, just ordered one!
• deadbabe 9mo ago
  Would it be simple to modify this to make a highly stylized version of NYC instead? Like post apocalyptic NYC or medieval NYC, night time NYC, etc. because then that would have some very interesting applications
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    simple is relative, could definitely be done, but until the models get a bit smarter and require less manual hand-holding it'd be a lot of grindy work
• ChrisbyMe 9mo ago
  A bit tangential but i really think the .nyc domain is underappreciated. SF/Mountain View etc don't even have one! you get a little piece of the NYC brand just for you!
• mpaepper 9mo ago
  You mentioned needing 40k tiles and renting a H100 for 3$/hour at 200tiles/hour, so am I right to assume that you spend 200*3=600$ for running the inference? That also means letting it run 25 nights a 8 hours or so? Cool project!
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Yup back of the napkin is probably about there - also spent a fair bit on the oxen.ai fine-tuning service (worth every penny)... paint ain't free, so to speak
• d--b 9mo ago
  This is huge! At first I thought this was someone working thousands of hours putting this together, and I thought: I wonder if this could be done with AI…
• polishdude20 9mo ago
  To take it a step further it would be super cool to so rhiw figure out the roadway system from the map data and use the buildings as masks over the roads and have little simulated cars driving
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    100% - I originally wanted to do that but when I realized how much manual work I'd have to do just to get the tiles generated I had to cut back on scope pretty hard. I actually have a nice little water shader that renders waves on the water tiles via a "depth mask", but my fine-tunes for generating the shader mask weren't reliable enough and I'd spent far too much time on the project to justify going deeper. Maybe I'll try again when the next generation of smarter, cheaper models get released.
    • polishdude20 9mo ago
      There's gotta be an easy way to just use the Google maps data to make a mask for the water?
      • adam_dev 9mo ago
        I am doing something like you describe but it uses real maps. https://lisbonracer.com/ https://lisbonracer.com/
• kkukshtel 9mo ago
  This is awesome, and thanks so much for the deep dive into process!! One thing I would suggest is to also post-process the pixel art with something like this tool to have it be even sharper. The details fall off as you get closer, but running this over larger patch areas may really drive the pixel art feel. https://jenissimo.itch.io/unfaker https://jenissimo.itch.io/unfaker
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Oh wow this is great, I threw a few of these tricks at it and never really felt like I nailed it... Might have to revisit after playing around with this more
• MontyCarloHall 9mo ago
  This doesn't really look like pixel art; it looks like you applied a (very sophisticated) Photoshop filter to Google Earth. Everything is a little blurry, and the characteristic sharp edges of handmade pixel art (e.g. [0]) are completely absent. To me, the appeal of pixel art is that each pixel looks deliberately placed, with clever artistic tricks to circumvent the limitations of the medium. For instance, look at the piano keys here [1]. They deliberately lack the actual groupings of real piano keys (since that wouldn't be feasible to render at this scale), but are asymmetrically spaced in their own way to convey the essence of a keyboard. It's the same sort of cleverness that goes into designing LEGO sets. None of these clever tricks are apparent in the AI-generated NYC. On another note, a big appeal of pixel art for me is the sheer amount of manual labor that went into it. Even if AI were capable of rendering pixel art indistinguishable from [0] or [1], I'm not sure I'd be impressed. It would be like watching a humanoid robot compete in the Olympics. Sure, a Boston Dynamics bot from a couple years in the future will probably outrun Usain Bolt and outgymnast Simone Biles, but we watch Bolt and Biles compete because their performance represents a profound confluence of human effort and talent. Likewise, we are extremely impressed by watching human weightlifters throw 200kg over their heads but don't give a second thought to forklifts lifting 2000kg or 20000kg. OP touches on this in his blog post [2]: I spent a decade as an electronic musician, spending literally thousands of hours dragging little boxes around on a screen. So much of creative work is defined by this kind of tedious grind. [...] This isn't creative. It's just a slog. Every creative field - animation, video, software - is full of these tedious tasks. In the end, the quality of art is defined by the quality of your decisions - how much work you put into something is just a proxy for how much you care and how much you have to say. I would argue that in some case (e.g. pixel art), the slog is what makes the art both aesthetically appealing (the deliberately placed nature of each pixel is what defines the aesthetic) but also awe-inspiring (the slog represents an immense amount of sustained focus). [0] https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13069909/eboy_pixorama_2.0.1408639556.gif https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/cho... [1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fuil8yleh9xbb1.png https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fu... [2] https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
  • 9mo ago
• mrandish 9mo ago
  This is really wonderful. Thanks for doing it! I especially appreciated the deep dive on the workflow and challenges. It's the best generally accessible explication I've yet seen of the pros and cons of vibe coding an ambitious personal project with current tooling. It gives a high-level sense of "what it's generally like" with enough detail and examples to be grounded in reality while avoiding slipping into the weeds.
