[HN Gopher] Each visit to the page deteriorates the main image
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       Each visit to the page deteriorates the main image
        
       Author : badorg
       Score  : 162 points
       Date   : 2022-11-11 21:10 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (crowd-jpeg.vercel.app)
 (TXT) w3m dump (crowd-jpeg.vercel.app)
        
       | sebmellen wrote:
       | Reloading this page every few seconds contextualizes how massive
       | the traffic on a top HN post is/can be.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | pvg wrote:
         | It's a couple dozen rps and that's with a page that's actively
         | begging to be reloaded. It's not nothing but as traffic spigots
         | go, it's not that much even for a small single-person-hosting-
         | a-thing kind of project.
         | 
         | If you look at things that get overwhelmed by HN, more often
         | than not they get fixed pretty quickly as the authors figure
         | out they've missed something relatively straightforward that's
         | response-murdering.
        
       | ericmcer wrote:
       | I figured you would start with something better than a 300kb jpeg
       | that already looks pretty bad in my 900x800 viewport
        
       | cableshaft wrote:
       | I had an idea to do something similar to this but with a story,
       | where a random text character would be garbled (or maybe deleted)
       | with every visit.
       | 
       | I wasn't sure how best to handle that on the backend side, not
       | really something I've ever had to do before. Especially dealing
       | with (possibly) full text fields and a bunch of people hitting up
       | the website in a short period of time, possibly thousands at a
       | time.
       | 
       | I could have just recorded visit counts, and have it randomly
       | generate on the client side based on the visit count, but I
       | wanted to keep it persistent for all viewers.
        
         | bo0tzz wrote:
         | Have you tried just doing it the naive way? Databases are
         | damned fast, and actually hitting pageview counts of "thousands
         | at a time" is pretty unlikely (it seems like being on the HN
         | front page gets you about 10 hits per second at peak).
        
         | taftster wrote:
         | Or maybe the opposite, where the story unscrambles with each
         | visit. Either direction could be kind of interesting.
         | 
         | Like imagine a murder-mystery game, of sorts. The story gives
         | more clues as each guess to solve the murder goes unanswered.
         | Or a choose your own adventure type scenario, where the
         | directions are "chosen" by some visit.
         | 
         | Interactive story telling on the massively-multiplayer scale
         | could be really interesting.
        
         | dgoldstein0 wrote:
         | Why does it need to be random? Pseudo random with a fixed seed
         | would give you random looking deterministic numbers
        
       | Konohamaru wrote:
       | Deep Fried Page
        
       | Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL wrote:
       | reminded me of (albeit a bit of a different concept):
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
       | 
       | > The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text,
       | and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-
       | recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-
       | recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's
       | particular size and geometry, certain frequencies of the
       | recording are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually
       | the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic
       | resonant frequencies of the room itself.
       | 
       | performance recording:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhtO4DsSazc
        
         | TonyTrapp wrote:
         | The experiment has also been brought to the 21st century and
         | its video and audio codecs:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icruGcSsPp0 - uploading a video
         | 1000 times to YouTube.
        
       | throwup wrote:
       | I refreshed the page after 60 seconds to estimate how many people
       | are clicking, and it came to 4.9 requests per second. All of a
       | sudden I don't have as much sympathy for HN knocking someone's
       | site offline when it's just a static blog filled with text.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | arjvik wrote:
         | Refreshing every second and mentally averaging, I'm getting
         | closer to 15-20 requests per second. But yes, only a badly
         | designed static site should be crashing under that load (unless
         | it's on a residential connection, perhaps it's ISP rate
         | limiting?)
        
         | codazoda wrote:
         | Yeah, it's no big deal for static content. My little Raspberry
         | Pi had no trouble with it even though it uses a SQLite DB.
         | 
         | https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...
         | 
         | Granted, it was a Sunday.
        
         | gus_massa wrote:
         | As a rule of thumb, if the post get N upvotes, you get 100N+50
         | visits. YYMV.
         | 
         | The post has now 76 points in 40 minutes, so an average of
         | (76*100+50)/40/60 ~= 3.2 that is close to your 4.9. But the
         | peak may be much higher, like the 20/s reported by other users.
        
