Over Engineered

00:07.23
Chris Morrell
All right, welcome back to another episode of Overengineered, the podcast where we ask the question, what's the absolute best way to do things we already have a perfectly acceptable solution for?

00:18.92
Chris Morrell
i am here today with my friends, Ben Holman and Joe Tenenbaum, and we are going to talking a little bit about this kind of crazy thing that Ben did ah called the kilopixel display.

00:32.26
Chris Morrell
ah Ben and I talked about it. ages ago. I don't even remember how long it's been, but it was a long time ago.

00:36.01
Ben Holmen
I think it almost a year. I probably about a year.

00:38.64
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:39.55
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

00:40.58
Chris Morrell
And then I know ah Ben, you and Joe talked about it on side projects. um And it's, it's been out in the world, but now, now it actually happened. And it was like such a joyful thing to be a part of. And we were just hoping to like sit down and and talk a little bit about it in one, like, and now that season one is over.

01:04.31
Chris Morrell
So i guess before we get started, both of you have been on the podcast before, but you want to just do quick intro to say hi ah before we go further.

01:04.98
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

01:12.57
Ben Holmen
Sure. I'm Joe Tannenbaum. I work for Laravel.

01:14.70
Chris Morrell
your own island, you

01:15.36
Ben Holmen
I do some terminal stuff. No, I'm Ben Holman.

01:18.37
Joe Tannenbaum
um i No, no, no, no.

01:18.47
Ben Holmen
ah

01:19.89
Joe Tannenbaum
I'm Ben Holman. And ah you're lucky you got me as a guest at this point.

01:21.24
Chris Morrell
know.

01:24.09
Joe Tannenbaum
I'm so internet famous. i'm I'm totally booked and you should be grateful.

01:29.49
Chris Morrell
on your own island you know

01:31.71
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, for real.

01:31.88
Ben Holmen
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

01:33.96
Chris Morrell
Thank you.

01:34.15
Ben Holmen
Yeah, this feels like a full circle moment because last year, independently, I went and talked to both you on your podcasts. And ah that was a real kick in the pants to like ship this thing and figure some things out.

01:46.33
Ben Holmen
had been just paused on it like you do with any side project, especially those that only cost money and don't ever hope to like turn into a business.

01:54.66
Chris Morrell
but

01:56.75
Ben Holmen
ah And chatting with both of you is very inspiring. So I am really glad that we can like come back after it's wrapped up or at least the this this edition of the kilo pixels wrapped up so to set the stage a little bit for anyone who wasn't around for it uh no fault there but i built a very impractical slow moving slowly updating thousand pixel display so you can draw you can draw on a grid that's 40 by 25 And it turns a single pixel at a time. So instead of like refreshing at 120 times per second, a million pixels, whatever your phone or your your laptop is doing, this'll do like one pixel every five or six seconds or so.

02:42.58
Ben Holmen
So it's like millihertz refresh rates basically. uh so it's a wildly like ridiculous thing to build when i talked to the two of you i didn't really have a like ah it was a totally different version of the project i was doing like round balls and chris i think you and i talked about like illuminated switches that you can poke and turn on and off that kind of thing um and then i left those conversations feeling like i gotta i gotta actually finish this like i've got

02:48.85
Joe Tannenbaum
Thank you.

02:58.30
Chris Morrell
okay

03:03.33
Chris Morrell
Yep. yep

03:12.86
Ben Holmen
a lot done. I got ship the thing. So since those conversations last year, I just kept picking on it, totally rebuilt the web app, um came up with a totally new pixel design, um like what the thing is actually built out of.

03:27.18
Ben Holmen
And then I went and made a thousand of them and did a bunch of prototyping work and got it out on the internet, which was which was the real, ah like the the end goal was to get it out in the world so people can play with it.

03:42.70
Chris Morrell
Yeah, and I mean...

03:42.86
Joe Tannenbaum
I got to say it's it's moving around behind you. It's got a real sort of ominous lurking energy um as it's moving around in in and poking pixels.

03:49.99
Ben Holmen
This is...

03:52.64
Joe Tannenbaum
It's like, oh, at any time they could just sort of like snap off the wall and just grab Ben or something. that I don't know It just feels feel ominous back there, but it's also beautiful.

03:59.52
Ben Holmen
I'm not sure what this one's designing, but there is one that kind of feels like a little bit of a void. Someone designed something that feels like ah like a hole or something collapsing in on itself. And that's being drawn behind me, I think.

04:09.44
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh.

04:11.09
Ben Holmen
Right now, so to jump ahead a little bit, I let anyone in the internet on the internet like submit something to be drawn here. And I got, i don't remember the the exact number, but somewhere in the range of hundreds of submissions.

04:24.59
Ben Holmen
And they each took about 40 minutes to be drawn. So that took about a week and a half to make it down to the bottom of the queue, basically. And now I've moved it.

04:35.48
Ben Holmen
When it was streaming, i didn't dare put it behind me, like at my day job.

04:40.48
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

04:40.53
Ben Holmen
just in case something slipped through, you know? ah

04:43.15
Joe Tannenbaum
Strong.

04:43.65
Ben Holmen
But now that it's no longer live streaming, I'm not accepting submissions for it. um I have it just cycling through some of my favorites. So I picked like a subset of all that were submitted and it just draws one and then picks another one.

04:56.54
Ben Holmen
And it's kind of fun to not really know what it's going to draw next, but to like recognize them once they start to appear.

05:00.02
Joe Tannenbaum
so cool.

05:03.89
Chris Morrell
That's very fun.

05:05.47
Joe Tannenbaum
Okay, so to back up a little bit, um you finished it and then you were like, okay, you we we have a little chat and you kind of put in the chat, like, I i want to and want to push this thing.

05:10.08
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm.

05:16.13
Joe Tannenbaum
i want to make it happen. I want to see you know what happens when the internet gets its it's grubby little hands on it.

05:20.48
Ben Holmen
yeah

05:21.45
Joe Tannenbaum
And I want to make it, you kind of you said, I want to make it like big. I want to make a splash with it. you know I put a lot of effort in. i I would like at least a sort of like social return on the effort, if anything.

05:27.64
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

05:31.27
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, that's not what you said, but that's what I'm deriving from what you said.

05:32.49
Ben Holmen
Yeah. yeah Yeah. I was looking for payoff for sure.

05:34.54
Joe Tannenbaum
Which is valid. Yeah, yeah.

05:35.91
Ben Holmen
Like I talked to a lot of people over the last six years about this thing and it was pretty universally like, yeah, I get it.

05:37.31
Chris Morrell
thanks

05:43.09
Ben Holmen
That's cool. I, yeah, I want to see that thing. And my original concept was just having it in a coffee shop so a few people could see it.

05:46.43
Joe Tannenbaum
Right.

05:51.55
Ben Holmen
But our conversations last year kind of sparked like, well, how could I put this on the internet and like keep it safe or make it interesting? There are some really weird constraints with like basically one person's running it at once for 40 minutes. So if you submit something, it's not going to be drawn for maybe days.

06:10.59
Ben Holmen
And then at the same time, I couldn't just let everyone work on it at once, like an R place or a million checkboxes thing where too too many people are trying to control it.

06:14.24
Chris Morrell
technically

06:20.03
Ben Holmen
And so nobody gets the satisfaction out of it. Like it just turns into a mess and no one can accomplish something.

06:22.93
Joe Tannenbaum
Right.

06:26.64
Ben Holmen
So there was a lot of tension there. Where I landed on it is I live streamed it and I had two views of it. You can find this on YouTube, a broad view where you could see the entire display.

06:39.01
Ben Holmen
And then a close-up of the actual mechanism that's turning these wooden blocks that form each pixel, um which is very satisfying to watch, actually. It turns out it's kind of like an ASMR sort of ambient background display to have going.

06:53.41
Ben Holmen
I got comments from folks who just said, hey, I love watching this in the background. Like, it's fun to leave it going, which was a little wild to me.

06:59.83
Chris Morrell
be

07:01.31
Ben Holmen
So I had a live streaming setup.

07:01.46
Chris Morrell
That is my only that's my only complaint, is that the the one day that you put the audio on, it was so good.

07:01.69
Joe Tannenbaum
That's great.

07:08.73
Chris Morrell
The fact that i I totally get why you can't do it, but it was just like so much more satisfying to just like hear the little motor running and hear the little pokes happening.

07:12.08
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

07:17.08
Ben Holmen
Yeah. it It is, and it makes a little click.

07:19.69
Chris Morrell
It was fantastic.

07:20.59
Ben Holmen
and

07:21.73
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

07:22.81
Ben Holmen
I turned the audio on for Chris for like 20 minutes when I didn't have a meeting going on, but I couldn't have like a one-on-one call with someone and then be streaming that.

07:25.50
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

07:31.30
Ben Holmen
Like if you turn your speakers way up, you could hear what was going on in my office. ah But it does make a satisfying sound.

07:36.27
Joe Tannenbaum
Okay, so so you put out a blog post.

07:38.67
Ben Holmen
So I was live streaming,

07:39.45
Joe Tannenbaum
That was the mechanism. Oh, yeah, okay.

07:42.00
Ben Holmen
ah Yeah, I'll get to the blog post. ah

07:43.97
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, not there yet.

07:44.20
Ben Holmen
I was live streaming, but then I also was cutting time lapses and uploading them to Blue Sky and posting them to the website as well. So people like we handled that leg of I submit it on Monday morning and it's not going to be drawn until Tuesday afternoon.

