8 ms·

Notes on XKCD's “Pixels”

233 points by tel 12y ago

JohnnyGrey 12y ago
Very interesting, nice shear
JohnnyGrey 12y ago
Very interesting, nice shear
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Stupid question: so it's not Randall Munroe who's making XKCDs such as Pixels of Time?
- minimaxir 12y ago
  It's a collaboration. Without the art and the ideas, the code would be meaningless.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Sure; I just always assumed he's writing the code himself.
    - dirkk0 12y ago
      Me too. What an honor to work with the man.
      - dirkk0 12y ago
        Interesting. I wonder why I got downvoted. I am not promoting self exploitation.
- ixtli 12y ago
  My suppositions was always that he had help with frontend code. He's not a professional programmer; he's a rocket scientist. Also, a _lot_ of primetime frontend web engineering requires a very specific and deep knowledge of javascript and compatibility issues. (N.b.: by primetime I mean when your application is going to be viewed live by a bunch of laymen watching the colbert report, or etc.)
  - archgoon 12y ago
    "He's not a professional programmer; he's a rocket scientist" Um... he interned at NASA and worked for them for six months after graduating as an independent roboticist contractor. He's been working on xkcd professionally, full time, for 8 years since then. Plenty of time to learn javascript.
    - lukifer 12y ago
      Learning Javascript : Coding something production-worthy and non-trivial in a short timeframe :: Learning English : Writing a compelling novel
    - dkokelley 12y ago
      I'm sure Monroe had plenty of time to do many things. Perhaps javascript is less interesting to him than formulating answers to what-if submissions. There's nothing wrong with asking experts to assist in their area of expertise.
      - archgoon 12y ago
        Of course there's nothing wrong. My only point is quite the opposite. The post I was responding to suggested "Since he is a rocket scientist, it is unlikely that he would be able to code the frontend, and would require help", which is absurd. Given Mr. Munroes obvious interest in programming and computers, (see comics: https://xkcd.com/1180/ https://xkcd.com/1180/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/ http://xkcd.com/1137/ http://xkcd.com/1137/ http://xkcd.com/1068/ http://xkcd.com/1068/ https://xkcd.com/1024/ https://xkcd.com/1024/ https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/269/ https://xkcd.com/269/ https://airbrake.io/blog/internet/best-programming-xkcd-comics https://airbrake.io/blog/internet/best-programming-xkcd-comi... ) it was entirely reasonable to believe that he had picked up enough experience to code the javascript frontends. There is simply no reason to pigeon hole the man as a "Rocket Scientist", especially given the fact he was a roboticist previously (which, shockingly enough, tends to involve programming). He has shown a wide variety of interests, and if he demonstrated an ability to code frontend javascript, I would not be surprised.
- andrey-p 12y ago
  I knew he had a developer working with him for Time and such (and now I know who the dev is!), and I knew he had a server person too. The phrase "folks at xkcd" threw me off a bit though - to me it implies a whole team. Is there an xkcd team as such? It would be good to read a bit more about them, if there's any info available.
PanMan 12y ago
Not to discount the work or end result that went in to this, but when I saw Pixels I assumed it used a 'standard' library, e.g. Leaflet, used for many maps (which have similar zoom) and tiles. I'm wondering why you wrote something from scratch?
- ColinDabritz 12y ago
  Good question. From the article: "For this project, I chose to use vanilla JavaScript with no external dependencies or libraries. In general, we strive to keep the dependency count and build process minimal for these projects, since keeping the complexity level low gives them a better chance of aging well in the archives."
- chromakode 12y ago
  The initial idea was to use a tileserver-based approach like leaflet. Writing a custom renderer allowed us to have unique views per client infinitely deep that zoomed smoothly, rather than at fixed intervals. Another benefit is avoiding the on-disk size and generation CPU time of building tiles, as well as the bandwidth costs of serving a bunch of redundant views of the same image data.
  - ygra 12y ago