• alterom 9mo ago
  Holy damn, this map is a dream and the best map of NYC I've ever seen! It's as if NYC was built in Transport Tycoon Deluxe. I'll be honest, I've been pretty skeptical about AI and agentic coding for real-life problems and projects. But this one seems like the final straw that'll change my mind. Thanks for making it, I really enjoy the result (and the educational value of the making-of post)!
• aaronbrethorst 9mo ago
  this is truly amazing. bravo.
• rkagerer 9mo ago
  I love it! Such a SimCity 2000 vibe!
• howToTestFE 9mo ago
  this makes me want to play simcity again! really cool
• suriya-ganesh 9mo ago
  This is such a cool concept. props to you for building it.
• vortegne 9mo ago
  While impressive on a technical level, I can't help but notice that it just looks...bad? Just a strange blurry mess that only vaguely smells of pixelart. Makes me feel insane that we're passing this off as art now.
• deltamidway 9mo ago
  Absolutely love this! Yay robots!
• rzzzt 9mo ago
  Does anyone remember a Chinese website that did something similar? IIRC it was one of the selectable rendering modes of a Google Maps equivalent. Edit: this submission has a few links that could be what I had in mind but most of them no longer work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2282466
• mal10c 9mo ago
  reticulating splines
• jcelliott 9mo ago
  Hey, engineer at Oxen.ai here. Glad the fine-tuning worked well for this project! If anyone has questions on that part of it we would be happy to answer. We have a blog post on a similar workflow here: https://www.oxen.ai/blog/how-we-cut-inference-costs-from-46k-to-7-5k-fine-tuning-qwen-image-edit https://www.oxen.ai/blog/how-we-cut-inference-costs-from-46k... On the inference cost and speed: we're actively working on that and have a pretty massive upgrade there coming soon.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Hell yeah oxen.ai is awesome, made my life so much easier
  • skerit 9mo ago
    I didn't know Oxen.ai. I took a look at your docs on how to fine-tune LLMs: > Oxen.ai supports datasets in a variety of file formats. The only requirement is that you have a column where each row is a list of messages. Each message is an dictionary with a role and content key. The role can be “system”, “user”, or “assistant”. The content is the message content. Oh, so you're forced to use the ChatML multi-turn conversation format.
• meindnoch 9mo ago
  Looks badly AI generated.
• 10c8 9mo ago
  There's absolutely no pixel art anywhere in the entirety of the map.
• epa 9mo ago
  Amazing
• sandpaper26 9mo ago
  "map of NYC" does not include Staten Island. That's how we like it
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    I just couldn't justify spending dozens more hours for Staten Island...
    • mentos 9mo ago
      What do you estimate the cost would be to have each tile hand drawn by an artist? I don't think there are enough artists in the world to achieve this in a reasonable amount of time (1-5 years) and you're probably looking at a $10M cost? Part of me wonders if you put a kickstarter together if you could raise the funds to have it hand drawn but no way the very artists you hire wouldn't be tempted to use AI themselves.
• rafram 9mo ago
  > This project is far from perfect, but without generative models, it couldn’t exist. There’s simply no way to do this much work on your own 100 people built this in 1964: https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-new-york/ https://queensmuseum.org/exhibition/panorama-of-the-city-of-... One person built this in the 21st century: https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/truckers-viral-scale-model-of-every-nyc-building-to-get-official-showing https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/truckers-viral-scal... AI certainly let you do it much faster, but it’s wrong to write off doing something like this by hand as impossible when it has actually been done before. And the models built by hand are the product of genuine human creativity and ingenuity; this is a pixelated satellite image. It’s still a very cool site to play around with, but the framing is terrible.