07:58.43
Ben Holmen
um There was like some feedback in that loop. And people got really excited when they could like watch their thing being drawn on the live stream like that totally worked. So you're right. I did want, i did want it to hit.

08:12.99
Ben Holmen
Like I had a sense from talking to people that it was going to hit. Um, and I knew that I would need something to share. Like I would need a really kick-ass blog post about all the things I'd gone through.

08:27.78
Ben Holmen
And I'll tell you what, I have so much appreciation for creators who can like do a complex project and then like film it and then tell a narrative through it and all that. That's like a whole different project.

08:38.27
Chris Morrell
yeah

08:38.66
Ben Holmen
And by the end, i just wanted to ship this.

08:40.47
Chris Morrell
you.

08:41.45
Ben Holmen
I didn't want to think about all the steps. I didn't want to create a narrative. I didn't want to. copy images and go back in my photo roll four years looking for something that would illustrate a point. Like it was exhausting, but I knew i needed to do that to have it hit, that people would respond really strongly to my struggle through this project that didn't even need to exist.

09:06.04
Ben Holmen
um But they would they would really appreciate a narrative in a blog post. And so I knew I had to do it. So i almost said at the last minute, I took a couple of days to write it. um And then i spent, like, I was definitely aiming this for like the Hacker News audience.

09:23.53
Ben Holmen
And I picked Aaron Francis's brain about like, what time of day do you do it at? How do you title it? What's a good headline for this? And there's a specific way of like, you go to show HN first, and then if it gets picked up there, you'll head to the home, the front page of of Hacker News.

09:40.15
Ben Holmen
And my my ambition was front page of Hacker News. That would have felt like, got it. And it hit there.

09:47.71
Joe Tannenbaum
And did you surpass your ambition, Ben?

09:49.30
Chris Morrell
so

09:49.71
Ben Holmen
I did surpass my ambition.

09:50.00
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah,

09:54.07
Ben Holmen
so i I haven't been this nervous in a while, actually. I was kind of surprised at how much I didn't want to put this in the world at the very last moment. I didn't want to like find out, maybe, like is it going to hit or not?

10:09.96
Ben Holmen
Or I wasn't sure what the reception would be like. like Hacker News can be a little... like It has a reputation for tearing people apart.

10:14.71
Chris Morrell
Little scary.

10:15.99
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah.

10:16.34
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

10:16.60
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

10:16.78
Ben Holmen
um I was also worried about the thing breaking and not having bandwidth to fix it. And I was like trying to fit this into my personal life. Like I have a day job.

10:25.78
Joe Tannenbaum
Hmm.

10:26.83
Ben Holmen
It's by its nature, like a 24 seven thing. So if I have three hours of meetings, it's going to be broken for three hours.

10:29.99
Chris Morrell
Well, it was also,

10:33.41
Ben Holmen
So

10:33.58
Chris Morrell
it was also happening right around Laracon, right? You're, you're traveling to Denver for Laracon and like days before that you were like finishing things up.

10:36.94
Ben Holmen
yes.

10:39.66
Ben Holmen
Yep.

10:42.80
Ben Holmen
Oh, a hundred percent.

10:42.88
Chris Morrell
So that's a factor as well.

10:44.79
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I did my first streaming. Well, really, I did my first like 1000 pixel draw. And then it worked. And I could hardly believe that it actually worked. Like, I thought he's going to have like a 5% error rate, but 5% error rate on 1000 pixels is 50 pixels.

11:01.21
Ben Holmen
And that would not look right. but I got it. It was like sub 1% error rate and I could, I could fix it. So I actually just started streaming on a whim. Like it actually worked. I'm going to try the streaming now and put it up. And it was really fun to have that to show folks at Laracon.

11:18.53
Ben Holmen
People in our community could like visualize it a little bit better. I cracked open the door a little bit on like, go ahead and draw something. So I had like, And I think this this hack and happened accidentally, but I think it was really good to hit Hacker News with a queue of about 20 things that were drawing.

11:36.03
Joe Tannenbaum
Right. You some stuff in the hopper already.

11:37.01
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

11:37.52
Ben Holmen
Right.

11:37.65
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

11:37.80
Ben Holmen
And that just happened serendipitously by me like sharing it with some friends.

11:38.16
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

11:42.28
Ben Holmen
And so there were some things from like a week or two ah in advance of the launch that were like ready to go.

11:49.29
Chris Morrell
Yeah, I was gonna say, before we get to the Hacker News launch, can we like go back two steps? Because I feel like there, it it feels to me like this story has two other pieces. that That's one of them i is, you know, that there's this moment when you were like,

12:05.21
Chris Morrell
Guys, this is actually working. Joe accidentally publishes the URL to the web.

12:12.22
Joe Tannenbaum
Okay, okay, okay, okay. Let me just say about that. i said, let me know.

12:16.64
Chris Morrell
You and did specifically say yes.

12:18.52
Joe Tannenbaum
I said, verbatim, let me know when I can scream about this.

12:19.75
Chris Morrell
Go ahead.

12:22.47
Joe Tannenbaum
And you said, yeah, scream away. And I went, great. And I put the yeah URL up. The only yeah URL I had and I knew about, it I put up and you were like, dude, that's my private yeah URL.

12:30.43
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

12:31.88
Chris Morrell
yeah

12:32.11
Joe Tannenbaum
And I was like... ah how who Who am I to know? Like, what's going on? So, um yeah, I goofed. But, you know, it was a goof with permission-ish, you know.

12:39.22
Chris Morrell
but

12:41.83
Chris Morrell
And i think it I think it actually was great because it did. it like a A few people who were paying attention got in there, right? You got you started to get...

12:50.15
Joe Tannenbaum
immediate Immediate big retweets, actually, in the five minutes it was up, which is, like, strong, you know.

12:52.62
Chris Morrell
yeah

12:56.98
Chris Morrell
And I think that getting that, like, it was almost like a beta release, right?

12:56.96
Ben Holmen
good release.

13:00.70
Chris Morrell
You, like, got ah handful of people drawing pictures, talking about it a little bit.

13:04.88
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

13:06.58
Chris Morrell
And I think that was great. um But even, like, stepping back from there, i think ah as as this thing became a reality, right, as it went from this is the thing that you're talking about to this is the thing that you can, like, see the light at the end of the tunnel of, right?

13:22.28
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

13:24.65
Chris Morrell
I think it was very interesting, at least for me, to watch you start to figure out what that needed to look like and think about things like the technical limitations, the moderation, um sort of the launch plan.

13:32.14
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

13:38.16
Chris Morrell
I think all of that stuff is also very interesting. i like I don't think we should gloss over it because it's it's kind of... ah it It felt like an important part of the process.

13:49.16
Ben Holmen
yeah

13:49.31
Chris Morrell
um I think particularly like...

13:51.03
Ben Holmen
You cannot just, oh, go ahead.

13:54.19
Chris Morrell
yeah. no go ahead

13:55.88
Ben Holmen
You can't just put stuff out there and think people are going to find it.

13:56.48
Chris Morrell
the

13:59.81
Ben Holmen
And then you have to be ready for like, it's like a empathetic approach to it. Like, how are people going to receive this? How are they going to want to interact with this?

14:09.90
Ben Holmen
How are they going to want to abuse this thing?

14:11.03
Chris Morrell
respect

14:12.46
Ben Holmen
You have to think about humans in all those ways if you want it to work out well.

14:15.51
Chris Morrell
yeah

14:17.94
Ben Holmen
And I find that stuff very fascinating. like what What would be interesting to someone who's never heard of this before? Or what's a hook that they would really be into? How are people going to try to break my voting system?

14:29.69
Ben Holmen
How are people going to try to break my reporting system, which I built? like I originally had a way to take down gross submissions, basically. But I decided that more people would abuse it than use it. So I took that down.

14:42.70
Ben Holmen
um

14:42.81
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

14:43.85
Ben Holmen
But you have to think about all those things. And then, of course, writing the blog post, you absolutely have to be thinking about your audience there and what people are going to respond to. um if is Is this like a tutorial, like you can do this? Or is this like, I'm going to take you on a wild ride that I've been on? That kind of thing. You have to think about that as you're getting ready to put stuff out into the world.

15:04.05
Ben Holmen
And you're absolutely right. That's a totally different mindset to get into. Totally different than like the woodworking or writing cnc code or whatever it is that's a totally different aspect of the project that it wouldn't have been successful without all those things and it is its own like pursuit it's satisfying in its own unique ways

15:24.22
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and I think, um okay.

15:26.11
Joe Tannenbaum
I also think there's a... Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I think that it's going to happen a hundred more times. I appreciate the sort of optimism with which you put it out, meaning like you didn't put a ton of guardrails in place about like image monitoring.

15:39.63
Ben Holmen
yeah

15:41.50
Joe Tannenbaum
you didn't You're just like, you know what? We're going to cross those bridges as we approach them. And like if we need to deal with it, we'll deal with it. And

15:47.61
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

15:48.82
Joe Tannenbaum
It's not the way my i would have put in like all of these like image analysis guardrails and all this crazy stuff, but like it wasn't necessary. You really approached it with a really like lovely optimism about the project.

16:01.33
Joe Tannenbaum
And i think you in in the same way you were like you have to think about this like empathetically, you were like, I think more people are going to find joy than want to abuse this. And that's what ended up happening.

16:11.46
Ben Holmen
yeah

16:12.10
Joe Tannenbaum
and it's really it was ah it was such a lovely thing to watch unfold over the course of like whenever, however long this was a week, week and a half, whatever it was. But um I thought that was great. i really, really liked that.