    As someone who helped convert #1110 (Click and drag) into one of the (subjectively) better zooming implementations (http://dump.ventero.de/xkcd1110/ http://dump.ventero.de/xkcd1110/), I immediately wondered whether Pixels would benefit from Seadragon as well. Then I noticed that it's infinite and I wasn't quite sure anymore whether a DZI could do that properly. Perhaps by generating a sparse DZI on the fly in the browser. But that way probably lies madness, too. Also anti-aliasing would have to be turned off beyond 100 % zoom of individual images, which I'm not sure is trivial to hack in there. Still, I think from a UX perspective the slightly springy behaviour of Seadragon is much nicer than the algorithmic rigidity of things like Leaflet or Google Maps.
- SupremumLimit 12y ago
  Leaflet only allows discrete zoom levels as far as I know, whereas Pixels zooms continuously. I'm not sure a tile layer with an infinite number of zoom levels is possible either. At the very least, it would require extensive hacking.
baddox 12y ago
I enjoy hearing people comment on their own "terrible" design decisions, though they never seem as bad as some of my own. :) Regarding performance, did anyone else have absolutely awful frame rates when zooming? On my beefy Macbook Pro in Chrome it would drop to two or three frames per second. Edit: and on my Windows PC in Chrome, which was fairly beefy three years ago, it's more like a frame every few seconds.
- simoncion 12y ago
  I had no slowdowns while zooming on both my seven-ish-year-old Toughbook CF-30 and my three or four-year-old desktop machine. Chromium 38 on Linux on both.
- aroch 12y ago
  Disable "Enable zero-copy rasterizer" in chrome and give it another try. Its likely hitting the integrated graphics and not discrete or CPU, leading to the less than awesome FPS
- ceras 12y ago
  Zooming on my x86 Chromebook was ~1fps or worse.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- chromakode 12y ago
  If the code detects that rendering a frame takes a while, it increases the threshold in which sub-panels are drawn. Hopefully it should speed up after those first couple frames.
  - baddox 12y ago
    I must have gone at least 20 levels deep and it never noticeably improves.
- jfindley 12y ago
  Me too - it's much more interesting to read about terrible decisions, why they were made, etc than it is to read yet another unblemished story of success. We as an industry should be better at sharing "Hey, I did this wrong because X" stories, they are both interesting and useful.
davezuko 12y ago
Very interesting. I love to see how people deal with such tight deadlines, especially when they hit that eventual point mentioned in the article where things just sort of work out of sheer effort and it's too late to change their approach. I am curious, however, about this comment: "We anticipated a higher proportion of the Colbert Report referrals would be using IE." What was the rationale behind this? Maybe I'm just wrong in my assumptions about the Colbert audience, but I'd definitely have expected a much more mobile-heavy (and non-IE) group.
- alanfalcon 12y ago
  I'd say it was the simple assumption that the general internet audience uses IE at a much greater rate than typical XKCD visitors... And he does mention that they aren't TV watchers so didn't have any experience to draw on there.
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  Also found that decision strange, I would've assumed the average viewer would pull out their phone (Chrome or Safari) and check the site since nobody has a desktop or laptop anymore. I look like a time traveler from the past wandering the streets with my antiquated IBM thinkpad.
- chromakode 12y ago
  We definitely should have known better. Admittedly none of us had watched television in front of a TV for quite some time. I think this was a case of focusing too sharply on what was broken vs. what our audience would consist of. xkcd's audience typically slants away from IE, so we anticipated the TV influx would be more average. That being said, the record high 6% IE numbers achieved didn't quite justify the time spent. ;)
  - dwd 12y ago
    The big problem with browser stats is that they are averaged over a day or month. Maybe not an issue with a global audience, but for a local audience you find desktop use is mostly limited to between 8-6 while people are at work. Mobile spikes during the morning and late afternoon commutes and tapers off into evening. Tablets have a smaller morning/afternoon spike and gradually pick up in the evening. This is fairly consistent over a number of .com.au sites I have analysed mobile traffic for. So, at the time you're running your evening TV advertisement or PR spot it's 80% mobile, not the 25% the stats tell you.
gioi 12y ago
