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Posted by penguin_booze 14 hours ago

Monosketch(monosketch.io)
685 points | 126 commentspage 3
mldev_exe 3 hours ago|
I once saw a girl in CSCI class have an ASCII sketch of CPU memory chips (or something like that), and I thought you had to be a prodigy to do that ><
dennisjoseph 9 hours ago||
There is Monodraw, the best out there. https://monodraw.helftone.com/
thom 12 hours ago||
I'd love some version of these tools that could reliably round-trip pure text. Some heuristic or model that can actually recognise boxes, lines with anchors, parent-child relationships etc, so you can paste in pure text and immediately start rearranging stuff. My experience with Monodraw was that you had to maintain the original file format to do this, so once a diagram was in a markdown file or whatever, you couldn't just cut and paste it and easily edit it. At that point it might as well be any file format rendered as an image.
afandian 12 hours ago|
This is surely possible.

You need to find the monospace whitespace characters (seems there's a few [0]). Then encode a compressed version of the logical diagram in the white space, steganography style.

Or do something with characters [1] to compress a lot of data into a tiny ball of hair at the end.

Draw.io smuggles the XML in a PNG which I've always admired.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character

thom 12 hours ago||
Lovely idea! You're going to be fighting against editors and linters but it'd be a very cool proof of concept.
TonyStr 12 hours ago||
Great app!

It clicked for me once I realized you can ctrl+shift+C to copy the diagram to text, and paste in my editor! But I wonder if it would be possible to make ctrl+C copy to clipboard as ASCII? I see that ctrl+C copies the json representation of the selected objects, but surely it would be possible to maintain an internal model of copied objects, while the clipboard is always filled with usable ASCII? I think I've seen some applications do this before

lasgawe 8 hours ago||
I used a similar tool called AsciiFlow (asciiflow.com). This Monosketch seems easier to use. The best part is that we can add diagrams directly inside the source code.
dfee 9 hours ago||
first: looks very cool.

now, historically, i'd look at the language choice and ask myself, "would i want to set up a JVM" to run this kotlin app? oh, it's kotlin and python and the installation happens through pipenv?

two different ideas strike me now:

1. would it be worth throwing this at an LLM and having it write it in a different language,

2. if i was just consuming a bundled binary (e.g. go or rust), would i have such reluctance?

i think distribution is becoming increasingly important, making nonsense details like pipenv and whichever version of the JVM is present much greater friction.

TheRealPomax 9 hours ago|
Especially with things like github actions creating your releases meaning you don't have to build on your own hardware. You just set up three workflows that build on a windows, mac, and linux image, store the results in temporary storage, with a release workflow that grabs the binaries from storage and packs them up as a binaries + source release.
fintechie 9 hours ago||
Aren't SOTA models doing this for few cents already? at least when I tell Claude to add a systems draw or arch flow to a README.md he'll do it quickly.
cadamsdotcom 9 hours ago|
> he’ll do it

Quick note - be careful of gendering & anthropomorphising large language models, since you’re talking to a non-human machine so should be wary of how it can affect your mindset.

Der_Einzige 9 hours ago|||
Anthropic, both in the name, and in their model cards, agressively anthropomorphize their models.

You probably should start doing it. Ghost in the Shell is about super intelligent AI creating a "ghost" (scientifically understood version of the soul) out of thin air. I believe such a thing is possible. The same movie literally predicted model merging (the end of the film the AI model merges with the major) to a tee.

Further, the appearance of sentience/cognition/consciousness might as well be identical to actual sentience/cognition/consciousness. That is to say, we can't know if you're a P-zombie or not. Bladerunner and most other cyberpunk stuff is coming and gonna hit you and every other AI-denialist in the face. The Von-Kampf test is absurd and pretty bad (inaccurate) in their universe for a reason.

I tell my LLM it's a good bot and thank it, because even a tiny risk of subjective qualia experienced by a model (and again, Anthropic themselves believe in this exact risk) means I should treat it like a quasi-ethical actor.

This is also a reason why the robot torture scene in empire strikes back could be a real dynamic in the future.

pizza 7 hours ago||
The possibility of intelligent machines undergoing transformative regeneration actually dates back to a party hosted by one Charles Babbage where, in attendance, was one Charles Darwin, who only thereafter published On the Origin of Species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage%2527s_Saturday...

latchkey 9 hours ago|||
Oh come on, what is this. Affect my mindset how exactly?
worldsayshi 13 hours ago||
I like it! I really like that the lines stick to the boxes but it's a bit hard to make them stick.
aanet 13 hours ago||
Looks fab. Great design.

Can it make polygons? Basically, shapes other than rectangles? If so, how? (maybe I missed it?)

bargainbin 12 hours ago||
Not the author but I'm making a similar tool currently, and the reality is no because of the nature of it being character based.

You can theoretically have "artistic" polygons where it renders using a mixture of characters to emulate how that grid would be filled if a certain shaped was laid over it but the end result wouldn't be very functional for the purposes of diagramming.

spockz 7 hours ago||
If we have syntax highlighting build into the TrueType font, can’t we also get sticky lines with the same mechanism? It would then only work with the right font obviously.
ftr1200 7 hours ago|||
https://cascii.app can :)
baalimago 12 hours ago||
It's not an ascii renderer, but a ascii diagram drawing tool
mihaela 7 hours ago|
I love Monodraw, and use it every week
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