As you can surmise from the domain, this is created by Mr Doob. They're most well known for creating the 3D JavaScript library Three.js: https://threejs.org
Their full site and a lot more cool stuff they've made can be found here: https://mrdoob.com
I opened that in a background tab and went "why does it sound like quake 1" - haha. This whole site has a bunch of awesome stuff on it, thank you for sharing.
The consensus in English-writing guides like the APA or Elements of Style is about staying true to a person's self-identified pronoun while preferring specificity over ambiguity. In a case where you don't know - "they" is perfectly acceptable. In a case where "they" is an explicit self-identity - it's the only correct option. In this case, where he literally calls himself "Mr", it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun where "he" is the correct one for someone calling themselves "mr"
Hm. Interesting argument, but I kinda disagree with the premise that "if we have anything exposing gender metadata, the rest of the language around it in a sentence must be pulled into referencing that to be more correct".
It's a coherent thing to argue for, I'll give you that, but it's also.. kinda arbitrary? And one can make an equally convincing case for statelessness in the sense that just because one word carries metadata, doesn't mean that the other words around it must react to it.
You're making a straw-man argument with "anything exposing gender metadata". It's not like I dug up some obscure article - it's literally his chosen brand name. There's nothing arbitrary to use "he" for somebody who calls himself "mr".
Is it possible that you have a good point about inclusive writing in general, but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?
It doesn't need to be said or made up. Just arguing against a distorted or substituted version of the position of the other party as if it were their actual argument is enough.
Uh, okay, but, how do you just disagree with an idea then?
The idea being
> it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun
And my disagreement being with the assessment that it is "incorrect".
It's not. That's an arbitrary choice and pointing to "authorities" there changes nothing about the arbitrary-ness.
__
In fact, I went all in on good faith there by validating that idea as one coherent way to see this topic.
I just fundamentally disagree with it and brought forward my equally valid and coherent way to see this topic.
Which got countered with a "this is just a strawman" (which is false, as that is not how strawmans work) followed by a direct attack
> but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?
And now you show up and.. uh.
__
Yeah anyway. The direct attack there alone is enough to lose any moral highground. So even if I had been doing what I was accused of (which I clearly did not), that would be a less worse offense?
> The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.
Far from it, it only creates confusion and injects ideologically charged "pronoun language" into the discussion. If you feel the need to make clear that yes, the person you're talking about can be a man as well as a woman - something which most people realise and the ones who don't won't anyway no matter which words you use - use something like s/he or "he or she". The first form is just as short, is not ideologically charged and does not create ambiguity.
You may genuinely not know the gender of an online nickname, and, frankly, you also don't really have to know?
Why share this metadata in the first place.
I kinda see your point regarding "it pulls in culture war", but, to be fair, it's "they/them". Language that - in this very usage - predates the culture war by centuries.
Fair pushback, however, again, I would ask to which degree and to what end.
"There is an entity named doob, and they are responsible for this thing" at least to me kinda solves the exact thing (attribution, "where to ask questions") it needs to solve, while simultaneously encoding the least amount of metadata possible.
(Okay technically the entity is named mrdoob as an opaque string, but "there is an entity named doob" was more fun to type)
Unless they are non-binary? But in some languages you'll still run into trouble. In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.
> In Italian, if your masculine, it's non-binario, and if you're feminine, it's non-binaria.
Haha what the fuck. Who implemented that oh my god.
Genuine question though. That cannot be grassroots, can it? Because it completely defeats the purpose of that. Did this just come up because someone _had_ to translate the english culture war during news reporting?
I know no one stops you from using hashtag `codevember` on vibe coded project[0], but... isn't the whole point of these one month challenges(genuary, nodevember, inktober, etc) about human creativity? Like game jams?
I've been thinking about this and it's still difficult to accept it. It feels like making generative ai art and posting it with hashtag inktober.
You could say that 'the artist' guided the genai to show creativity, ai is just a tool, and maybe the process helped improve their drawing skills.
Yes, I agree. It's just... maybe it's because I won't be amazed by coding challenge posts anymore like I used to, just like I'm not excited about hobby coding projects these days.