It makes me remember John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding[0] > The Indian before mentioned [...], saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was—a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied—SOMETHING, HE KNEW NOT WHAT -- [0] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615.txt, 2nd book, chapter XXIII, paragraph 2
- sp332 12y ago
  Stephen Hawking quote (from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down) A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
skybrian 12y ago
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I'm ashamed of Randal Monroe for asking for such a crazy deadline and Max for agreeing to it. This is an art project. Randal can set his own deadlines. There is no reason to ask someone to work crazy sleep-deprived hours for it, even if they volunteer. He's doing the same thing a bad boss would do, with less justification than most. Writing it up afterwords sets a bad example for other impressionable young hackers who look up to these guys and will set themselves up for being exploited when they go to work because they think it's expected of them. I couldn't finish the article. I'm sure there are good hacks in it. But we have to stop promoting bad behavior. If we can't do this ourselves for art, what about when there's real pressure? Update: to clarify, there's nothing unusual about this and there far worse examples all the time. It's just a bit striking since Randal's image is of a somewhat otherworldly idealist. Backpedal #2: to avoid being overly dramatic, let me clarify that being ashamed of someone else's behavior implies that you feel some responsibility for their behavior, which doesn't make sense in this case. Also, not finishing an article is, to be honest, not all that unusual.
- beambot 12y ago
  I don't disagree with the sentiment (hiphip-hurrah for better planning!). But in this case, I'm not sure we have sufficient information to claim malice. Perhaps they only came up with the idea 3 days before Colbert? Perhaps Colbert asked (last minute) for a cool, new, live demo? Perhaps they were just being opportunistic, and this turned into one of those unforeseen firedrill moments? Externalities being what they are, they did a bang up job of pulling it off in time.
  - skybrian 12y ago
    You're of course right that we don't know the real story, just what it looks like. However, asking an artist for an original work of art in order to promote their book on your show seems like a rather unlikely request. Also I'm not assuming malice. However, I wouldn't congratulate them for pulling it off; this is itself encouraging the wrong thing.
    - 12y ago
justifier 12y ago
jason nelson (i) had me splitting sides when i first saw his infinitely zoomable image sydney's siberia : http://www.secrettechnology.com/sydney/ http://www.secrettechnology.com/sydney/ looking through wayback archives it seems siberia was posted around july of 2011 it is a brilliant idea, very ripe for self discovery, and hopefully randall and chomakode came to it in their own way because when i saw the comic i immediately went into the webs looking for a shout out to jason nelson.. i was waiting for this inevitable post and link on HN for a platform to expose more people to the weird and wonderful art of jason nelson (ii) .. i was introduced to nelson through his gamegamegame(iii), a wild platformer that could best be described how futurama describes beck: 'transcends genres even as he re-invents them'; (i) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Nelson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Nelson (ii) http://www.secrettechnology.com/ http://www.secrettechnology.com/ (warning autostarts noise) (iii) http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html
- MaysonL 12y ago
  OMG – that gamegame triggered weird after-images reminiscent of visual migraines: the white background of my monitor is pulsating in many colours.
frooxie 12y ago
I just realized it's made for use with a scroll wheel. I use a Wacom pen, not a mouse, so the instructions were confusing to me.
- egypturnash 12y ago
  I feel your pain, fellow Wacom-instead-of-mouse person.
- skeletonjelly 12y ago
  Try double clicking.
deathanatos 12y ago
