This sent me on a one hour long rabbit hole that ended with two guys building a Sierpinski triangle with recursive PowerPoint presentations

https://youtu.be/b-Fa6HtvGtQ?si=LpQszgA9_K-m3V3-

Discussion (209 points, 6 days ago, 34 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173962

Some other time, I really thought that a 32 byte demo I saw is the limit of how small the binary can get and still look good.

That other demo didn't even have sound.

This is hell of a good work. A masterpiece to retire after. (or more realistically, chase it on other architectures)

One of the linked demos, "rainbow surf", got me hypnotized. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKLhH_ANwIc

Definitely thought this was a 16b parameter llm, not a 16 byte demo.

I'm really impressed. Those are the things that made me love programming and computing. It's all so beautiful, it's TRULY art. It's a shame that in the industry we don't usually have the opportunities to make something like that, with AIs and all that...

I swear watching this kind of projects occasionally is the only thing keeping me from dropping tech and going to work as a mailman or something.

i can barely accept this is possible

There are only 2^128 of such demos. How much of those are valid DOS programs? If we narrow it down to ones that generate both video and sound, I guess there are much less, which should motivate more people to try and find one :)

Makes me wonder how many bytes the shortest possible Mandelbrot implementation would need.