A lot of established engineers are using LLMs. I am not sure why that is still a stigma. Our industry is going through major changes, that is well established. I would be surprised if someone is not using LLMs to produce cool experiments.
Human creativity goes into "what to build", not "how to build it".
A Photograph is, mechanically, 100% machine-created. But we still call photographers "creative" for their work on picking what to photograph, how to frame it, timing the shot, etc..
Honestly, I think it's wonderful that editors are finally getting some credit for the creativity they bring to the process. There's plenty of writing about how famous films like "Star Wars" often owe a lot to their editing, even though that traditionally doesn't get credited as "creative" work.
Creativity is defined by what one did in the creative process, not whether you did something else outside of the creative process or not. I.e. if the only thing you do is say "make me a piece of art, I'll pay you $x" then you had 0 creative involvement. Not because you paid for it, but because of the lack of doing anything during the creation process.
The same is true of using any tool. If you just click a premade and generic "process photo" button in an image editor for every photo you get then you're doing no creative work (unless that whole action is a meta statement itself or something). If you mess with the different options and settings to find the one which matches your creative vision then you've played a part in the creative process, even if you weren't the one responsible for the code of how the pixels changed and paid for the software to do that part.
To LLMs directly, if you just say "make me some art" then you've done nothing creative as well. If you iterate and mess around with what you like until you get something you find interesting, then you've played, what seems to me, the biggest part in the creativity process of that output (which has nothing to do with where the code to match that vision of the output came from). I think LLMs and creativity can be confusing because "make me some art" will produce something that, at a glance, looks very much like we'd expect creative art to look like (regardless the reason or if it actually is), and we often falsely jump to the conclusion anything that looks creative out of an LLM must therefore only ever be able to source from the LLM. This would be like assuming because an image editor has that generic "process photo" button one can never do anything creative with an image editor.
Revered photographers do a lot more than push a button. But I agree pushing a button and getting a result without much thought or effort generally doesn't make for an interesting creative work, most professional photographers would agree too
> Human creativity goes into "what to build", not "how to build it".
This is nonsense, right? If I decided "hey wouldn't it be cool if there was a really interesting painting of a dude" that isn't an interesting creative expression
If I enter a "Make pottery" monthly challenge locally, and show up with a robot that produces mugs, I'm sure it'd spawn some interesting conversation nonetheless, but I'd also expect the organizers to tell me I didn't quite get the spirit of what they're doing.
It's pretty much the same here. The purpose of these "jams" or "challenges" isn't to see if LLMs can do those things, obviously they can, we all know this already. The point is for you to personally challenge yourself, and improve yourself. That's the spirit at least.
I guess, but this isn't just some claude-kiddie, he's the creator of Three.js. it's like slamming Linus for using AI on the Linux kernel. He knows what he's doing.
I know who he is and I don't care what he does with ai.
To me these little challenges are about improving programming skills, showing creativity, and mostly just for fun. So using LLMs on 'codevember' feels weird. That doesn't mean I'm blaming him for it, I'm just having a hard time accepting it.
A big chunk of the software development industry is not typing code but figuring out what code to write in the first place.
If you want to draw out the construction analogy, ask a mason or carpenter if they'd rather be an architect. (a lot would probably not want to, but I know a few people in the trades that can do a lot more than just welding two pieces of steel together, it's just that their job is the welding part.
Actually this will be one of the challenges; LLM assisted coding has empowered people to be more decision makers, lead developers, architects, etc than code monkeys. But it's a pyramid, there's only so many lead developers you feasibly need on a project.)
Writing software and having software running on a computer is not the point of all of this. The point is to then use these tools to improve your physical world outside of the computer, and to use the computer to improve your mind and then apply that to how you live in the physical living world. The computer is not your friend, your colleague, or your enemy, it's a screwdriver the over excited gave a celebrity complex.
yeah man the point of software development is to develop software that is useful, helpful, thoughtful, creative, productive, or just cool. For me and most non hardcore engineers like on hackernews, the outcome is all that matters.
Imagine you're getting an extension to your house. You might not be an architect, an electrician, a plasterer, a carpenter, an interior designer, a grounds worker, a gardener, a labourer or any other profession I've missed off (apologies) but you get a great sense of joy from designing and seeing your extension built.