This is a nit, but it always bothers me: > My plane landed in SFO a half hour before our rough goal of launching midnight EST. While my cab was hurtling me home at 80mph, the folks at xkcd were putting the final touches on the art and server code. We cobbled it all together over IRC and went live at around 1:30am EST. We're in Daylight Saving time. EDT. Or just "ET" or "Eastern", which are good year-round. (Or "America/New_York" if you're feeling pedantic.)¹ Unless of course you just don't observe Daylight saving time, and you were actually working in EST, in which case, respect. > As you scroll deeper, pos becomes a long array of the nested pixels you've entered, like [[305, 222], [234, 674], [133, 733], ...] Doesn't this mean that crossing a panel boundary means we need to pop up the stack? And, if I'm on the bottom-most panel of a bottom-most panel and I cross that boundary, mean two things off the stack? And if I'm evil, and keep zooming in on that bottom of the bottom of the […] bottom of the bottom of the bottom of a pixel, and then move across that boundary: Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded zoom.js:529 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:529 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 [… (it's turtles all the way down!) …] (Some bugs to be expected given the development timescale, of course. :-) And, to be fair, when I thought about "how would you implement this?", yours was the solution I had in mind. Tough edge case here though; you note the problem with addition and carry in your post too, and I wonder if I just ran into a corner case of that.) I did greatly enjoy this comic. Especially once I determined that it gave different panels depending on where you zoomed in. > browsers were still too slow to draw all 360,000 individual pixel panels via Canvas Would mipmapping help any here? ¹At least it isn't carved in stone: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/clock-grand-central-station-new-york-city-25254083.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/clock-grand-central-station-n....
- chromakode 12y ago
  >We're in Daylight Saving time. EDT. Or just "ET" or "Eastern", which are good year-round. Point taken. :) >Doesn't this mean that crossing a panel boundary means we need to pop up the stack? Aha! Yes, now that I'm looking closely, I think that is possible, since the logic that handles crossing outside of the current "pos" pixel boundary is re-entrant. However, I note that the line numbers in your trace are alternating. This looks suspiciously like an oscillation between the "need to zoom out and find a new pos" and "need to zoom in and set pos" states. It just occurred to me that since these conditionals compare floating point positions directly, it might be possible for a precision error to cause such a loop. This exercise has made me realize a benefit to the mess of carrying code that happens further down, when wrapping around the 4 panels that are actively being displayed. That code will in principle operate past the point where a recursive implementation will stack trace, FWIW. According to StackOverflow [1], that'll be around 25K/50K nestings in Chrome/Firefox. >Would mipmapping help any here? Yep! The current implementation only scales an image once per render, caching the resultant image data and reusing it for all of the other draws [2]. Images are also pre-scaled to various intervals (for example [3]), though that was to improve image scaling rather than performance. Actually, while working on the mipmapping implementation, I found evidence that the canvas putImageData call (for image buffers) is a good deal slower than drawIamge [4]. It looks like where I left things, I'm still using putImageData. Tomorrow, I'll try caching the actual canvas elements and see if that gives the predicted huge performance boost. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/7828803 http://stackoverflow.com/a/7828803 [2]: https://github.com/chromakode/xkcd-pixels/blob/master/zoom.js#L516 https://github.com/chromakode/xkcd-pixels/blob/master/zoom.j... [3]: http://imgs.xkcd.com/turtledown/turtles-tiled.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/turtledown/turtles-tiled.png [4]: http://jsperf.com/canvas-drawimage-vs-putimagedata/3 http://jsperf.com/canvas-drawimage-vs-putimagedata/3
wz1000 12y ago
The script that renders the comic seems to consume an ungodly amount of ram. It ate up close to six GB's of ram on Firefox running on Arch Linux, and forced my X server onto swap. On Chromium, the comic is navigable, but the page still consumed close to one GB of memory.
anon1110 12y ago
It seems pretty broken to me. When I zoom in far enough, it fades from the original zoomed pixels to a new image as per the design. But, unlike the design illustration, and unlike what one would expect from an infinite zoomer, the new image that fades in has no correspondence to the original. It should be that white pixels in the original correspond to mostly white images in next level image, and black pixels in the original should correspond to mostly black images in the next level image. But there is no correspondence.