  • azlen 9mo ago
    It feels like whether or not it's possible to make a model of new york misses the point. This kind of project could just as easily scale up to be an isometric map of the entire world, every city, every forest, every mountain hut, and update continuously as new buildings are built and cities grow. Expensive yes, for now- but the speed and scale to make and maintain such representations will absolutely be outside the realm of what was previously possible. Not just maps of the world, maps of human knowledge, history, to such detail that would entail not just tens of thousands of hours but billions or trillions of hours if done by hand.
    • mxfh 9mo ago
      Bing maps had stiched oblique imagery for about 15 years now and seemingly nobody cared and they all went for meshes later. Even worked for all four cardianal directions. https://www.bing.com/api/maps/sdk/mapcontrol/isdk/birdseyev2setview https://www.bing.com/api/maps/sdk/mapcontrol/isdk/birdseyev2... Slapping a style transfer on top of this is not that complex.
• emzo 9mo ago
  I'm on holiday in NY now - this is so cool
• crazygringo 9mo ago
  I just want to say this isn't just amazing -- it's my new favorite map of NYC. It's genuinely astonishing how much clearer this is than a traditional satellite map -- how it has just the right amount of complexity. I'm looking at areas I've spent a lot of time in, and getting an even better conceptual understanding of the physical layout than I've ever been able to get from satellite (technically airplane) images. This hits the perfect "sweet spot" of detail with clear "cartoon" coloring. I see a lot of criticism here that this isn't "pixel art", so maybe there's some better term to use. I don't know what to call this precise style -- it's almost pixel art without the pixels? -- but I love it. Serious congratulations.
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    Author here, and to reiterate another reply - all of the critique of "pixel art" is completely fair. Aesthetically and philosophically, what AI does for "pixel art" is very off. And once you see the AI you can't really unsee it. But I didn't want to call it a "SimCity" map, though that's really the vibe/inspiration I wanted to capture, because that implies a lot of other things, so I used the term "pixel art" even though I figured it might get a lot of (valid) pushback... In general, labels and genres are really hard - "techno" to a deep head in Berlin is very different than "techno" to my cousins. This issue has always been fraught, because context and meaning and technique are all tangled up in these labels which are so important to some but so easily ignored by others. And those questions are even harder in the age of AI where the machine just gobbles up everything. But regardless, it was a fun project! And to me at least it's better to just make cool ambitious things in good faith and understand that art by definition is meaningful and therefore makes people feel things from love to anger to disgust to fascination.
    • ant6n 9mo ago
      It’s almost like sim city (2000), but not quite. It night help if the overall mayo was fully square.
      • PetitPrince 9mo ago
        More like Sim City 3000 methinks. Sim City is more pixel artsy / lower resolution, while 3000 have enough resolution to feel more like an illustration rather than a videogame.
• dluan 9mo ago
  This on top of Subway Builder would be incredible
• vagabund 9mo ago
  Really fun to fly around, find my old apartment building etc. It would be neat if you could drag and click to select an area to inpaint. Let's see everyone's new Penn Station designs! Would guess it'd have to be BYOK but it works pretty well: https://i.imgur.com/EmbzThl.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/EmbzThl.jpeg Much better than trying to inpaint directly on Google Earth data
• amadeuswoo 9mo ago
  Very gorgeous and creative! Any plans to attempt other isometric cities? (Like SF, LA, Paris, London)
• theLegionWithin 9mo ago
  Sim City, NYC edition
• Computer0 9mo ago
  Highly recommend reading the blog post too. It helped me see some of the limitations of this approach and I thought it was useful,
• fortran77 9mo ago
  Why is so much NJ on the map?
  • cannoneyed 9mo ago
    a) couldn’t decide where to draw the edges b) I live in NJ ;)
    • fortran77 9mo ago
      I'm sorry.
• BHSPitMonkey 9mo ago
  The progressive loading of the tile images really goes great with the pixel art style. Nice touch!