You outsourced literally everything, you didn't lay a single brick, didn't calculate a single beams "load-bearing" capacity but at the end you have this awesome extension you can live in that brings you joy. There's going to be snags here and there as there always is with anything, even if you crafted and did it all by hand, but seeing it built and guiding and adapting things along the way is the fun part.
The parent poster’s post is amusing because I did all of those things. I framed out an addition to my house. I demoed all of the living spaces, installed insulation, hung drywall, did the trim (which was difficult to learn!), installed windows. I also built a patio (with a shovel!), built a fence, planted an orchard, etc. I did these things because, although I have the money to pay others, it was 1) deeply satisfying and 2) I wanted it done right. I think lots of technical people think that we can’t do it right because it’s not our area but—if you care, you will do it right.
Do I get the same satisfaction from defining and directing a project that my team at work implements?
Yes. Writing code was always fun but running a project is itself a systems engineering problem. Especially if you’re the one defining project scope.
So yes, absolutely it is the same level of joy. The code I wrote was just the method needed to solve the low-level problem but it was never the entire problem space.
I can see my fingerprints all over the user facing design and I can see all the places where I agonized over different approaches to maximize user enjoyment. Seeing the solutions manifest is thrilling frankly. I see users of LLMs as filling a similar role to mine in this respect.
That said, I understand that not everyone enjoys the entirety of the problem space to the same degree and so I can see how a reasonable group of people might not find the higher-level puzzle as enjoyable as its low-level counterpart just as there are those who might find the low-level tedious instead of rewarding.
There is a point in the LLM usage spectrum where I feel that I am not really understanding the stuff I am creating. I can have the LLM write some code, without starting to feel this. But it is only a small amount of code...
Creativity is about coming up with your vision with the tools at hand in my eyes. I would still argue in situations like this you need a sense of style to understand what works and what doesn't.
You do realize who this is, right? Do you know how many manually written jams/demos mrdoob has directly enabled by his three.js work? Can we please, please, try and fight the urge to driveby this sort of work?
People still paint, despite photoshop. People still play instruments, despite Digital Audio Workstations.
There is art in the craft, and more importantly enjoyment in the craft.
I wouldn't AI generate a song because all of the fun for me and my friends is in the playing and watching. You will find that's true very often for creative people and those who enjoy their work.
If all you are doing is blasting out corporate assets, or persuing money, I don't think anyone cares what you are using, generate away.
I see plenty of creativity on display here. I haven't seen anything like this and it was delightful. Also makes me want to explore more that I can do to create visualizations like this.
The fact that it was vibe coded matters very little to me. Gate keeping the concept of a codevember doesnt seem very codevember to me.
i don't care about leaderboards but i do care about the community of like-minded people that comes with these kinds of competitions, which AI larpers totally eliminate
While true, I think it's also true that ideas are cheap - how many people here know someone that had a great idea (like "uber for pets") and just need a software developer to build it?
That said, idea people can now make their ideas a reality quicker / cheaper without needing an expert, if only to show it. Which in turn can make them more creative and original. In theory.
It is nice, but I'm somewhat unnerved that it never stops pouring. I expect it to finally stop at some time, and it doesn't, which for some reason makes me uneasy.
Or even before that. I'm on a M1 Ultra mac studio with 128G of RAM. I would have expected a lot more performance, but then I'm seeing a lot of conversation about codevember and AI use and yeah… this is a good part of that argument.
I feel like this is what you get when you don't codevember, but you had an idea that would be cool. I've never seen a HN 'show something cool that's a relatively simple visual hack that's also physics etc.' that chugged this hard on my machine. I'm not running anything else and I have 20 cores and RAM isn't going to pose any obstacle. It's not very performant.
Their full site and a lot more cool stuff they've made can be found here: https://mrdoob.com
It works perfectly. It is inoffensive, a drop-in-replacement, doesn't elongate sentences or any other such negative side effects.
It's real known words not just freshly invented. And it's even semantically correct.
The they/them swap is the most elegant implementation I am aware of.