233 points by tel 12y ago

JohnnyGrey 12y ago

Very interesting, nice shear

JohnnyGrey 12y ago

Very interesting, nice shear

TeMPOraL 12y ago

Stupid question: so it's not Randall Munroe who's making XKCDs such as Pixels of Time?

minimaxir 12y ago
It's a collaboration. Without the art and the ideas, the code would be meaningless.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Sure; I just always assumed he's writing the code himself.
  - dirkk0 12y ago
    Me too. What an honor to work with the man.
    - dirkk0 12y ago
      Interesting. I wonder why I got downvoted. I am not promoting self exploitation.
ixtli 12y ago
My suppositions was always that he had help with frontend code. He's not a professional programmer; he's a rocket scientist. Also, a _lot_ of primetime frontend web engineering requires a very specific and deep knowledge of javascript and compatibility issues. (N.b.: by primetime I mean when your application is going to be viewed live by a bunch of laymen watching the colbert report, or etc.)
- archgoon 12y ago
  "He's not a professional programmer; he's a rocket scientist" Um... he interned at NASA and worked for them for six months after graduating as an independent roboticist contractor. He's been working on xkcd professionally, full time, for 8 years since then. Plenty of time to learn javascript.
  - lukifer 12y ago
    Learning Javascript : Coding something production-worthy and non-trivial in a short timeframe :: Learning English : Writing a compelling novel
  - dkokelley 12y ago
    I'm sure Monroe had plenty of time to do many things. Perhaps javascript is less interesting to him than formulating answers to what-if submissions. There's nothing wrong with asking experts to assist in their area of expertise.
    - archgoon 12y ago
      Of course there's nothing wrong. My only point is quite the opposite. The post I was responding to suggested "Since he is a rocket scientist, it is unlikely that he would be able to code the frontend, and would require help", which is absurd. Given Mr. Munroes obvious interest in programming and computers, (see comics: https://xkcd.com/1180/ https://xkcd.com/1180/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1168/ https://xkcd.com/1168/ http://xkcd.com/1137/ http://xkcd.com/1137/ http://xkcd.com/1068/ http://xkcd.com/1068/ https://xkcd.com/1024/ https://xkcd.com/1024/ https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/963/ https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/806/ https://xkcd.com/619/ https://xkcd.com/619/ http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/378/ http://xkcd.com/303/ http://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/269/ https://xkcd.com/269/ https://airbrake.io/blog/internet/best-programming-xkcd-comics https://airbrake.io/blog/internet/best-programming-xkcd-comi... ) it was entirely reasonable to believe that he had picked up enough experience to code the javascript frontends. There is simply no reason to pigeon hole the man as a "Rocket Scientist", especially given the fact he was a roboticist previously (which, shockingly enough, tends to involve programming). He has shown a wide variety of interests, and if he demonstrated an ability to code frontend javascript, I would not be surprised.
andrey-p 12y ago
I knew he had a developer working with him for Time and such (and now I know who the dev is!), and I knew he had a server person too. The phrase "folks at xkcd" threw me off a bit though - to me it implies a whole team. Is there an xkcd team as such? It would be good to read a bit more about them, if there's any info available.

PanMan 12y ago

Not to discount the work or end result that went in to this, but when I saw Pixels I assumed it used a 'standard' library, e.g. Leaflet, used for many maps (which have similar zoom) and tiles. I'm wondering why you wrote something from scratch?