         | datalopers wrote:
         | HN volume is pretty weak tbh. Web devs are just getting worse.
        
           | taspeotis wrote:
           | Pretty easy problem to solve too - just scale up the static
           | asset Kubernetes cluster!?
        
         | squeaky-clean wrote:
         | I'm seeing about 20 per second by doing the same method. Still
         | nothing crazy, but it probably needs a bit more time at the top
         | of HN
        
           | marcus_cemes wrote:
           | Probably more to do with the fact that people are mashing F5
           | to see the difference.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | notahacker wrote:
       | It's like Stable Diffusion in reverse
       | 
       | (you could probably actually set Stable Diffusion up to iterate
       | towards a new refinement of an image each time a webpage gets a
       | new unique visitor...)
        
       | majikandy wrote:
       | Haven't had this much fun since last Saturday morning pressing
       | refresh for Glastonbury tickets.
        
       | xwowsersx wrote:
       | Let's destroy it!
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | KyleBerezin wrote:
       | I wonder what cases it to seem like it is zooming in.
        
         | drewtato wrote:
         | There's a 1.5% chance for the image to be 4 pixels wider and
         | taller than usual, so that's probably moving things around.
         | 
         | https://github.com/kumpmati/crowd-jpeg/blob/main/api/src/ser...
        
         | Ptchd wrote:
         | if someone cropped the jpeg you sent them
        
       | badorg wrote:
       | https://github.com/kumpmati/crowd-jpeg
        
         | nuccy wrote:
         | > Made using SvelteKit + MongoDB and deployed to Vercel
         | (frontend) and AWS (backend).
         | 
         | Sounds complicated. Isn't just a static html file on SSD +
         | webpage on php/js backend with sqlite or even without, just
         | grepping logs via cron do the trick?
         | 
         | Having jpg caching nginx as a front-end would handle the load
         | even of HN top page.
        
       | Ptchd wrote:
       | That's what it means in some cases to share jpgs (if you don't
       | always share the original for one reason or another).
        
       | imwillofficial wrote:
       | ::refreshes page 100 times::
       | 
       | Buahahahahahahah
        
       | noasaservice wrote:
       | Is this some NFT stunt?
        
         | kevinh wrote:
         | From the website:
         | 
         | > You could see this website as a metaphor for the effects of
         | tourism, how humanity affects nature, or how meme quality
         | degrades over time as they are shared.
        
           | noasaservice wrote:
           | From a mobile view, that is nowhere evident. I only had the
           | URL and the title to see if anything made sense.
           | 
           | Given the hypercapitalist point of view here, I figured it
           | was some auto-degrading NFT.
        
           | throwaway888abc wrote:
           | Came to comment with same quote. It's really touching
           | parallel and the degraded image give it weight. Kudos to OP
        
             | throwup wrote:
             | Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but pixels.
        
       | system2 wrote:
       | CTRL + R my friends.
        
       | KyleBerezin wrote:
       | There is a album made from the deterioration of loop tapes,
       | corroding more each time the read head passes over the tape.
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Disintegration_Loops
       | 
       | The track "dlp 4" is a pretty good example of this, it can be
       | found on youtube for the curious.
        
         | KyleBerezin wrote:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J46cFYqtiYQ video of dlp 4
        
         | zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
         | Thank you for posting this. I'm excited to check it out.
         | Hainbach's videos introduced me to this concept and I had no
         | idea it was something that had been done before.
        
       | Daub wrote:
       | I like the implied idea of a fragile internet.
       | 
       | It reminds me of Sampson by Chris Burden. Each visitor to the art
       | gallery pushed a pair of giant pistons further towards the point
       | they would collapse the gallery walls.
       | 
       | https://publicdelivery.org/chris-burden-samson/
        
       | davidhyde wrote:
       | I'm excited to see who the tree eventually turns into.
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-11 23:00 UTC)