• ipnon 9mo ago
  Makes me realize how much I love New York, thank you.
• alexpotato 9mo ago
  I lived in NYC for 8 years and have worked there for almost 20 years. Absolutely loved zooming around to see: - my old apartment - places I've worked - restaurants and rooftop lounges I've been to etc The explanation of how this was put together was even cooler: https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc https://cannoneyed.com/projects/isometric-nyc
• Tiberium 9mo ago
  Great project! Just wanted to talk about the "/ The edit problem" section in the blog post - it's almost entirely false. Inpainting (when you provide a mask) has existed for years, and for good edit models (such as Nano Banana Pro) you can annotate the image, and it'll only edit one part, keeping the rest almost entirely consistent. The same goes for other top editing models like Flux 2, Seedream 4.5 and so on. Transparency also exists, e.g. GPT Image does it, and Nano Banana Pro should have it supported soon as well.
• kieojk 9mo ago
  It looks like simcity4!
• hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  I love it, and I want it for my city, and hell the whole world!
• WhompingWindows 9mo ago
  This is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. Massive kudos to you. I am forwarding to all NYers I know. It gives me chills to relive specific places, though I'm far from the city now.
• tartoran 9mo ago
  Great job, I love the M Machine too. Good music and visuals.
• nomagicbullet 9mo ago
  > But at the end of the day, the last 10% always takes up 90% of the time and, as always, the difference between good enough and great is the amount of love you put into the work. Nicely put.
• johnathandos 9mo ago
  Really slick. Let’s see the AI open it up so we can use it to generate a similar map for anyplace on Earth :)
• andreabat 9mo ago
  Great work, I loved the in depth tech explanation
• amysox 9mo ago
  This is a fantastic piece of work, AI or no! Feature idea: For those of us who aren't familiar with The City, could you allow clicks on the image to identify specific landmarks (buildings, etc.)? Or is that too computationally intensive? I can identify a few things, but it would sure be nice to know what I'm looking at.
• shawn10067 9mo ago
  This is delightful. It scratches that SimCity itch while still being recognizably New York. I ended up losing track of time exploring my old neighborhood and landmarks, and it somehow conveys the city's scale and quirks better than a satellite view. Thanks for sharing it.
• nnevatie 9mo ago
  Looks more like trimetric projection, but cool nevertheless.
• MORPHOICES 9mo ago
  [dead]
• amunozo 9mo ago
  Wow, this is absolutely amazing! This is the kind of project I am trying to do with agents, but of course I'm really far from this, but you motivated me to do better!
• fsmedberg 9mo ago
  I created an account just to say that your map is amazing! It's beautiful and very interesting to look at, because of all the details. Thank you for documenting your method of creating this! I've been looking for a way to create a similar map for the island I'm living at, and maybe your method will work for this. Thank you so much for documenting the steps!
• Voklen 9mo ago
  Maybe I'm just missing it somewhere but does anyone see what the licence for this map is?
• petesergeant 9mo ago
  This is incredible, I love it. It would be great to be able to overlay OSM data over it for those of us who aren't that familiar with the city and would like to know more about certain areas or places
• amsterdorn 9mo ago
  Would be cool if you could adjust the sun's position & see the effect on shadows. Could even extend it to add a "night mode" too, though that'd require extensive retexturing.
• jonjodev 9mo ago
  This is an incredible piece of work that I had a blast exploring! I must admit I spent way too much time finding landmarks I visited when I last holidayed from Australia. Now I'm feel nostalgic. Thanks so much for sharing!
• diginova 9mo ago
  what an amazing feat of artwork and such a fine writeup as well. learnt a ton! thank you for this
• karmasimida 9mo ago
  This is fantastic, can't overstate how revolutionary this would be for gaming development.
• kingkawn 9mo ago
  Dope
• foke82 9mo ago
  Truly amazing work! I only had time to scan quickly your write-up but I'll try to read it entirely, it's very interesting thank you! As you say: software engineering doesn’t go away in the age of AI - it just moves up the ladder of abstraction ! At least in the mid term :)
• HardwareLust 9mo ago
  You definitely captured the SimCity vibe. Well done!