ColinDabritz 12y ago
Good question. From the article: "For this project, I chose to use vanilla JavaScript with no external dependencies or libraries. In general, we strive to keep the dependency count and build process minimal for these projects, since keeping the complexity level low gives them a better chance of aging well in the archives."
chromakode 12y ago
The initial idea was to use a tileserver-based approach like leaflet. Writing a custom renderer allowed us to have unique views per client infinitely deep that zoomed smoothly, rather than at fixed intervals. Another benefit is avoiding the on-disk size and generation CPU time of building tiles, as well as the bandwidth costs of serving a bunch of redundant views of the same image data.
- ygra 12y ago
  As someone who helped convert #1110 (Click and drag) into one of the (subjectively) better zooming implementations (http://dump.ventero.de/xkcd1110/ http://dump.ventero.de/xkcd1110/), I immediately wondered whether Pixels would benefit from Seadragon as well. Then I noticed that it's infinite and I wasn't quite sure anymore whether a DZI could do that properly. Perhaps by generating a sparse DZI on the fly in the browser. But that way probably lies madness, too. Also anti-aliasing would have to be turned off beyond 100 % zoom of individual images, which I'm not sure is trivial to hack in there. Still, I think from a UX perspective the slightly springy behaviour of Seadragon is much nicer than the algorithmic rigidity of things like Leaflet or Google Maps.
SupremumLimit 12y ago
Leaflet only allows discrete zoom levels as far as I know, whereas Pixels zooms continuously. I'm not sure a tile layer with an infinite number of zoom levels is possible either. At the very least, it would require extensive hacking.

baddox 12y ago

I enjoy hearing people comment on their own "terrible" design decisions, though they never seem as bad as some of my own. :) Regarding performance, did anyone else have absolutely awful frame rates when zooming? On my beefy Macbook Pro in Chrome it would drop to two or three frames per second. Edit: and on my Windows PC in Chrome, which was fairly beefy three years ago, it's more like a frame every few seconds.

simoncion 12y ago
I had no slowdowns while zooming on both my seven-ish-year-old Toughbook CF-30 and my three or four-year-old desktop machine. Chromium 38 on Linux on both.
aroch 12y ago
Disable "Enable zero-copy rasterizer" in chrome and give it another try. Its likely hitting the integrated graphics and not discrete or CPU, leading to the less than awesome FPS
ceras 12y ago
Zooming on my x86 Chromebook was ~1fps or worse.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
chromakode 12y ago
If the code detects that rendering a frame takes a while, it increases the threshold in which sub-panels are drawn. Hopefully it should speed up after those first couple frames.
- baddox 12y ago
  I must have gone at least 20 levels deep and it never noticeably improves.
jfindley 12y ago
Me too - it's much more interesting to read about terrible decisions, why they were made, etc than it is to read yet another unblemished story of success. We as an industry should be better at sharing "Hey, I did this wrong because X" stories, they are both interesting and useful.

davezuko 12y ago

Very interesting. I love to see how people deal with such tight deadlines, especially when they hit that eventual point mentioned in the article where things just sort of work out of sheer effort and it's too late to change their approach. I am curious, however, about this comment: "We anticipated a higher proportion of the Colbert Report referrals would be using IE." What was the rationale behind this? Maybe I'm just wrong in my assumptions about the Colbert audience, but I'd definitely have expected a much more mobile-heavy (and non-IE) group.

alanfalcon 12y ago
I'd say it was the simple assumption that the general internet audience uses IE at a much greater rate than typical XKCD visitors... And he does mention that they aren't TV watchers so didn't have any experience to draw on there.
dobbsbob 12y ago
Also found that decision strange, I would've assumed the average viewer would pull out their phone (Chrome or Safari) and check the site since nobody has a desktop or laptop anymore. I look like a time traveler from the past wandering the streets with my antiquated IBM thinkpad.
chromakode 12y ago
We definitely should have known better. Admittedly none of us had watched television in front of a TV for quite some time. I think this was a case of focusing too sharply on what was broken vs. what our audience would consist of. xkcd's audience typically slants away from IE, so we anticipated the TV influx would be more average. That being said, the record high 6% IE numbers achieved didn't quite justify the time spent. ;)
- dwd 12y ago
  The big problem with browser stats is that they are averaged over a day or month. Maybe not an issue with a global audience, but for a local audience you find desktop use is mostly limited to between 8-6 while people are at work. Mobile spikes during the morning and late afternoon commutes and tapers off into evening. Tablets have a smaller morning/afternoon spike and gradually pick up in the evening. This is fairly consistent over a number of .com.au sites I have analysed mobile traffic for. So, at the time you're running your evening TV advertisement or PR spot it's 80% mobile, not the 25% the stats tell you.