16:23.41
Chris Morrell
yeah and it's not to say that you didn't think about it.

16:23.43
Ben Holmen
I think that that's my...

16:25.97
Chris Morrell
like I know we we had those conversations and you talked about he talked you know we talked about scale and we talked about moderation, both both of which like could have been things that you way over-engineered ahead of time.

16:26.74
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yep.

16:40.47
Chris Morrell
right I know that like a ah belief system that I have about the world is that fewer people than you expect

16:40.63
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

16:40.96
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Yeah.

16:50.08
Chris Morrell
or most people want to do the right thing and ah you can take advantage of that. ah Some people won't and you have to be realistic about it.

17:00.80
Chris Morrell
But I think a lot of lot of times we sort of overcorrect.

17:06.25
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

17:06.34
Chris Morrell
um And that was kind of my perspective that I brought to brought to that conversation. i'm I'm glad to see that I didn't totally screw you over with it.

17:15.53
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

17:17.07
Chris Morrell
um

17:17.16
Ben Holmen
Okay. My dad should pull it with that one.

17:20.83
Chris Morrell
but um Yeah,

17:21.13
Ben Holmen
Yeah. I definitely approached it with like, it's going to work out and I know where I'm going to insert controls if it's not.

17:27.41
Chris Morrell
exactly.

17:27.44
Ben Holmen
And I had a few failure modes. I'm like, well, if someone could easily just take a look at what API calls are being made and what my auth is, and then like submit a thousand of the same image.

17:38.41
Ben Holmen
like There were some that could have made for a mess for me, but most of them were just like, I'll just pause the thing or I'll turn off the live stream or whatever.

17:45.56
Chris Morrell
Right, yeah, yeah.

17:46.53
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Right.

17:48.15
Ben Holmen
It also really helped that there was absolutely no money involved. And it's absolutely like almost charming if it breaks. But not like like it's not going to hurt my reputation if this weird thing doesn't work out perfectly.

17:56.19
Chris Morrell
Right.

17:56.34
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Right.

18:00.92
Ben Holmen
And that really took some of the pressure off like it performing perfectly.

18:01.03
Chris Morrell
Right.

18:01.08
Joe Tannenbaum
right

18:04.33
Ben Holmen
And I had like overnight, it pulled out a wire when i was my first night, it managed to unplug one of the motors.

18:10.26
Chris Morrell
ah

18:11.71
Ben Holmen
And so it just slowly, ja it was quitting already.

18:12.46
Joe Tannenbaum
It tried to destroy itself. It was like, I'm so tired. Just give me get me out of here.

18:15.86
Chris Morrell
like so

18:18.17
Ben Holmen
And so like it ruined six or eight submissions. And so I re-queued them the next morning after I fixed it. Or my live stream would have to be restarted periodically.

18:24.19
Joe Tannenbaum
Right.

18:27.16
Ben Holmen
like It's fine. it's It's totally

18:29.06
Chris Morrell
yeah

18:29.12
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

18:29.85
Ben Holmen
And none of that caused the problem.

18:30.25
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

18:31.13
Ben Holmen
Nobody was upset with me. um And it's just kind of expected when you're building something like this.

18:37.99
Chris Morrell
Yeah, so we're like, you're you're talking about it. we're We're having conversation. i'm sure you're talking with other people about like some of these questions. But like you're thinking about scale, you're thinking about it because you're like, I'm going to submit this to Hacker News. Maybe it's going to hit the homepage. That'd be pretty cool.

18:52.46
Ben Holmen
yeah

18:52.55
Chris Morrell
like I need to be prepared. it's It's just running on a digital ocean droplet, right? It's not anything crazy.

18:59.89
Ben Holmen
Yes. So I have a couple of sites on this, nothing wild. um It is just a straight up provision by Forge ah digital ocean droplet. um Do you, do either of you remember how long it took for me submitting it to when it hit number one on Hacker News?

19:17.67
Ben Holmen
Was it like half an hour?

19:18.40
Chris Morrell
I don't.

19:18.56
Joe Tannenbaum
it was not It was not long. It was, I mean, relatively speaking, it was pretty quick. Yeah.

19:23.47
Ben Holmen
It went up real fast.

19:23.72
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

19:25.01
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

19:25.03
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

19:26.03
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

19:26.06
Ben Holmen
So I submitted it. It got a few posts, something like eight or nine votes on show HN and some friendly comments. ah I sent that to to Aaron and he said, yep, you're home free now.

19:39.46
Ben Holmen
It's good.

19:39.92
Chris Morrell
Hmm.

19:40.00
Ben Holmen
It's going to hit the homepage now. Like it just takes a few votes, like more than five ah to like promote it out of show HN.

19:42.62
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh, yeah, he could tell.

19:48.65
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

19:48.79
Ben Holmen
And it's very novel compared to a lot of the like software projects that come through there.

19:49.42
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh.

19:52.98
Ben Holmen
So it had a good shot, of course. um And then it just rocketed up the front page. And I like, I took a screenshot when it hit number one, because I'm like, I can't believe I hit number one on Hacker News.

19:58.97
Joe Tannenbaum
Like so fast.

20:04.81
Ben Holmen
That's like, that's what so many people chase, especially but I have like this, this perverted joy of like, there's so many people who are like trying to buy their way to the top spot, or we're like, they're, they've got whatever multimillion dollar VC backed, like,

20:08.04
Chris Morrell
yeah

20:08.10
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Yeah.

20:17.03
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

20:22.71
Ben Holmen
startup dream that they're like, this is part of a launch plan. We're going to get to the top of Hacker News or whatever. And my project is like, not throwaway, but like, it does, it has no economic value. It is simply just like for the pure silliness and joy of being a weird little human that I'm going to do this stupid project.

20:39.55
Ben Holmen
And it's going to go to that coveted top spot. And I'm not going to do anything with that spot other than just like share this ridiculous thing with the world.

20:49.75
Joe Tannenbaum
You can write a new blog post that said the the key to getting the top spot on Hacker News is to grind on wooden cubes for six straight years.

20:49.82
Ben Holmen
And then it stayed there.

20:56.73
Chris Morrell
exactly

20:57.44
Ben Holmen
There you go.

20:57.52
Joe Tannenbaum
And then and you're like, forget all of those other tactics.

20:58.08
Chris Morrell
ah

20:58.98
Ben Holmen
Get on my level.

21:00.77
Joe Tannenbaum
Like, that's the way you like you get there in 30 minutes.

21:01.10
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yeah.

21:03.05
Joe Tannenbaum
No problem. but

21:03.58
Chris Morrell
please

21:04.15
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

21:05.10
Ben Holmen
That's right. Don't try. No, I think the key is you don't care too hard about it.

21:06.63
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

21:08.37
Ben Holmen
That's the thing.

21:09.02
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

21:09.37
Ben Holmen
ah But I made it, which felt like.

21:10.90
Chris Morrell
But you do have to care some, right?

21:13.26
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

21:13.42
Chris Morrell
It's not that you can't care at all because you you did put a lot of care into it.

21:15.29
Ben Holmen
It wasn't caring that I hit that slot.

21:18.15
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

21:19.26
Ben Holmen
Yeah, that wasn't my ambition was hitting that.

21:19.50
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

21:21.30
Ben Holmen
That was like, I can't believe I made it not just to the homepage, but to the top spot.

21:25.58
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

21:25.61
Ben Holmen
And then the crazy thing is it stayed there for a day. It stayed there.

21:29.93
Joe Tannenbaum
A day.

21:30.05
Ben Holmen
I think it was top spot for 23 hours straight, which I think is the really weird part, not hitting one, but staying at one because there's a lot of churn at the top and it just was pinned there.

21:30.29
Chris Morrell
All day.

21:31.71
Joe Tannenbaum
A day. Yeah.

21:40.37
Chris Morrell
yeah

21:40.71
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

21:42.67
Ben Holmen
So I couldn't believe my like good fortune on that. That really was a generous response. And, and

21:48.69
Joe Tannenbaum
Well, to to to zoom out, though, to zoom out for one second, you you created what is essentially Hacker News Catnip.

21:51.67
Ben Holmen
Yes, sir.

21:55.96
Joe Tannenbaum
You really did. like It's a very...

21:57.26
Ben Holmen
Yeah. it

21:58.13
Joe Tannenbaum
Well, it's it's a genuinely cool project. You physically built it, which makes you already stand out amongst every weird software thing that people try to show on Hacker News. And then there's still a software component. And then you wrote a really compelling journey article about it. It was just like the whole package was just like...

22:18.07
Joe Tannenbaum
How could you and you were live streaming it so it was like a live in the now element to it.

22:20.95
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

22:22.10
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, it was.

22:22.73
Chris Morrell
Was it social element as well?

22:24.68
Joe Tannenbaum
As soon as it hit a hack number one, I was like, this is going to this is going to little bit.

22:25.38
Ben Holmen
Yep.

22:28.64
Joe Tannenbaum
I think it's going stick around for a minute. Like, it but I mean, it was a little more than I thought it was going to be, but it was it was incredible. I mean, a day, a day, man, that's crazy.

22:36.45
Ben Holmen
Yeah. so

22:37.42
Chris Morrell
how How long did it take between ah the Hacker News submission and the first a person reaching out about an article?

22:46.30
Ben Holmen
It was later that afternoon. It was within 24 hours.

22:48.24
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

22:49.31
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

22:49.84
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Yeah. So who who all wrote about it?

22:50.79
Ben Holmen
So I had.

22:53.55
Joe Tannenbaum
Well, no, hope first of all, how did that feel?

