Show HN: An interactive physics simulator with 1000’s of balls, in your terminal

(github.com)

75 points by minimaxir18 days ago

8 comments

noduerme18 days ago
The choice of Braille is very clever. I once failed a typography class for using Braille in a final design project that was supposed to create a sequence of images representing a visual story out of pure typography. This followed a 30 minute long argument with the professor during critique in which he asserted that Braille was not type. I countered that it was. It's charming to see it employed in this way.
- minimaxir18 days ago
 The Braille trick has been used for ASCII art for awhile. In this case, I was more interested in it for subcharacter rendering of balls.
 - noduerme18 days ago
 I didn't realize that, haven't thought about ASCII/ANSI art since the 90s, but the concept of using it for subcharacter animation is clever. Cheers.[edit] Odd question. I have relatives in the Bay Area who I think spelled their name Wolfe. Their patriarch was named Eliot and survived Auschwitz. Any relation?
 - minimaxir17 days ago
 I'm from the East Coast.
nebezb18 days ago
Reading your workflow described in PROMPTS.md was insightful. I appreciate how much thought goes into each follow-up, including the manual steps after each invocation.
- minimaxir18 days ago
 The prompts turned out significantly better this time!
 - alook18 days ago
 I just wanted to chime in and thank you for sharing your prompts like that!It feels like which prompts people are using (even from developers on the same team) is often opaque. It's a great learning resource for people to see under the hood of each other's AI coding workflows, and I hope to see more folks doing this.(Link for anyone who wants to check them out): <a href="https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md</a>
allenu18 days ago
The effect reminds me of the classic Fishtro demo by Future Crew from 1992: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUjRpLn2qWo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUjRpLn2qWo</a>
- catoc17 days ago
 I remember that demo - thanks for the nostalgic flash back!
xyzsparetimexyz17 days ago
Thanks for mentioning that this was ai coded but please put it further up in the description. Makes it easier to avoid projects like these. Thanks.
mhuffman18 days ago
Claude, slopcode me an Omarchy screensaver using this. Make it so!
- minimaxir18 days ago
 Incidentally I was thinking about adding some automated physics events so it could be viewed passively.Likely not a computationally efficient screensaver, though.
nvader18 days ago
Now, this makes me think of a thing I never knew I wanted: Plasma Pong, but in the terminal.
hulitu17 days ago
> For terminal compatability and accessibility reasons, Color Mode is disabled by defaultNow i get it. Colors make UI inaccessible. So that's why Windows is Gray on Gray. And why the color icons were replaced with Gray on Gray icons.Until now i regarded my above sentence as satire but, i need to face the reality. /s
- minimaxir17 days ago
 The color contrast between the ANSI colors and the terminal backgrounds for some terminals make it so the colors are hard to see.
tempaccountabcd18 days ago
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