gioi 12y ago

It makes me remember John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding[0] > The Indian before mentioned [...], saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was—a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied—SOMETHING, HE KNEW NOT WHAT -- [0] http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615.txt http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10615/pg10615.txt, 2nd book, chapter XXIII, paragraph 2

sp332 12y ago
Stephen Hawking quote (from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down) A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

skybrian 12y ago

I'll probably get downvoted for this, but I'm ashamed of Randal Monroe for asking for such a crazy deadline and Max for agreeing to it. This is an art project. Randal can set his own deadlines. There is no reason to ask someone to work crazy sleep-deprived hours for it, even if they volunteer. He's doing the same thing a bad boss would do, with less justification than most. Writing it up afterwords sets a bad example for other impressionable young hackers who look up to these guys and will set themselves up for being exploited when they go to work because they think it's expected of them. I couldn't finish the article. I'm sure there are good hacks in it. But we have to stop promoting bad behavior. If we can't do this ourselves for art, what about when there's real pressure? Update: to clarify, there's nothing unusual about this and there far worse examples all the time. It's just a bit striking since Randal's image is of a somewhat otherworldly idealist. Backpedal #2: to avoid being overly dramatic, let me clarify that being ashamed of someone else's behavior implies that you feel some responsibility for their behavior, which doesn't make sense in this case. Also, not finishing an article is, to be honest, not all that unusual.

beambot 12y ago
I don't disagree with the sentiment (hiphip-hurrah for better planning!). But in this case, I'm not sure we have sufficient information to claim malice. Perhaps they only came up with the idea 3 days before Colbert? Perhaps Colbert asked (last minute) for a cool, new, live demo? Perhaps they were just being opportunistic, and this turned into one of those unforeseen firedrill moments? Externalities being what they are, they did a bang up job of pulling it off in time.
- skybrian 12y ago
  You're of course right that we don't know the real story, just what it looks like. However, asking an artist for an original work of art in order to promote their book on your show seems like a rather unlikely request. Also I'm not assuming malice. However, I wouldn't congratulate them for pulling it off; this is itself encouraging the wrong thing.
  - 12y ago

justifier 12y ago

jason nelson (i) had me splitting sides when i first saw his infinitely zoomable image sydney's siberia : http://www.secrettechnology.com/sydney/ http://www.secrettechnology.com/sydney/ looking through wayback archives it seems siberia was posted around july of 2011 it is a brilliant idea, very ripe for self discovery, and hopefully randall and chomakode came to it in their own way because when i saw the comic i immediately went into the webs looking for a shout out to jason nelson.. i was waiting for this inevitable post and link on HN for a platform to expose more people to the weird and wonderful art of jason nelson (ii) .. i was introduced to nelson through his gamegamegame(iii), a wild platformer that could best be described how futurama describes beck: 'transcends genres even as he re-invents them'; (i) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Nelson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Nelson (ii) http://www.secrettechnology.com/ http://www.secrettechnology.com/ (warning autostarts noise) (iii) http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html http://www.secrettechnology.com/gamegame/gamegame.html

MaysonL 12y ago
OMG – that gamegame triggered weird after-images reminiscent of visual migraines: the white background of my monitor is pulsating in many colours.

frooxie 12y ago

I just realized it's made for use with a scroll wheel. I use a Wacom pen, not a mouse, so the instructions were confusing to me.

egypturnash 12y ago
I feel your pain, fellow Wacom-instead-of-mouse person.
skeletonjelly 12y ago
Try double clicking.