The consensus in English-writing guides like the APA or Elements of Style is about staying true to a person's self-identified pronoun while preferring specificity over ambiguity. In a case where you don't know - "they" is perfectly acceptable. In a case where "they" is an explicit self-identity - it's the only correct option. In this case, where he literally calls himself "Mr", it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun where "he" is the correct one for someone calling themselves "mr"
It's a coherent thing to argue for, I'll give you that, but it's also.. kinda arbitrary? And one can make an equally convincing case for statelessness in the sense that just because one word carries metadata, doesn't mean that the other words around it must react to it.
Is it possible that you have a good point about inclusive writing in general, but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?
Isn't a strawman something I would make up that you would have said to then attack it?
The idea being
> it's stylistically incorrect to choose a more ambiguous pronoun
And my disagreement being with the assessment that it is "incorrect". It's not. That's an arbitrary choice and pointing to "authorities" there changes nothing about the arbitrary-ness.
__
In fact, I went all in on good faith there by validating that idea as one coherent way to see this topic.
I just fundamentally disagree with it and brought forward my equally valid and coherent way to see this topic.
Which got countered with a "this is just a strawman" (which is false, as that is not how strawmans work) followed by a direct attack
> but you just happened to hop on the wrong case to make your stand, didn't realize that we're talking about an explicit "mr"?
And now you show up and.. uh.
__
Yeah anyway. The direct attack there alone is enough to lose any moral highground. So even if I had been doing what I was accused of (which I clearly did not), that would be a less worse offense?
Idk.
Far from it, it only creates confusion and injects ideologically charged "pronoun language" into the discussion. If you feel the need to make clear that yes, the person you're talking about can be a man as well as a woman - something which most people realise and the ones who don't won't anyway no matter which words you use - use something like s/he or "he or she". The first form is just as short, is not ideologically charged and does not create ambiguity.
You may genuinely not know the gender of an online nickname, and, frankly, you also don't really have to know? Why share this metadata in the first place.
I kinda see your point regarding "it pulls in culture war", but, to be fair, it's "they/them". Language that - in this very usage - predates the culture war by centuries.
So.. idk I think you might be wrong here.
"There is an entity named doob, and they are responsible for this thing" at least to me kinda solves the exact thing (attribution, "where to ask questions") it needs to solve, while simultaneously encoding the least amount of metadata possible.
(Okay technically the entity is named mrdoob as an opaque string, but "there is an entity named doob" was more fun to type)
Haha what the fuck. Who implemented that oh my god.
Genuine question though. That cannot be grassroots, can it? Because it completely defeats the purpose of that. Did this just come up because someone _had_ to translate the english culture war during news reporting?
[0]: https://x.com/mrdoob/status/2117561239249518650
You could say that 'the artist' guided the genai to show creativity, ai is just a tool, and maybe the process helped improve their drawing skills.
Yes, I agree. It's just... maybe it's because I won't be amazed by coding challenge posts anymore like I used to, just like I'm not excited about hobby coding projects these days.
> isn't the whole point of these one month challenges(genuary, nodevember, inktober, etc) about human creativity? Like game jams?
A Photograph is, mechanically, 100% machine-created. But we still call photographers "creative" for their work on picking what to photograph, how to frame it, timing the shot, etc..
Honestly, I think it's wonderful that editors are finally getting some credit for the creativity they bring to the process. There's plenty of writing about how famous films like "Star Wars" often owe a lot to their editing, even though that traditionally doesn't get credited as "creative" work.
The same is true of using any tool. If you just click a premade and generic "process photo" button in an image editor for every photo you get then you're doing no creative work (unless that whole action is a meta statement itself or something). If you mess with the different options and settings to find the one which matches your creative vision then you've played a part in the creative process, even if you weren't the one responsible for the code of how the pixels changed and paid for the software to do that part.
To LLMs directly, if you just say "make me some art" then you've done nothing creative as well. If you iterate and mess around with what you like until you get something you find interesting, then you've played, what seems to me, the biggest part in the creativity process of that output (which has nothing to do with where the code to match that vision of the output came from). I think LLMs and creativity can be confusing because "make me some art" will produce something that, at a glance, looks very much like we'd expect creative art to look like (regardless the reason or if it actually is), and we often falsely jump to the conclusion anything that looks creative out of an LLM must therefore only ever be able to source from the LLM. This would be like assuming because an image editor has that generic "process photo" button one can never do anything creative with an image editor.