22:53.57
Ben Holmen
yeah

22:55.75
Joe Tannenbaum
How how how was that how was that day?

22:56.03
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

22:57.83
Joe Tannenbaum
Like, how were you, how what was your state of mind?

22:59.56
Ben Holmen
Oh, man. So I was, like I said, anxious. I almost didn't want to ship it. But I also needed to get like, I want this to run for about two weeks. And I have like a trip coming at the end of like, what was last weekend, but basically I had 12 days.

23:17.31
Ben Holmen
And I thought, like, maybe I should push it to next week. But then what if it's, like, still going? Like, what if it's still popping off when I'm supposed to leave town? That's not going to feel good. So I didn't have a great situation.

23:29.85
Ben Holmen
It had to be after Laracon. Like, this started the Monday after Laracon. So I had a very limited, like... Very set schedule I needed to land it in. And I wanted to not do it because I didn't feel quite ready.

23:43.76
Ben Holmen
But I knew it was all ready. It was just like my anxiety of like, I want my thing to work.

23:47.08
Chris Morrell
yeah

23:48.04
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

23:48.65
Ben Holmen
You know, I want people to respond to the thing I i made.

23:49.13
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

23:52.73
Ben Holmen
I feel felt like I had one shot to really like make a splash with it.

23:52.83
Joe Tannenbaum
Mm-hmm.

23:57.68
Ben Holmen
um So I started real anxious. I almost didn't do it, but I pushed through that, got it out there. And then once I once i got that message from Aaron, that was like, hey, you you're it's in the bag now.

24:13.20
Ben Holmen
Like, you're off, show I, John. You're headed to the front page. I felt relief. And also the machine was working. Like my traffic was picking up. My server was staying up. Like as time passed, then it was just like playing with house money.

24:28.25
Ben Holmen
Like, okay, i made it to the front page. That's great. My friends are having fun with my thing. That's great. People are sharing it around. That's great. Like I checked off all the boxes of like,

24:40.59
Ben Holmen
the response I was hoping for and like the first hour. what So after that, was just like, this is unbelievable.

24:46.04
Joe Tannenbaum
Unheard of. That's amazing. That's amazing.

24:48.01
Ben Holmen
Like,

24:48.65
Joe Tannenbaum
it's amazing

24:48.73
Chris Morrell
yeah

24:49.92
Ben Holmen
Yeah, so that was the, like, I felt very fortunate oh that so many people have responded because, like, by lunchtime, I was telling Megan, like, I can't believe this. This is nuts. Like, this never happens. And, like, things are working and it's all coming together.

25:04.90
Ben Holmen
So then i was just, like, just pure joy from then on.

25:05.17
Joe Tannenbaum
Wow.

25:08.39
Ben Holmen
ah My boss, I think my boss dropped... ah Look who's on the front page of Hacker News ah post like sometime around bunch. um So my coworkers were in on the fun um of it as well.

25:21.26
Ben Holmen
And people I hadn't heard from in a while were reaching out because of it. and It's just crazy to see that. So I got 63,000 unique visitors on my blog the first day.

25:28.24
Chris Morrell
That's very cool.

25:34.55
Joe Tannenbaum
wow

25:34.61
Ben Holmen
ah The next day was about 60 and a total of 160,000 uniques on my blog, which that's crazy, crazy amounts of traffic for some dude's blog post.

25:41.69
Joe Tannenbaum
That's what's up.

25:42.96
Chris Morrell
wild.

25:43.71
Joe Tannenbaum
That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah.

25:49.10
Ben Holmen
ah

25:49.40
Chris Morrell
that's war held

25:50.38
Ben Holmen
I've never had anything hit. I did a shower manifesto a few years ago. Joe, I think that you've mentioned that's like how you first like got in touch with me.

25:54.77
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh.

25:58.02
Joe Tannenbaum
I that's how you arrived on my radar. Yeah.

26:01.89
Ben Holmen
And that that was somewhere around the the front page of Hacker News.

26:02.06
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

26:05.02
Ben Holmen
I don't know. I was i didn't submit that one. um I just heard like, oh, that was on Hacker News. ah So I don't know if that was the top spot. It drove a lot of people and has led to some really funny conversations. But this was like on a different level than that.

26:19.91
Ben Holmen
ah My blog served 969 gigabytes of traffic. So I almost hit a terabyte. If I look at it now, I might've gone over a terabyte.

26:27.59
Joe Tannenbaum
Wow.

26:27.74
Chris Morrell
Wow.

26:30.15
Ben Holmen
We'll see. That's a lot of like, I had some animated GIFs. So each visitor was hitting like 12 or 14 mags if they scrolled to the bottom. But the fun thing of that is out of those 969 gigs,

26:42.20
Ben Holmen
nine hundred and sixty eight werere served by Cloudflare and my little server didn't have to do anything due to some ah pretty aggressive caching strategies I have on that.

26:46.84
Joe Tannenbaum
like you cloudflare but Thank you, Cloudflare. Cloudflare. Yeah.

26:51.51
Chris Morrell
chris

26:54.88
Ben Holmen
And then the actual kilopixel, so I had, I was sharing a blog post

26:55.20
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

27:00.87
Ben Holmen
And that was typically what was being shared around. Like as it got picked up by other outlets, they were linking to my blog post on benholman.com. But then the actual kilopixel controller sits at kilopx.com.

27:13.37
Ben Holmen
um And that was like secondary. People were definitely reading the blog post and not actually going to the other. So I got a total of 43,000.

27:22.97
Ben Holmen
uh to just break that up that was 160 000 read the blog post 43 000 actually went and looked at the thing and then something like 15 000 views on youtube of the streamer of like the the embedded video that was streaming so

27:39.97
Joe Tannenbaum
Those are very strong numbers. it Those are very good numbers.

27:41.98
Ben Holmen
Very strong numbers.

27:42.89
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

27:43.29
Ben Holmen
That was way more than I was expecting.

27:43.56
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

27:44.89
Ben Holmen
I don't know what, if I had to pick like, how many people do I want to read this on my blog? It would have been in the thousands. Like if I had a 2000 people read my blog post about my project, i have been like, that's great.

27:51.20
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

27:55.97
Ben Holmen
Cool.

27:56.07
Chris Morrell
This is great.

27:56.56
Ben Holmen
Love it.

27:57.24
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

27:58.99
Ben Holmen
So that was wild. ah my The droplet, as we mentioned, that did lock up at one point. I think I probably could have survived if I was a little more conservative and cached more heavily.

28:13.11
Ben Holmen
ah But I was really trying to avoid like not building this thing to be bulletproof. like Just get it out in the world. Don't over-optimize it. And so ah I just doubled the size of the droplet, took advantage of it being offline for a few minutes and just shut it down and resized it, put it back up again, and it was fine.

28:32.33
Ben Holmen
um So the the infrastructure was not much of a worry at all. at The infrastructure wasn't really too much of a worry for me. And that also made it much easier to just enjoy the project.

28:45.50
Chris Morrell
Yeah. Can you talk just real briefly about like how how did that all work?

28:45.82
Ben Holmen
And

28:51.13
Chris Morrell
Like, I know we talked a little bit about like what the game plan was, but like what was the final what was the final like infrastructure layout of how things talk to each other?

28:59.18
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

28:59.57
Chris Morrell
What was running?

29:01.28
Ben Holmen
So it helps if you think of it in three different nodes. ah The first thing is maybe the easiest to understand. That's the actual physical kilopixel that's hanging on the wall.

29:13.74
Ben Holmen
um It is the grid of pixels. And then there is, you can find pictures of this on my blog if you haven't seen it yet. Basically, it's like a 3D printer where I have stepper motors that can move it around to the individual pixel locations.

29:25.86
Ben Holmen
And so to do that, um it has two pieces of, like two types of computers attached to it. It has a CNC controller, which tells the motors, so here's how to do your job.

29:36.79
Ben Holmen
And that's connected by USB to a Raspberry Pi. That Raspberry Pi, is just running in a loop. It runs the setup script first to tell the machine, like, this is how big you are, this is um how many steps per millimeter, that kind of, like, configuration thing.

29:50.65
Chris Morrell
sure

29:51.79
Ben Holmen
But then it runs in a loop and it just says, hey, here's the next pixel. heres Here are some instructions to give the... to the the CNC controller to go to the right location and then to poke that pixel to turn it.

30:05.14
Ben Holmen
And then it goes back to the server and says, all right, I looked at a light sensor and that pixel seems to be off and it's at this X and Y. And then the server stores that to the state and responds with here, go to this pixel next.

30:19.49
Ben Holmen
And it just repeats that. So it gets a fresh set of like, go to this coordinate, go change that pixel and then tell me what the current state is. So there's a little

30:27.61
Chris Morrell
So the the controller at the Raspberry Pi is just like, all it's just a loop that all it does is talk to some other thing that's thinking and just says, here's where I am, tell me what to do next, essentially.

30:36.66
Ben Holmen
Yep.

30:39.54
Ben Holmen
Yep. It's kind of ah a bit of a dumb client. And one of the interesting things about that is it could be talking to anyone.

30:42.28
Chris Morrell
yeah

30:46.06
Ben Holmen
That could be talking to anyone's API, if that makes sense. um But it's talking to my API. So the second aspect of this of this system is my web server running a Laravel app.

30:57.69
Ben Holmen
um That app maintains the current state of the kilopixel of all the thousand pixels. And then it has a ah web app served at kilopix.com, which is a inertia and view app where you can see what other people have submitted.

