Generative art was my first love. By accident, I ended up being a student of the great Frieder Nake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frieder_Nake) and that changed my future trajectory.
These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.
I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code.
I wasn't unhappy with some of the results, but it was an interesting and frustrating struggle.
> I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle.
I wrote a JS canvas library[1] partly because existing libraries of the time (2013) didn't do what I wanted a canvas library to do. Things like animated gradients and patterns, etc. I'm still working on the library today - so thats 12+ years of my spare time gone!
Generative art - such as challenges like Genuary[2] - is a key tool for giving me ideas on how to develop the library further. I keep CodePens of some of my better efforts[3] around as a set of extra tests to check for breaking changes as I fiddle with the library.
> Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me
I used to (and occasionally still do) make generative art and found this too! Although I'm not really sure why - I still love good generative art and don't really consume any AI generated art intentionally.
I think possibly one of the main things that happened was a lot of online generative art communities got flooded first by NFTs, and then AI generated art. I find it a lot harder to reliably find other people's generative art these days.
Is this a hobby project or a real social media application with people using it? If there are at least 1000 ppl. using the platform, we can consider adding link aggregation for it in https://murmel.social
There are not 1000 people using the platform yet. It's a quite new social media platform, but it will be here even though there is not so many people, since it's a platform that you can use by all yourself, cause you can use it in your own custom domain. I've review your project, but I think rawfeed.social is not something you can add there. But thanks.
> The friction of building personal apps has always been so high that as users we accepted the ads, the trackers, the dark patterns, and the constant upsells.
> The friction is just not there anymore. You can build a personal app that has the exact subset of features you want, that is clean, fast, and respects your privacy, in a matter of hours.
Anthropic charges $20/month for Claude Pro, which is all fine, but we all know that this is heavily subsidized, and is not the real cost of tokens we burn through.
The well-known ccusage (https://ccusage.com/) utility can read those logs and compute what you would have paid on a pay-per-token basis. For heavy users, that number can be... surprising.
I built a single HTML file that turns that data into a shareable infographic — cost trends over time, model breakdown (Sonnet vs. Haiku vs. Opus), total token volume, and peak spend days.
Everything runs client-side. The JSON never leaves your machine.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot while building Murmel (https://murmel.social). One thing we wanted to avoid from day one was the “infinite engagement machine” model, so instead of pushing algorithmic slop, we just surface links that are already being shared by people you follow on Bluesky and Mastodon.
It ends up feeling much closer to “what’s interesting in my corner of the web right now?” and much less like a system trying to keep you trapped inside it.
Small scope, obviously, but I think more social tools should feel like utilities, not casinos.
Don't give them ideas please. They'll ask for more investment to do exactly this.
I miss the days when open source was a way to get your product in the developers hands and build trust. Stuff like this shows that the tide has shifted to primary focus on shareholders and potential hold on patents and trademarks.
Me too. I also miss the days when I was proud of my little open source projects. Now I just regret donating fuel, even a miniscule amount in the grand scheme of things, to the soulless lawnmower that has already chopped down so much of my joy in work and promises to eventually shred the paycheck, too.
I hear yah, especially knowing that AI crawlers just don't respect ROBOTS.txt or anything similar, but there's still nothing wrong with writing code for fun.. No need to lose that!
Eventually, this led me to writing my own indie book on generative art with Go: https://p5v.gumroad.com/l/generative-art-in-golang, which led me to a talk I gave on GopherCon Europe: https://youtu.be/NtBTNllI_LY?si=GMePA3CfVQZJq2O7
These were great times, but I think the book is not worth buying anymore. Sadly, AI-generated imagery sort of killed the mojo of algorithmic art for me, and I've been trying to get back to it for the last few years.