7 ms·

CUSTOMER Hackerman, I need an impressive icon for my website. It should be 5x5 pixels big and look like a rabbit. Can you please draw it for me? HACKERMAN Dr

CUSTOMER Hackerman, I need an impressive icon for my website. It should be 5x5 pixels big and look like a rabbit. Can you please draw it for me? HACKERMAN Draw!? Bah! I don’t need any graphic program for that. I am Hackerman. I will code it for you. You will get the image next week. CUSTOMER Next week?? But… HACKERMAN No buts! I just need to read about how the GIF file format works, then I can create the image in no time. [TIME PASSES] After spending some evenings, Hackerman gets the main idea of how the GIF file format works and the compression algorithm called LZW. With that knowledge, he succeeded in creating the image within an hour. Hackerman calculated that the binary of the image should be as follows: 47 49 46 38 39 61 00 00 00 00 70 00 00 2c 00 00 00 00 05 00 05 00 81 11 11 11 FF FF FF D5 D7 D9 00 00 00 07 0F 80 01 00 83 01 82 84 85 88 82 8A 85 02 85 81 00 3b So he just opened his code editor, saved the file as rabbit.gif, and sent it to his customer. Boom! Easy-peasy! Do you want understand the GIF-file format and be as cool as Hackerman?

bluejekyll 3y ago
Yes? Is that such a bad thing? Is this trying to say there is no value in learning something so low level. Exploration leads to learning, and learning leads to innovation. Perhaps Hackerman will go on to create the greatest image encoding library for images so that they can easily scale from 5x5 to 25x25 or more and fit in the same space as the 5x5. Who knows.
- loloquwowndueo 3y ago
  He’s quoting from TFA.
atoav 3y ago
I teach a foundational media technology course at on of the bigger european art universities — I do the same thing with the students using a broadcast wave file. The goal of the thing isn't to turn them into hackers, it is to give them a feeling what the stuff they work with is made of, what a file is. This is also a great introduction to talk about compression, metadata, encoding, decoding, sample rate, bitdepth and so on. If you dive that deep into it, the settings in a typical media conversion program will suddenly become much less intimidating. My motto always was: this was made by humans so it should be possible for humans to understand it as well. And this is maybe the "hidden" lesson: If you bring enough patience you can go into the depth of nearly every topic.
- helpfulContrib 3y ago
  [dead]
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I absolutely love that you do this. There appears to be a trend to discount the value of knowing the low-level details of these sorts of things -- but even if you never actually work at that level, knowing what's happening "behind the scenes" increases and deepens understanding and can make high-level things that seem arbitrary or nonsensical make sense.
  - 1letterunixname 3y ago
    First principles and curiosity > blithe unconcern about the "magic box". Likewise, coders who don't have enough understanding all the way down the stack including hardware are merely engineer posers in it for a paycheck.
  - happybits 3y ago
    Thanks a lot JohnFen. One reason for writing the post and trying to create GIF-images from binary, was to come as close as possible to GIF format and especially the LZW-algorithm. To understand it in an intuitive way. To get a bit closer to the minds who created the algorithm in the first place.
- philsnow 3y ago
  I forgot most of what little I learned in semiconductor physics and analog design courses in college, but I remember enough to know that nothing about computers is magic. Nothing. That knowledge gives me confidence that I can figure out anything having to do with computers given enough quiet time. On the other hand, I don't really know much about cars. If I had a 2024 model year car and something went wrong with it, I'd very quickly run up against a wall of arcane-seeming knowledge that I don't have easy access to. I don't know where I would start to learn everything about cars from scratch like I did with computers. There might be a name for this, but I don't know what it is.
  - 3y ago
jolmg 3y ago
That first > 00 00 00 00 should be `05 00 05 00`.
- Brentward 3y ago
  Yeah the article says these "aren't used anymore," but my image viewer (sxiv) complained that the gif was corrupted until I put something there. It still displayed the image, but it also complained afterwards.
  - jolmg 3y ago
    In the case of viewnior, it said that the resulting image has zero size and displayed nothing. That statement of it not being used seems false.
  - happybits 3y ago
    Aha, thanx for the info, I didn't know. So the canvas width and height should be the same as the width and height?

bluejekyll 3y ago

Yes? Is that such a bad thing? Is this trying to say there is no value in learning something so low level. Exploration leads to learning, and learning leads to innovation. Perhaps Hackerman will go on to create the greatest image encoding library for images so that they can easily scale from 5x5 to 25x25 or more and fit in the same space as the 5x5. Who knows.

loloquwowndueo 3y ago
He’s quoting from TFA.

atoav 3y ago

I teach a foundational media technology course at on of the bigger european art universities — I do the same thing with the students using a broadcast wave file. The goal of the thing isn't to turn them into hackers, it is to give them a feeling what the stuff they work with is made of, what a file is. This is also a great introduction to talk about compression, metadata, encoding, decoding, sample rate, bitdepth and so on. If you dive that deep into it, the settings in a typical media conversion program will suddenly become much less intimidating. My motto always was: this was made by humans so it should be possible for humans to understand it as well. And this is maybe the "hidden" lesson: If you bring enough patience you can go into the depth of nearly every topic.

helpfulContrib 3y ago
[dead]
JohnFen 3y ago
I absolutely love that you do this. There appears to be a trend to discount the value of knowing the low-level details of these sorts of things -- but even if you never actually work at that level, knowing what's happening "behind the scenes" increases and deepens understanding and can make high-level things that seem arbitrary or nonsensical make sense.
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  First principles and curiosity > blithe unconcern about the "magic box". Likewise, coders who don't have enough understanding all the way down the stack including hardware are merely engineer posers in it for a paycheck.
- happybits 3y ago
  Thanks a lot JohnFen. One reason for writing the post and trying to create GIF-images from binary, was to come as close as possible to GIF format and especially the LZW-algorithm. To understand it in an intuitive way. To get a bit closer to the minds who created the algorithm in the first place.
philsnow 3y ago
I forgot most of what little I learned in semiconductor physics and analog design courses in college, but I remember enough to know that nothing about computers is magic. Nothing. That knowledge gives me confidence that I can figure out anything having to do with computers given enough quiet time. On the other hand, I don't really know much about cars. If I had a 2024 model year car and something went wrong with it, I'd very quickly run up against a wall of arcane-seeming knowledge that I don't have easy access to. I don't know where I would start to learn everything about cars from scratch like I did with computers. There might be a name for this, but I don't know what it is.
- 3y ago

jolmg 3y ago

That first > 00 00 00 00 should be `05 00 05 00`.

Brentward 3y ago
Yeah the article says these "aren't used anymore," but my image viewer (sxiv) complained that the gif was corrupted until I put something there. It still displayed the image, but it also complained afterwards.
- jolmg 3y ago
  In the case of viewnior, it said that the resulting image has zero size and displayed nothing. That statement of it not being used seems false.
- happybits 3y ago
  Aha, thanx for the info, I didn't know. So the canvas width and height should be the same as the width and height?