31:11.73
Ben Holmen
You can create your own submissions and then you can interact with that, like upvoting them up and down the queue ah to decide what should be displayed next. So that's the source of truth of what is the state of the display, and then what should it be?

31:28.54
Ben Holmen
Like, what do we need to change to get it to the desired state, if that makes sense?

31:30.86
Chris Morrell
Thank you.

31:32.89
Ben Holmen
So how this machine has operated is it will draw a picture, and then once it has finished drawing the picture, it will say, what should I draw next, which is the top of the queue, like what's the most voted submission?

31:45.35
Ben Holmen
And then it calculates a diff of those pixels. So like if I have this one picture, then I overlay another one on top of it, which pixels need to change to get me to that location. And so that's typically like 300 to 600 pixels actually need to change from off to on or on to off.

32:03.39
Ben Holmen
And then it just marks all those pixels as pending. It says like this one is off, but it should be on, or this one is on, but it should be off. And then it knows the location of all those pixels and it knows where's the last location of the kilopixel.

32:18.37
Ben Holmen
So if it's working in the top left corner, it can give it a pixel that's nearby to do next. um And then it just feeds them. It does a calculation. Each time the kilopixel asks, it says, what should I do next?

32:30.74
Ben Holmen
It says, all right, here's the next best pixel for you to change and sends that down to the client.

32:35.91
Chris Morrell
And what's kind of fun about that is you, I know over the course of that first week, you talked about like enabling different strategies, right? So like you had this like most efficient strategy, but at some point you're just like, I'm just going to swap that out for pick a random pixel that needs to move.

32:45.48
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm.

32:51.79
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

32:54.14
Joe Tannenbaum
Chaos mode.

32:55.10
Chris Morrell
Yeah, that's very fun.

32:55.07
Ben Holmen
Right, exactly. So I had somebody submit a perfectly on submission, thousand pixels that were all turned on.

32:56.38
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

33:02.76
Ben Holmen
And then someone submitted a thousand pixels all turned off, which is actually, they took a lot of clicking to get that done. So kudos to whoever that was.

33:09.78
Chris Morrell
Ha ha ha ha ha.

33:10.64
Ben Holmen
And I saw, and then someone voted them or collectively, the people voted those two next to each other. So it would have to completely change the state, a thousand pixel diff, which is the only time it happened um over 10 days or so.

33:25.19
Ben Holmen
And so when I saw that coming, I changed it to just pick a random pixel. And it took about two and a half times as long as my like optimal strategy. But it did make for an interesting time lapse.

33:37.82
Ben Holmen
I let that run for just that one, and I changed it back.

33:37.97
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

33:40.36
Ben Holmen
But you could have a lot of fun. um I was talking to Mark Jaquith about this at Laracon beforehand, and he suggested like a spiral pattern, like always start in the middle and work your way out, which would be very satisfying.

33:50.57
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

33:50.68
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh, that's cool.

33:51.17
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

33:51.65
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, like that.

33:51.81
Ben Holmen
um You could pick like the least efficient mode, like what is the maximum travel distance, which is even worse than just random. And then where I landed, which was most aesthetically pleasing, but also relatively efficient, was just like stay pretty close, but tend to go up and down a little bit more than left and right, which the physical limitations of the machine, it just works a little bit.

34:13.29
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh.

34:16.31
Ben Holmen
A little bit better for it to go up and down than left and right. It tends to swing a little bit when it's going left to right um if it's near the bottom. So i I didn't want to do that more than I had to.

34:30.62
Joe Tannenbaum
OK, so you blew up on the Internet. You became Internet famous.

34:33.97
Ben Holmen
Yeah, I think I kind of did.

34:34.97
Joe Tannenbaum
Your whole personality changed. um

34:36.98
Ben Holmen
Oh, yeah, I'm a different man.

34:37.61
Joe Tannenbaum
you You became a real jerk in chat.

34:38.92
Chris Morrell
you

34:39.65
Joe Tannenbaum
um

34:39.66
Chris Morrell
respect ah this is This is the end.

34:39.80
Ben Holmen
i think I've outgrown this friendship. Maybe haven't.

34:42.14
Joe Tannenbaum
I do, but I'm shocked we're talking right now.

34:45.12
Chris Morrell
He's getting his final...

34:46.44
Joe Tannenbaum
i am i am genuinely shocked. um

34:49.26
Ben Holmen
i Honestly, though, you two have been the best like partners on this project.

34:49.38
Joe Tannenbaum
So...

34:52.98
Ben Holmen
like we So we're good friends ah outside of podcasting. We became good friends. Chris, you and I became good friends probably because of that podcast we recorded together last year.

35:02.32
Chris Morrell
I think so, yeah.

35:03.59
Ben Holmen
And we've like we've got a good friendship going, um which I'm very grateful for in general. But I'm particularly grateful for your hype and patience for this project over the last few months because you heard about it more than anybody.

35:16.27
Joe Tannenbaum
Patience.

35:18.44
Ben Holmen
And the number of updates and like, here's a video of it doing something just a little bit more than last time you saw it. the The kinds of updates you guys have tolerated and welcomed ah has been a joy for me.

35:30.23
Ben Holmen
So I just want to call that out publicly.

35:30.67
Chris Morrell
It was a joy for us too. I mean, it was really fun to get behind the scenes, you know?

35:32.52
Ben Holmen
And then once it was live...

35:32.95
Joe Tannenbaum
I'm.

35:36.17
Joe Tannenbaum
I'm also glad you finally acknowledged that we're partners on the KiloPixel and that we did as much work as we did because I really felt like we were out of the narrative and I didn't think that was very fair.

35:39.88
Chris Morrell
if

35:45.44
Ben Holmen
and

35:45.92
Joe Tannenbaum
So, you know, yeah, part of equal partners, the three of us.

35:47.03
Ben Holmen
right well here's the here's the credit equal uh well partners partners but then once it was out

35:48.75
Chris Morrell
you Yeah.

35:50.33
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

35:50.96
Chris Morrell
Right. right

35:51.67
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Equal partners, like we said.

35:54.11
Chris Morrell
I mean, yeah, youre you're, Joe and I probably are a little bit more important, right?

35:54.69
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

35:59.52
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, yeah.

36:01.66
Chris Morrell
you just You just cut the wood. I mean, you know.

36:03.79
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Come on, man.

36:03.96
Ben Holmen
right it's just a thousand pixels it's not that hard and

36:07.58
Chris Morrell
yeah

36:08.76
Ben Holmen
But you two, once it was out, were like the best hype men I could ask for. Chris, I think you drew more on the KiloPixel than anybody. You had some real high quality.

36:17.12
Joe Tannenbaum
Also really well, like, what what is this?

36:18.67
Ben Holmen
Yes.

36:20.92
Joe Tannenbaum
How did you know how to do this?

36:21.34
Ben Holmen
It turns out Chris is really good at pixel art, and I had no idea.

36:24.17
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

36:25.79
Chris Morrell
You know, ah you ah grew up on the internet in the 90s and you get good at pixel art.

36:34.45
Ben Holmen
Well, you have a talent.

36:34.81
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, I did too, but I'm terrible at it. I'm terrible. I know. I was like, so I was so impressed. You were, you were, you were really breaking out some impressive detailed pictures for the canvas that you were provided. I was very, it was awesome.

36:49.15
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

36:49.28
Chris Morrell
It was a blast. I mean, I feel like the the drawing interface that you made was was very um ah intuitive to use. It keyboard mode, which was great.

36:58.32
Ben Holmen
Good.

37:00.88
Chris Morrell
And I ah particularly appreciated that in keyboard mode,

37:01.20
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

37:04.95
Chris Morrell
you could hold space and move the arrow and it would withdraw.

37:09.23
Ben Holmen
yeah

37:10.40
Chris Morrell
So I thought that the the UI was great. And then in addition to that, I mean, i sent you guys the script, but like at one point i was like, all right, I need to, I need to speed myself up. So I wrote a little PHP script that would take a, take a black and white ah image input and print out the JSON representation of that as kilopixel like data.

37:34.95
Ben Holmen
and then And then modify the local storage.

37:34.99
Chris Morrell
And then I would just go into the inspector. Yep. I just go into the web inspector.

37:38.88
Joe Tannenbaum
And this is why we love Chris so much.

37:40.97
Chris Morrell
so But it was very fun.

37:43.99
Ben Holmen
To be clear, I created an image uploader for the rest of the world, but Chris refused to use it.

37:44.24
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

37:50.21
Ben Holmen
He's like, no, I got my system. I just modify my local store.

37:51.78
Chris Morrell
I have, I have.

37:52.53
Ben Holmen
Like, why would I want to do that?

37:53.37
Joe Tannenbaum
i I remember saying, Chris, how are you doing this so fast and so well? And i just we just got like the little simple smiley emoji, just like little. and And then he's like, this is what I'm doing.

38:03.71
Joe Tannenbaum
He sent his script, sent the local storage JSON.

38:06.06
Ben Holmen
Yeah,

38:06.15
Joe Tannenbaum
I was like, ah, you son of a gun.

38:07.22
Ben Holmen
of course. Yeah, Chris.

38:08.77
Joe Tannenbaum
So, okay, we don't have a lot of time here. So I just want to, I want to get to one last piece, which is ah you blew up on the internet. Everybody, you know, see people are reaching out at this point.

38:17.44
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

38:19.13
Joe Tannenbaum
Like you, you got people reaching out, like who are the sort of name drops and people who are some of the people reaching out?

38:24.67
Ben Holmen
Yeah, so the first media outlet was 404 Media, which does great reporting on the internet in general.