• indigoabstract 9mo ago
  Looks pretty amazing, especially a bit zoomed out! The 3D/street view version is an obvious and natural progression from here, but from what I've read in your dev log, it's also probably a lot of extra work.
• lazarus01 9mo ago
  I too am amazed by the detail. I see things now, that I never saw before, in areas I'm intimately familiar with.
• languagehacker 9mo ago
  First thing I wanted to do was click the monster button in SimCity 2000
• ExoticPearTree 9mo ago
  This is so cool. I love the 80s cartoon feel of the map.
• graypegg 9mo ago
  This is an immensely cool thing that fits the space I imagine for AI within art. And I am not someone that likes framing AI output as art. If you had instead drawn this, there would be charm and fun details EVERYWHERE. Little buildings you know would have inside jokes, there would be references snuck into everything. Who YOU are would come through, but it would also be much smaller. This is HUGE, and the zoomed out view is actually an insanely useful map. It's so cool to see reality shifted into a style like this, and there's enough interesting things in "real new york" to make scrolling around this a fun thing to do. I have no impression of you here other than a vague idea you like the older sim city games BUT I have a really interesting impression of NYC. IMO, that's two totally different pieces of art, with two totally different goals. Neither takes away from the other, since they're both making something impactful rather than one thing trying to simulate the impact of the other. Really nice job with this.
• tom_m 9mo ago
  This is pretty awesome!
• lawrence1 9mo ago
  "Napoleon may have once said “quantity has a quality all its own”." Nope, It was Stalin who said that in regards to his "meatwave" strategy.
• westoque 9mo ago
  > I simply booted up a VM with an H100, ssh’d into it with Cursor, and prompted the agent to set up an inference server that I could ping from my web generation app. What used to take hours or days of painful, slow debugging now takes literally minutes. an awesome takeaway from this is that self-hosted models are the future! can't wait for hardware to catch up and we can do much more experiments on our laptops!
• squokko 9mo ago
  Very cool! What's your license on this stuff?
• gbhdrew 9mo ago
  Really great work! All that's left is a day/night cycle, some underground infra views, and (obviously) a way to play the SimCity 3000 soundtrack over it
• feelingsonice 9mo ago
  Someone else posted this on HN a while back -- https://github.com/Hugo-Dz/spritefusion-pixel-snapper https://github.com/Hugo-Dz/spritefusion-pixel-snapper Maybe you can use that^ to snap the pixels to a perfect grid
• topaztee 9mo ago
  neat!
• cvarjas 9mo ago
  Amazing map! Where is the rest of Staten Island?
• jaredcwhite 9mo ago
  I don't understand why an interesting demo is buried here inside of some of the most ridiculous propaganda I've ever read on the topic of genAI. It really makes me not have any interest in the actual thing you're showing. Imagine if Wendy Carlos wrote an article about how it's cool she could use this new piece of technology called a Moog Modular synthesizer to create a recording of Bach, and now harpsichords are dead, acoustic instruments suck, and all Baroque music will be made on modular synthesizers forever more. Unfortunately with AI it's much worse because it's more like if Wendy Carlos has slurped up all Baroque music ever recorded by everyone and then somehow regurgitated that back out as slop with some algorithmic modifications. I'm sorry, I'm unable to accept that's where we're at now.
  • iammjm 9mo ago
    Being unable to accept the reality is a recipe for unhappiness and mental illness. Stay safe bro
• iammjm 9mo ago
  Amazing idea and implementation, bravo
• wonsukchoi97 9mo ago
  This is crazy good.
• wolvoleo 9mo ago
  I thought that other link recently of those guys who manually built new York city in Minecraft completely to scale more impressive. That's what we call a monk's job in Holland. Kudos
• hunvreus 9mo ago
  Awesome. There was a company in China, eDuShi (E都市), doing this for a whole bunch of Chinese cities back in the day: https://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/4112874847 https://www.flickr.com/photos/seeminglee/4112874847
• notelocomas 9mo ago
  Just read your bio on cannoneyed.com and want to let you know I was a huge fan of The Machine. I always wondered what happened to the group then found out about Luttrell. Cool seeing where you ended up.