This is literally what photographers do. Most do not even deal with exposure or any other setting. "Auto".
Professional ones, this is completely incorrect. Maybe hobbyists? But even then, not many.
I dont know if i've ever seen a message miss the point more than this one.
This is nonsense, right? If I decided "hey wouldn't it be cool if there was a really interesting painting of a dude" that isn't an interesting creative expression
It's pretty much the same here. The purpose of these "jams" or "challenges" isn't to see if LLMs can do those things, obviously they can, we all know this already. The point is for you to personally challenge yourself, and improve yourself. That's the spirit at least.
To me these little challenges are about improving programming skills, showing creativity, and mostly just for fun. So using LLMs on 'codevember' feels weird. That doesn't mean I'm blaming him for it, I'm just having a hard time accepting it.
Many of us are in the game because of the love for building things.
If you want to draw out the construction analogy, ask a mason or carpenter if they'd rather be an architect. (a lot would probably not want to, but I know a few people in the trades that can do a lot more than just welding two pieces of steel together, it's just that their job is the welding part.
Actually this will be one of the challenges; LLM assisted coding has empowered people to be more decision makers, lead developers, architects, etc than code monkeys. But it's a pyramid, there's only so many lead developers you feasibly need on a project.)
Add a "pseudo" before each and we would be in total agreement.
You outsourced literally everything, you didn't lay a single brick, didn't calculate a single beams "load-bearing" capacity but at the end you have this awesome extension you can live in that brings you joy. There's going to be snags here and there as there always is with anything, even if you crafted and did it all by hand, but seeing it built and guiding and adapting things along the way is the fun part.
I hired somebody to do the toilets. Fuck that.
Yes. Writing code was always fun but running a project is itself a systems engineering problem. Especially if you’re the one defining project scope.
So yes, absolutely it is the same level of joy. The code I wrote was just the method needed to solve the low-level problem but it was never the entire problem space.
I can see my fingerprints all over the user facing design and I can see all the places where I agonized over different approaches to maximize user enjoyment. Seeing the solutions manifest is thrilling frankly. I see users of LLMs as filling a similar role to mine in this respect.
That said, I understand that not everyone enjoys the entirety of the problem space to the same degree and so I can see how a reasonable group of people might not find the higher-level puzzle as enjoyable as its low-level counterpart just as there are those who might find the low-level tedious instead of rewarding.
I keep my local AI rack under my 3D printer because they are the same type of tool to me.
...when did I ever said that?
And why are you implying that using AI does not improve those skills?
You can learn nothing or become a master both ways. AI will just give you some tangible results first but in the end it depends solely on you.
I literally said that "I'm just having hard time accepting it."
> And why are you implying that using AI does not improve those skills?
I'm not.
There is art in the craft, and more importantly enjoyment in the craft.
I wouldn't AI generate a song because all of the fun for me and my friends is in the playing and watching. You will find that's true very often for creative people and those who enjoy their work.
If all you are doing is blasting out corporate assets, or persuing money, I don't think anyone cares what you are using, generate away.
The fact that it was vibe coded matters very little to me. Gate keeping the concept of a codevember doesnt seem very codevember to me.
That said, idea people can now make their ideas a reality quicker / cheaper without needing an expert, if only to show it. Which in turn can make them more creative and original. In theory.
If it could move with a mobile device’s gyroscope, that would be quite the amuse-esprit.
If Apple has liquid glass, why can't web have jelly menus??
I feel like this is what you get when you don't codevember, but you had an idea that would be cool. I've never seen a HN 'show something cool that's a relatively simple visual hack that's also physics etc.' that chugged this hard on my machine. I'm not running anything else and I have 20 cores and RAM isn't going to pose any obstacle. It's not very performant.
Doesn't work on Firefox Mobile.
about:config -> webgl.disabled: false
Works in Safari on my old iPhone 12 mini.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnJesHP5WEM
I guess the great unwashed have finally won.