38:31.00
Chris Morrell
you

38:31.02
Ben Holmen
I've been following them. So that was fun. Like the first one is somebody I recognized. And then ah the next one was The Register, which I had to read about, it but they're a big deal, which I'll come back to them in a second.

38:42.36
Chris Morrell
yeah

38:42.70
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Right.

38:44.23
Ben Holmen
So they were two that like reached out for comments and had questions about how does it work? What's working? Like, what are you going to do next? Yeah. But then there's the whole secondary market of like the internet sees something and then they write an article about it or link to it, which I was hoping would hit on this.

38:58.95
Ben Holmen
And it totally did. So one that hit early was Tom's hardware, which I definitely have heard of and read. Like people are reading that thing.

39:05.44
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

39:07.15
Chris Morrell
Yes.

39:07.30
Ben Holmen
And ah my uncle, who I had previewed this to like three or four weeks prior, and I got to backtrack sec. My uncle Bruce is the guy that like got me into like writing software.

39:21.60
Ben Holmen
He got me hooked up with Visual Basic 1.0 on a Windows 3 computer.

39:25.15
Joe Tannenbaum
Yes.

39:26.85
Ben Holmen
Like he showed me Linux before I'd ever seen anything. ah So I am deeply indebted to Bruce. ah He had seen this and then on an Android phone, there's a whole pane where Google just shows you articles you may be interested in.

39:42.92
Ben Holmen
Tom's hardware popped up for my uncle Bruce and he's like, that looks like Ben's thing.

39:47.75
Joe Tannenbaum
Yes, dude.

39:47.78
Chris Morrell
ah

39:47.96
Ben Holmen
So it made it through the internet to Tom's hardware and back to my uncle.

39:49.47
Chris Morrell
That's incredible.

39:49.99
Joe Tannenbaum
Wow, full circle. That's incredible.

39:52.92
Chris Morrell
oh

39:52.94
Joe Tannenbaum
Yes. Wow, that's so satisfying.

39:55.27
Ben Holmen
And then ah Boing Boing had it. Adafruit's blog, Adafruit sells some of the things that are sitting on this wall. Like the part of the machines came from Adafruit. So that was fun.

40:08.39
Ben Holmen
um Some other places that like beautiful corners of internet I had not seen before picked it up. um I just had not heard. And they are doing some cool stuff about like just sharing things.

40:20.94
Ben Holmen
um I found out about that because I actually sent to a tip to Jason Kotke at kotke.org. And he has a like, hey, if you're working on something, feel free to send it to me, like brag a little bit.

40:32.79
Ben Holmen
I thought, well, send this to him. um By the way, I won't respond to any emails.

40:34.90
Chris Morrell
So

40:36.56
Ben Holmen
I get too many emails, but I read everything. I'm like, okay, great. I've read Kotki forever, like since he started in the early 2000s or whatever. ah He responded like an hour later, yeah, I saw that on waxy.org and I already have something in the queue for it.

40:51.57
Ben Holmen
i' like, Jason Kotke's seen my thing.

40:52.41
Chris Morrell
cool.

40:53.77
Ben Holmen
ah like i I reached out, but he'd already like had something in his queue, so he published it for me.

40:57.29
Chris Morrell
so cool

40:58.83
Joe Tannenbaum
That's so cool, man.

40:59.10
Ben Holmen
That felt like a real, like, oh, can't believe I'm actually on the thing I've been reading since I was a young man.

41:01.70
Chris Morrell
Thank you.

41:05.37
Ben Holmen
And then in the same way, Hackaday did a feature on it as well.

41:05.86
Joe Tannenbaum
Wow.

41:09.09
Ben Holmen
And this is absolutely inspired by places like Hackaday, or I should say, like the things that have been on Hackaday forever. So there are a number of like outlets like that, that really felt like checking a bucket list item off.

41:23.72
Ben Holmen
Like I didn't think I would ever have something featured on those places, but it felt like such a treat to get there.

41:24.06
Chris Morrell
yeah

41:25.07
Joe Tannenbaum
Absolutely.

41:31.69
Joe Tannenbaum
And you didn't have to do the reaching out. They were like, everyone is happily just sharing it and like grab it, like latching onto it.

41:36.64
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yep.

41:37.94
Joe Tannenbaum
It's amazing.

41:38.29
Ben Holmen
Yep. It's the kind of project they love to share.

41:39.66
Chris Morrell
Including, including there's, there's one person that you haven't mentioned that, that heard about it, going back to the register.

41:46.33
Ben Holmen
Oh yeah. Going back to the register. So ah after I'd shut this down, it's currently not live streaming anymore. I'm like considering it done for season one. I don't know what I'll do next. So it's done, but the reporter who had reached out from the register and, and we'd emailed back him for the bit said, Hey, I thought you'd want to know that the guy who started raspberry pie gave me a quote for my article.

42:06.66
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh yeah.

42:08.91
Ben Holmen
Yeah. So I think this reporter like has worked with him in the past, like he's a tech reporter, sent it to him for comment. And the guy who like is responsible for the Raspberry Pi that's running this thing has seen it and gave a very flattering like nerdy in the best way possible kind of quote back.

42:26.67
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

42:26.70
Ben Holmen
So how wild is that?

42:29.18
Chris Morrell
That's so cool.

42:29.37
Joe Tannenbaum
Incredible, man. That's so cool.

42:32.84
Chris Morrell
One thing that i I said to you earlier that i I want to bring up here because I feel like we haven't rectified this is the the word that I haven't heard you use nearly enough ah for this is art.

42:48.31
Chris Morrell
um This is this is not not just that it's displaying art, but I think what you've done is just an incredible piece of of you know performance, technology, art. I don't know exactly how you'd even categorize it.

43:03.80
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

43:03.89
Chris Morrell
um

43:05.00
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, just even the orchestration of all of these components to work together so beautifully is art.

43:05.02
Chris Morrell
But it's like...

43:09.92
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, that's art.

43:10.56
Ben Holmen
I didn't really get around to the third part of the project.

43:11.14
Joe Tannenbaum
like

43:14.33
Ben Holmen
Like the third component of like the live streaming setup and all that too. Speaking of orchestrating everything.

43:19.07
Chris Morrell
ah right Right.

43:20.48
Joe Tannenbaum
oh

43:20.51
Chris Morrell
Dealing with all the, yeah.

43:20.79
Ben Holmen
And cutting time lapses and uploading them to blue sky and all that.

43:22.51
Chris Morrell
yeah

43:24.27
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Well, appreciate you calling it art.

43:25.58
Joe Tannenbaum
Thank you, FFMPEG, as always.

43:27.92
Ben Holmen
ah I kind of struggle with that myself because it's hard to define like something is or isn't art or to call something you do or do.

43:36.52
Chris Morrell
okay

43:36.67
Ben Holmen
is art or isn't. Also, this feels very like mechanical. and i don't know why. When I see other people's mechanical art, I think they're called strong beasts.

43:48.30
Ben Holmen
um There's a guy that builds these gigantic machines that walk the beaches of

43:53.11
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

43:53.95
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

43:54.70
Ben Holmen
Holland, I think. Very mechanical, but it feels like art to me.

43:56.13
Joe Tannenbaum
Huh?

43:58.65
Ben Holmen
For some reason, my own thing, very mechanical. I know the guts of it inside and out. It doesn't feel as artsy, like coming from the inside. But i think I think it is.

44:08.99
Ben Holmen
I think it's fair to call it an art project.

44:09.34
Joe Tannenbaum
it It it definitely art.

44:11.61
Chris Morrell
Well, I mean, i feel like you and I talked about the Can't Help Myself sculpture. um the the mechanical, yeah, um which is you know so undeniably beautiful art, right?

44:18.99
Ben Holmen
That's the machine that's cleaning up.

44:26.44
Chris Morrell
And and I feel like um that's very much a mechanical ah mechanical thing in the same way, right? It's like this this piece of engineering that evokes a feeling, right?

44:35.37
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

44:40.56
Ben Holmen
yeah

44:40.98
Joe Tannenbaum
It's just the medium, right?

44:41.28
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

44:42.90
Joe Tannenbaum
It's just the medium with which you're working.

44:42.97
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

44:44.78
Ben Holmen
yeah

44:44.86
Joe Tannenbaum
That's okay.

44:45.80
Chris Morrell
yeah

44:46.95
Ben Holmen
I tend to think of this like I don't think it's making a statement, which I think is important for art, but it is making you feel something, which I think is more critical.

44:55.27
Chris Morrell
yeah yes

44:56.87
Ben Holmen
and And really what's interesting to me about it is it's making you feel like whimsy and delight and joy, which love that.

44:57.23
Chris Morrell
yes

45:04.84
Ben Holmen
Like that's kind of my vibe in the world. um But that's not normally something I think like when I'm taking photographs, I'm not like generating whimsy and delight and joy with my photographs.

45:11.09
Chris Morrell
affected

45:17.32
Ben Holmen
It's more like feelings of peace or feelings of ah like and anxiety or something coming through. So it's ah like a different suite of emotional response than I'm used to associating with art.

45:30.57
Ben Holmen
um Like I was just in the Minneapolis Institute of Art last weekend. And I didn't feel a lot of like whimsy and joy and like connection to humanity through those things. I felt a lot of other things.

45:43.89
Ben Holmen
And so this feels like it's kind of, it's in a different class than what I would typically consider like an art project.

45:50.57
Chris Morrell
But art should our art should also make you feel like it it art isn't exclusively like bad feelings or something like right like whimsy and joy are certainly in the bounds of art

45:59.84
Ben Holmen
Yeah. I hope that...