deathanatos 12y ago

This is a nit, but it always bothers me: > My plane landed in SFO a half hour before our rough goal of launching midnight EST. While my cab was hurtling me home at 80mph, the folks at xkcd were putting the final touches on the art and server code. We cobbled it all together over IRC and went live at around 1:30am EST. We're in Daylight Saving time. EDT. Or just "ET" or "Eastern", which are good year-round. (Or "America/New_York" if you're feeling pedantic.)¹ Unless of course you just don't observe Daylight saving time, and you were actually working in EST, in which case, respect. > As you scroll deeper, pos becomes a long array of the nested pixels you've entered, like [[305, 222], [234, 674], [133, 733], ...] Doesn't this mean that crossing a panel boundary means we need to pop up the stack? And, if I'm on the bottom-most panel of a bottom-most panel and I cross that boundary, mean two things off the stack? And if I'm evil, and keep zooming in on that bottom of the bottom of the […] bottom of the bottom of the bottom of a pixel, and then move across that boundary: Uncaught RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded zoom.js:529 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:529 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:586 TurtlesDown.render zoom.js:576 [… (it's turtles all the way down!) …] (Some bugs to be expected given the development timescale, of course. :-) And, to be fair, when I thought about "how would you implement this?", yours was the solution I had in mind. Tough edge case here though; you note the problem with addition and carry in your post too, and I wonder if I just ran into a corner case of that.) I did greatly enjoy this comic. Especially once I determined that it gave different panels depending on where you zoomed in. > browsers were still too slow to draw all 360,000 individual pixel panels via Canvas Would mipmapping help any here? ¹At least it isn't carved in stone: http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/clock-grand-central-station-new-york-city-25254083.jpg http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/clock-grand-central-station-n....

chromakode 12y ago
>We're in Daylight Saving time. EDT. Or just "ET" or "Eastern", which are good year-round. Point taken. :) >Doesn't this mean that crossing a panel boundary means we need to pop up the stack? Aha! Yes, now that I'm looking closely, I think that is possible, since the logic that handles crossing outside of the current "pos" pixel boundary is re-entrant. However, I note that the line numbers in your trace are alternating. This looks suspiciously like an oscillation between the "need to zoom out and find a new pos" and "need to zoom in and set pos" states. It just occurred to me that since these conditionals compare floating point positions directly, it might be possible for a precision error to cause such a loop. This exercise has made me realize a benefit to the mess of carrying code that happens further down, when wrapping around the 4 panels that are actively being displayed. That code will in principle operate past the point where a recursive implementation will stack trace, FWIW. According to StackOverflow [1], that'll be around 25K/50K nestings in Chrome/Firefox. >Would mipmapping help any here? Yep! The current implementation only scales an image once per render, caching the resultant image data and reusing it for all of the other draws [2]. Images are also pre-scaled to various intervals (for example [3]), though that was to improve image scaling rather than performance. Actually, while working on the mipmapping implementation, I found evidence that the canvas putImageData call (for image buffers) is a good deal slower than drawIamge [4]. It looks like where I left things, I'm still using putImageData. Tomorrow, I'll try caching the actual canvas elements and see if that gives the predicted huge performance boost. [1]: http://stackoverflow.com/a/7828803 http://stackoverflow.com/a/7828803 [2]: https://github.com/chromakode/xkcd-pixels/blob/master/zoom.js#L516 https://github.com/chromakode/xkcd-pixels/blob/master/zoom.j... [3]: http://imgs.xkcd.com/turtledown/turtles-tiled.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/turtledown/turtles-tiled.png [4]: http://jsperf.com/canvas-drawimage-vs-putimagedata/3 http://jsperf.com/canvas-drawimage-vs-putimagedata/3

wz1000 12y ago

The script that renders the comic seems to consume an ungodly amount of ram. It ate up close to six GB's of ram on Firefox running on Arch Linux, and forced my X server onto swap. On Chromium, the comic is navigable, but the page still consumed close to one GB of memory.

anon1110 12y ago

It seems pretty broken to me. When I zoom in far enough, it fades from the original zoomed pixels to a new image as per the design. But, unlike the design illustration, and unlike what one would expect from an infinite zoomer, the new image that fades in has no correspondence to the original. It should be that white pixels in the original correspond to mostly white images in next level image, and black pixels in the original should correspond to mostly black images in the next level image. But there is no correspondence.