The electric sheep always intrigued me so much! but was a bit before my time, and also felt so impenetrable. I appreciate you drawing the link between them and something like this which is so finite and understandable.

and to OP for making something so finite and understandable ofc.

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neomantra 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Porting the ElectricSheep AfterEffects Plugin from Windows to OSX was my true first open source contribution (1999?). And that only happened because my friend was friends with its author and it came up when he was showing off some fractals movies. Then I said, “Oh I can help you with that.”

That OSS plugin itself was riding on the OSS ElectricSheep. All collaboration and distribution was via tarballs, although is on GitHub now. It was a trip seeing some code I wrangled make its way into commercial media, just organically.

The ElectricSheep project weaves so many cool tech threads together. Only thing is was missing compared to modernity is decentralized genome propagation.

Scott Draves, its author, has some great artist content too. He also spearheaded Polyglot notebooks, early on in that kind of interface.

	▲	azath92 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think the depth (in time, and community involvement) is one of the things that has drawn me to this project. It has the excellent vibe of a dedicated and yet accessible, IMO because of the beautiful and widely available visual output, internet community. Thanks for sharing some of this rich history!

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monster_truck 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Electric Sheep still works great to this day. The lifetime membership is worth it if you want nice enough sheep with 0 effort, but there are countless HD packs on archiveorg and elsewhere

	▲	azath92 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		cool to hear that the actual electric sheep project is still something you can interact with! For those super new to it (like me), check out https://electricsheep.org/ og video we came across it with https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5RdMvgk8b0 (this was just the first I found when looking there are many on youtube) and the algorithm behind it https://flam3.com/ This is all AFAICT as someone who's only just skimmed the surface, but i find it amazing.