46:04.70
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, yeah.

46:04.72
Ben Holmen
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

46:05.69
Chris Morrell
so

46:07.17
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, yeah, there are there are no there are no limitations on it. And i I would argue to say that art doesn't even need to make you feel something. Like the lack of feeling something is also maybe valid if that's the goal of what you were doing or the creativity but the process. You know what i mean? Like not feeling something particular is also...

46:27.49
Joe Tannenbaum
a feeling in and of itself, kind of. I mean, art is all you know, i don't think anybody's ever said this, but it's in the eye of the beholder, you know what i mean? So I think, um you know, that was a terrible joke.

46:38.58
Chris Morrell
but

46:40.09
Joe Tannenbaum
I guess the lack of registering anything on either of your faces was was devastating in my chest.

46:40.28
Ben Holmen
I was just waiting see where you're going with that joke. I'll have you know that I really wanted.

46:44.46
Chris Morrell
What's it?

46:45.65
Ben Holmen
No.

46:46.36
Chris Morrell
What's it?

46:48.59
Joe Tannenbaum
um

46:48.79
Ben Holmen
No. i I can't tell you how hard I suppressed my urge to go for the jugular when you said art doesn't have to make you feel anything. i really wanted to say, well, that's your art, Joe.

46:59.53
Chris Morrell
oh

47:00.66
Joe Tannenbaum
That's fair. That's fair.

47:02.31
Ben Holmen
I'm sorry.

47:02.41
Joe Tannenbaum
I got to go.

47:02.54
Ben Holmen
We got to edit that part out. That didn't land.

47:03.78
Chris Morrell
so

47:03.97
Joe Tannenbaum
No, I think it's about the creative.

47:04.22
Ben Holmen
Nobody liked that joke. And it was mean.

47:06.26
Joe Tannenbaum
I think it's you you you did a creative endeavor, right? Like you did. This requires a lot of creativity. And I think like almost regardless of the end product that that in and of itself, the process is art.

47:17.37
Joe Tannenbaum
I don't know. I this is art through and through to my in my eyes.

47:21.61
Ben Holmen
Here's a question, joe your

47:23.22
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

47:23.67
Ben Holmen
Your terminal experiments, if we can kick back like two years, when you were kicking out like car dashboards in the terminal and music players and webcams, that feels kind of in a similar vein.

47:27.34
Joe Tannenbaum
Mm hmm.

47:36.20
Ben Holmen
And I think it got a similar kind of response of like, I have no idea why you do this, but I love it. And like that whimsy and that joy, like, I don't know why this guy did this thing, but it's really cool.

47:44.95
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

47:47.34
Ben Holmen
And I'm going to share it. Kind of a similar kind of response to this thing. Like, why would you do that?

47:54.92
Joe Tannenbaum
i think that I think for me, where I'm sitting, the main difference between what I was doing and what you did is that I look at what you did and I go, i have no idea how this man did this. like

48:08.06
Chris Morrell
ah

48:08.15
Joe Tannenbaum
somebody could Somebody could sit down in the terminal and figure out eventually this is how you whatever, whatever. But the number of the number of skills... and thinking process and and and things that you had to string together to make what is actively happening behind you right now is extremely impressive.

48:26.45
Joe Tannenbaum
Like i could maybe do the maybe do the programming part of it, but like the machinery, the the wood cutting, like all that stuff is like not in my wheelhouse right now.

48:32.24
Ben Holmen
You could definitely do it.

48:36.87
Joe Tannenbaum
But like it's – I think there's a big jump between like the sort of thing I was doing and the things that you're doing.

48:41.42
Chris Morrell
second

48:42.78
Joe Tannenbaum
Not to like – we're not ranking anything here, but like I just –

48:42.79
Chris Morrell
But I don't,

48:43.68
Ben Holmen
I'm thinking about like the the emotional response though and like why does it resonate? I think the scale of what we did was different.

48:48.94
Joe Tannenbaum
Because it's fun. It's just fun.

48:50.84
Ben Holmen
This one is just a longer like stuck to it for years and yours were like, I'm going to knock this out in a few hours and see like if I can build on what I did.

48:51.37
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

48:54.94
Joe Tannenbaum
Right.

48:58.50
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

48:59.49
Ben Holmen
so like

48:59.96
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

49:00.60
Ben Holmen
The scale of what we were doing is different, but the response is similar. and That's what I was calling out. like Why do people like something goofy like that?

49:06.14
Joe Tannenbaum
I think also because the internet is so self-serious these days. you know it's just like there It's just a different animal.

49:12.64
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

49:15.28
Joe Tannenbaum
And like projects like yours harken back to an internet that was so much more fun. and so It was just like a little more Wild West. it was a little more experimental.

49:23.02
Ben Holmen
I think you're right.

49:25.06
Joe Tannenbaum
And i i think people feel that. I think they're like, man, I wish we had more of this. right like who Who looks at this and doesn't think, like I want more of this in the world? right like This is

49:34.76
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

49:35.06
Joe Tannenbaum
fun

49:36.11
Ben Holmen
By the way, this currently drawing scene from the Oregon Trail that my buddy Jesse.

49:36.20
Joe Tannenbaum
And i think I think that's what people watch onto.

49:40.34
Ben Holmen
Yeah, Jesse.

49:41.12
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh my God, it totally

49:42.33
Chris Morrell
It really is.

49:42.85
Joe Tannenbaum
I was trying to figure it out. Oh, that's so good.

49:45.88
Ben Holmen
ah just

49:46.12
Chris Morrell
ah So I think you guys are are right to a degree, but I also think it's just, I mean, people love to celebrate a creative pursuit. People love love things that are that are joyful and that are whimsical.

50:00.42
Chris Morrell
And i think that both of the projects, I think you're dead did right. Like, both of the projects tap into that, like, that joy ah in human nature.

50:11.02
Chris Morrell
I don't even think it necessarily has to do anything with the moment in time. I think that if you had built this 15, 20 years ago, people would have loved it then, right?

50:19.84
Ben Holmen
Yeah, you're right.

50:21.45
Chris Morrell
I think it's just like, this these are just fun. like it is It is a beautiful thing that like as humans, we can like take a just this idea that we have And like through the power of like our thoughts and like these, these tools that we have make it a reality, right?

50:40.81
Chris Morrell
This is amazing that we can do it.

50:41.51
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

50:43.16
Chris Morrell
And it, and it does, it evokes, it evokes emotion. it gets, it like speaks to humanity, like not to like overhype the, or you know oversell it, but like, I really think it does.

50:54.84
Chris Morrell
i think that that's why, why it's art. I think that's why both of those things are art. Like that is what it's about is like, expressing yourself, expressing some feelings, expressing something.

51:06.22
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

51:07.80
Chris Morrell
And like, this clearly does that, you know?

51:10.78
Joe Tannenbaum
it And also, I will just tack on to that. There was no ask. There was no like, you can see this in exchange for your email address or not.

51:16.05
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

51:18.79
Joe Tannenbaum
This is really just connected to selling my book at the end of the day. And like, it was just like, this is something fun that I it spent like a lot of hours on. Do you like it?

51:29.51
Joe Tannenbaum
And everybody's like, yeah. And I'm like, that's awesome.

51:31.33
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

51:31.49
Chris Morrell
We love it.

51:31.99
Joe Tannenbaum
Like, I think that's awesome.

51:32.46
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

51:34.95
Chris Morrell
yeah

51:34.96
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

51:35.95
Ben Holmen
I think when you go, don't

51:36.62
Joe Tannenbaum
So anyway, go ahead and promote your book that you want to... you go

51:39.81
Chris Morrell
ah

51:41.55
Ben Holmen
even think there's a way that anyone on the internet can give me money. Like I'm not selling anything. I don't have something like four years old in the backlog somewhere, some course or something.

51:46.58
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

51:50.93
Ben Holmen
I don't, I don't even think you can buy a PDF for me. I love that. ah Yeah, so I think there's a point, and I'm kind of learning about this um through the whole Bean Island bit and through this thing, that people really lean, ah really appreciate at least the part of my personality that's like go way too far in something that absolutely does not matter, but it's purely done for the joy of it.

52:15.94
Ben Holmen
And like done for the joy, but also bringing people into it.

52:16.20
Joe Tannenbaum
Yes.

52:16.37
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

52:20.01
Ben Holmen
Like there's an entrance and again, nothing to be asked for. And that's something I want to do more of. I think when you go like so far beyond what's normal, there you hit a level of absurdity that people love.

52:32.90
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. Yeah.

52:34.63
Chris Morrell
Absolutely.

52:35.13
Joe Tannenbaum
i i would agree.

52:35.78
Chris Morrell
Well, it's like the joke that like, it's funny and then it's like not funny, but like, if you keep on going long enough, it comes back around to being funny.

52:37.38
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

52:42.30
Ben Holmen
Right. right i that's why i kept going in this project because can you imagine spending four years and then not having the payoff that we've been celebrating today like all that and i never like pushed through to get to the it's funny again

52:44.17
Chris Morrell
So that same kind of idea, right?

52:44.26
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

52:52.58
Chris Morrell
Right, right.

52:54.71
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh.

53:00.56
Chris Morrell
So I know we have to stop in a minute or.

53:01.18
Ben Holmen
got it i ah time don't don't sweat it because i actually if you can keep going i want to talk about what happens next and pick

53:03.09
Chris Morrell
Yeah,

53:08.88
Chris Morrell
yeah that's I wanted to get a moment of that, but if we can get a a couple of moments, that's even better.

