[HN Gopher] Textart.sh
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       Textart.sh
        
       Author : bicebird
       Score  : 209 points
       Date   : 2024-01-20 01:12 UTC (21 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (textart.sh)
 (TXT) w3m dump (textart.sh)
        
       | bicebird wrote:
       | Found the site when looking for ascii art to add to a server motd
       | and wondered if anyone had any information about it? All I can
       | find when searching is references to people using it in projects,
       | but no background or community.
       | 
       | Has a pretty amazing number of categories / artworks, and some of
       | them are genuinely beautiful. It feels very old internet but the
       | domain was registered in 2018, although could have been migrated?
       | 
       | Almost happy for it to stay a mystery but on the off chance the
       | maintainer(s) see this thank you for adding a bit of brightness
       | to the world :)
        
         | qup wrote:
         | Some of the entries I ran across made me feel like it was
         | automated. They weren't really art, they were photos with words
         | in them etc.
         | 
         | I think it's scraping images somewhere and processing them
         | automatically.
        
           | SuperNinKenDo wrote:
           | There's certainly some automated conversiom happening at some
           | point in the process, either it's scraping resources that
           | include automated renders, or else it's doing them itself.
           | 
           | Lots of unreadable or very suboptimally rendered text within
           | images that you just wouldn't do like that even if you were
           | copying from an existing image.
           | 
           | Makes me wonder if the upvote/downvote mechanism is feeding
           | into some machine learning.
           | 
           | However, some images do convert pretty well, and if the
           | up/down voting mechanism reflects in what gets listed on what
           | order, then it could become a cool little resource.
           | 
           | Kinda ruins the old-internet charm of the text art though.
        
             | vages wrote:
             | The entries seem to go on forever, although with some
             | repetition. No way the images could be handmade.
        
               | debesyla wrote:
               | And some of the entries even have "shutterstock"
               | watermark on top, like in the
               | https://textart.sh/topic/gasoline category.
        
       | ssl-3 wrote:
       | Nice, but since each pixel consists of a solid-filled greyscale
       | rectangle (or emojis, I guess?) and doesn't take advantage of the
       | shapes of characters, the resolution seems limited compared to
       | the ASCII art of yore (or even the output of aalib).
       | 
       | It also doesn't have any Dickbutt images and this is a crime
       | against Dickbutt.
        
         | technophiliac wrote:
         | No goatse, either :(
        
         | kang wrote:
         | 9th image on topic peen is currently dickbutt
        
       | gmerc wrote:
       | I was expecting AI but was positively surprised
        
       | charcircuit wrote:
       | These are all machines generated from normal photos without any
       | regard if the output looks good. You can even see shutterstock
       | watermarks in some.
       | 
       | Take a look at a site like https://aahub.org/ if you want to see
       | some examples of proper text art.
        
       | russfink wrote:
       | What is the license on any of these?
        
       | 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
       | Every one I tried returned a disclaimer something like, "While
       | technically this is not [whatever] ASCII art because it uses
       | Unicode characters ..."
       | 
       | This suggests some folks are expecting ASCII art.
       | 
       | Perhaps this website should be "unicodeart.sh" instead
       | "textart.sh"
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | Doesn't seem to use the full unicode set either.
        
       | DanAtC wrote:
       | http://www.asciiartfarts.com/keyword.html
        
       | WaffleIronMaker wrote:
       | Here's a more curated and human-made ASCII version:
       | 
       | https://ascii.co.uk/art
        
         | Juraph wrote:
         | THIS is the kind of thing I was expecting when I clicked on the
         | parent link, ASCII art, instead of computer converted images.
         | While there is nothing wrong with rasterising an image to
         | ASCII, there is something I really love about the hand drawn
         | stuff. Especially the early ones where the 'canvas' size was so
         | limited, it forced such creativity.
        
       | methou wrote:
       | Back in 2000s when telnet BBS' are huge, you can fit in a lot of
       | things in a 80x24 screen. Sadly they are slowly dying out. I'm
       | not sure how many of them are left in the English world, but at
       | least in the Chinese world ptt.cc is still alive.
       | 
       | Here's an example of experience with ASCIIArt/ANSIArt[0], when
       | using telnet based forums:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-ohV6KZsQo
       | 
       | There's also a ANSIArt version of star war,
       | https://www.asciimation.co.nz/ , it used to be a telnet site, but
       | nowadays no one even have the binary to telnet from.
        
       | skenderbeu wrote:
       | We need an LLM model for this.
        
       | npilk wrote:
       | These must be computer-generated - the third image under 'goose'
       | has a Shutterstock watermark (oops):
       | https://textart.sh/topic/goose
        
       | hombre_fatal wrote:
       | this site really needs to prune its image-to-text generated crap.
        
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       (page generated 2024-01-20 23:01 UTC)