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Show HN: Conway's Game of Life, but as a div full of Braille characters
I built this many years ago to try out rendering images in textboxes, using braille characters as groups of 8 pixels. You can try different fonts to see how the spacing changes too.
- omneity 2y agoGreat work! Is the seed random? No matter how often I refresh it reaches a “dead” state after a few epochs only.
- diziet 2y agoFactories/guns are quite rare, Oscillators are fairly common (but maybe not rendered properly on this? . . . is a common oscilator and I see many but they don't render propely) and spaceships tend to collide with stuff!
- 8474_s 2y agoIts random and default 23/3 rule always decays to oscillators and static objects. `Most initial patterns eventually "burn out", producing either stable figures or patterns that oscillate forever between two or more states (known as ash)` https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
- zersiax 2y agoAs a blind person I can confirm that the braille does not, in fact, say anything in particular. It'd be an amusing experiment to sneak in a couple easter eggs into this that spell out actual words ;)
- floam 2y agoIt looks like the beginning state is random, but I’m sure it’s possible to create starting conditions that will eventually leave detritus that spells something.
- noduerme 2y agoThis is nifty. When I was in art school for graphic design, we were assigned a typography project to create a series of art pieces that used only "found typography", i.e. not fonts on your computer but, rather, type lifted from photographs of lettering in the wild. As part of my designs, I incorporated Braille found in an elevator. The typography professor rejected this, leading to a 30 minute class discussion around whether or not Braille was a form of typography. In his opinion, it wasn't, and he failed me on the assignment. I still think I was right, and it's one of my favorite design pieces of my own to this day.
- squigz 2y agoIt's amusing to me that artistic gatekeeping exists even in typography. What was the class consensus on whether it counts? Also, you should share the piece
- andsoitis 2y agoBraille is not a typeface in the same way that the alphabet is not a typeface.
- squigz 2y agoSprinkle in some pedantry with the gatekeeping, and we're really set!
- withinboredom 2y agoSometimes, I'm blown away by ignorance.
- dqh 2y agoIs all Braille identical? No equivalent of typeface where the dots are shaped of spaced differently, but in the same Braille pattern?
- Symbiote 2y agoWhen printed it would be different if the embossing pins were new or worn. The dots could be squares. The size of the dots (boldness) can vary.
- 9dev 2y agoUsing Braille characters as a 2D textual rendering output is a neat idea. Might come in handy for charting on the command line.
- squigz 2y agoI actually saw this done in a cryptocurrency price chart IRC bot. It works surprisingly well.
- withinboredom 2y agoYou may be interested in btop: https://github.com/aristocratos/btop https://github.com/aristocratos/btop
- zersiax 2y agoPlease don't, commandline is like the one frontier where I don't have to yell at devs for doing that kind of thing and locking people out by accident too often. It'd be rather ironic to have braille of all things become an accessibility barrier :) Disclaimer: fully blind developer and accessibility expert.
- neomantra 2y agoAs developer of one such libraries (ntcharts), and having some accessibility experience, I've thought about that irony too. On a practical level, is it simply any terminal visualization that can destroy a terminal app experience, or only Braille rune rendering? We could include some guidelines in our project for how to include such charts while ensuring accessibility. Besides via some configuration, I'm not sure how to programmatically recognize that terminal charts would be poorly experienced by a user. EDIT: made a ticket for this https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/2 https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/issues/2
- neomantra 2y agoHere's some terminal charting libraries that use Braille runes: * https://github.com/mum4k/termdash?tab=readme-ov-file#the-linechart https://github.com/mum4k/termdash?tab=readme-ov-file#the-lin... * https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/widgets/struct.Chart.html https://docs.rs/ratatui/latest/ratatui/widgets/struct.Chart.... * https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples/README.md#time-series https://github.com/NimbleMarkets/ntcharts/blob/main/examples...
- miki123211 2y agoAs a blind person, I find it quite sad that the most common use of Unicode Braille these days is to make terminal apps less accessible to the people Braille was originally intended for.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Jerrrry 2y agoSorry, as a fellow blind person, I couldn't read this because it wasn't in braille.
- Jerrrry 2y agoGenuine question, but aside from a monochrome display to tactile/physical-sense augmented accessibility device, to what other mediums could visually impaired people appreciate visually intricate phenomena such as cellular automata? Maybe the recently posted "audio from billiards/2d particles" could be adapted with a ruleset to bring Conways GoL to a less visual-centric medium.