53:09.44
Joe Tannenbaum
oh

53:14.37
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

53:14.40
Ben Holmen
For sure.

53:14.53
Chris Morrell
Like where where are you now?

53:17.37
Ben Holmen
So right now it's in my background, my webcam. Right now it is totally disconnected from anyone submitting something to it. It's totally in my control.

53:28.50
Ben Holmen
um What i have considered doing, and I want to brainstorm this with you.

53:33.83
Joe Tannenbaum
I'm going pause for one second because my kid is about to come home. So I'm going like switch to the other room so that he's not on camera.

53:38.33
Ben Holmen
Okay.

53:44.39
Ben Holmen
Should keep going?

53:45.45
Chris Morrell
Yeah, we can just keep going.

53:46.08
Ben Holmen
Okay. ah

00:00.95
Chris Morrell
All right. So season of the Kilo pixel is over. What, what happens next?

00:08.69
Ben Holmen
So I'm curious about that. I want to pick your brains a little bit because I have it sitting here, like disconnected from the internet. You can still see like what's happening, but you can't submit to it.

00:20.05
Ben Holmen
And the only thing that's displayed is something that my system has picked. And it's sitting in my Zoom background for any any calls I take. I'm planning to build a like collaborative mode.

00:33.04
Ben Holmen
where instead of submitting a thousand pixels at a time, everyone that is on the web app at the same time can like change pixels live, which would be fun, like in a meeting background.

00:43.46
Ben Holmen
So basically let people mess around with my background feels like a fun mode to enable from time to time, but that's only like 10 people tops that are enjoying that.

00:49.62
Chris Morrell
I like that.

00:54.00
Ben Holmen
So I want to bring it back and stream it periodically. And this is what I wanted to pick your brain about. I thought about, Continuing with kilopix.com and like set up a more casual once month live stream, have people submit basically the same mode as before, but I only play it for like one day, 24 hours.

01:16.48
Ben Holmen
So you can get your thing in. I don't, I don't think that's going to get the same amount of response that the first one is like, there's no way we're not going to recapture, put that lightning back in the bottle or whatever, whatever the idiom is like that happened. It was fantastic.

01:32.89
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:33.11
Ben Holmen
It's not going to happen again on this thing, but I do enjoy playing with people's art on my, on my machine, my art machine. Thank you, Chris. Um,

01:43.59
Joe Tannenbaum
Thank you.

01:44.11
Ben Holmen
ah And so I want to like have some kind of collaborative mode there. So that's one thing I'd like to chat about. The other thing is I can just totally give over control of the display by pointing it at your API.

01:56.87
Ben Holmen
So right now it's pointing at my API, which is like connected to the internet in this particular way. But... If someone is an aspiring game designer or if they have a social idea that they want to explore with, all this thing does is it says, hey, what pixel do I go to and I'll poke it and they'll tell you what that is.

02:15.72
Ben Holmen
And so it's totally decoupled from what we know is the front end of it on keelopix.com. It could be running someone else's game. It could be doing something totally different.

02:27.21
Ben Holmen
The only downside is that's only fun if you can see the thing. So then that gets me back in the live streaming game. And so it would have to be a good idea that I'd be willing to like live stream for a week again.

02:38.61
Chris Morrell
Right. Yeah. I mean, I love i when you said something about it before, ah you know, I've been thinking about it a bit. i don't have any great ideas, but i i I personally love the idea of like trying to put together an API that's just like just does something else.

02:52.74
Ben Holmen
Right.

02:55.71
Chris Morrell
I just don't know what it would be. But i i imagine that someone out there has a really neat idea and we just have to find that person, you know?

02:58.15
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

03:04.52
Ben Holmen
I talked to John Drexler for a while. Like we had a whole call about, Hey John, how should I, you have any ideas for like making this more of a social game?

03:08.95
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

03:12.62
Ben Holmen
Like help me work out those things. And we talked about things like, uh, some kind of territory control game. Like if you're familiar with go, like you're trying to control parts of the board, you could do something where people get a certain number of votes per hour or something like that to like make a team, ah team-based game that plays on black and white here or on and off.

03:34.10
Ben Holmen
Um, So something like that's possible. It's really like up to you. if you could If you could design a game that used a thousand pixels on the screen and like multiple people could collaborate on it, it would play here with an extra layer of absurdity, right?

03:52.67
Ben Holmen
And there's like something real about this is actually happening in the real world.

03:53.39
Chris Morrell
What's the what's the what's the time like what's the worst case scenario

03:57.02
Ben Holmen
It's not just pixels on some website we're all clicking on.

04:05.04
Chris Morrell
between two pixels like in terms of timing

04:08.22
Ben Holmen
Probably like 15 seconds tops. Like if it has to go from corner to corner, probably 15 seconds or less.

04:12.55
Chris Morrell
yeah

04:14.96
Chris Morrell
So you need to do something where it's like you can live with ah at least 15 to 20 seconds of latency. That's like a big constraint, but it's also a fun constraint.

04:22.34
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

04:24.56
Chris Morrell
Like the a thing that comes to mind for me is like a, like a battleship slash tic-tac-toe type game where the latency is like part of the game.

04:24.67
Ben Holmen
Yep. You have to...

04:36.49
Ben Holmen
I think you have to design the latency in as a constraint.

04:36.69
Chris Morrell
Right.

04:39.25
Joe Tannenbaum
You have to, yeah.

04:39.93
Ben Holmen
That's what makes it interesting.

04:40.33
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah. But

04:40.61
Chris Morrell
Yeah. But like where you're having to make, Like you're having to make calls with the information that you have now, but your calls are like going to get played out in the future, you know?

04:54.99
Chris Morrell
Like I think there's something fun there.

04:55.10
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm.

04:55.33
Joe Tannenbaum
like you have a window of. Like if you have to make a call in the window before the next thing happens, anticipating what might happen, that's an interesting, and like you're not allowed to see what's about to be drawn until you've made your call.

05:09.12
Joe Tannenbaum
And then you can see whether you kind of got it right or wrong or something, you know?

05:09.38
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

05:11.61
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, that's interesting.

05:11.61
Chris Morrell
Yeah, something like that.

05:14.53
Ben Holmen
I've also thought about people upvoting the very next pixel to change.

05:14.66
Joe Tannenbaum
There's also...

05:18.25
Ben Holmen
So like there are a thousand possibilities. What's the next pixel of the machine should change like in the next six seconds and then challenging them to draw a picture. So like you're going to try draw a picture of this rabbit or a smiley face or whatever.

05:31.59
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

05:33.18
Ben Holmen
Let's see if the internet can get there. That's kind of like a Twitch plays Pokemon, sort of like it's going to be a struggle, but it might be fun along the way.

05:39.87
Chris Morrell
h Well, and it would be kind of fun if you're thinking about like a game, there's there's also a world where there's like someone whose goal is to draw a different picture. Yeah.

05:52.72
Ben Holmen
Right.

05:53.43
Joe Tannenbaum
Right, great right, right.

05:53.57
Chris Morrell
you know Or maybe it's two teams.

05:55.29
Ben Holmen
Which picture can win?

05:55.50
Chris Morrell
and like Yeah.

05:56.62
Ben Holmen
Yep. Yep. Yep.

05:58.77
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

05:59.25
Chris Morrell
I like that. I also love the idea. i mean, I know you've talked about like putting this in a physical space before. i do and I know that that doesn't then the internet doesn't get to enjoy it

06:11.23
Ben Holmen
Mm-hmm.

06:11.68
Chris Morrell
um necessarily, although maybe maybe someone would be cool with you live streaming from from their location. But like I do think it's it's kind of a neat idea to be like, oh, when I go to this coffee shop, like there's a way for me to...

06:25.46
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

06:28.19
Chris Morrell
um like even i hate to throw more work on your lap, but like imagine maybe iPad mounted

06:34.85
Ben Holmen
Do you?

06:38.25
Chris Morrell
like ah ah maybe an ipad mounted in the space that has like the current drawing.

06:43.18
Ben Holmen
Oh, yeah.

06:45.88
Ben Holmen
Yep.

06:46.06
Chris Morrell
um and like anyone can go up and just touch to change what's drawn. Mm-hmm.

06:51.50
Ben Holmen
Yeah. that's my That's very close to my original concept, except my plan was to just have a QR code that people could scan that would have like some auth built into the yeah URL. So only people who are scanning that QR code could control it.

07:06.17
Ben Holmen
And then hope that like anywhere from zero to five people in that room would be interested in monkeying with it. That feels like a main manageable size for people to manipulate together.

07:12.96
Chris Morrell
Sure.

07:17.98
Chris Morrell
sure

07:18.00
Ben Holmen
I do think I would love to bring it back to my friend's coffee shop, best coffee shop in Eau Claire, Wisconsin shift coffee shop. ah I think the people in that community would really appreciate it.

07:28.45
Ben Holmen
And since I was like the original concept, I think it'd be very satisfying for me to say, Hey, Laura, can I put this in your shop for a week?

07:35.83
Joe Tannenbaum
yeah

07:35.93
Ben Holmen
And they'd totally be down for it. And I think that would be personally satisfying for me to like,

07:38.74
Chris Morrell
yeah

07:41.97
Ben Holmen
work out of the coffee shop for the week basically and keep an eye on it.

07:45.06
Chris Morrell
I.

07:45.97
Ben Holmen
Uh, and then just see how they, how they handle it. Like how the, how the patrons of the coffee shop interact with it.

07:53.32
Joe Tannenbaum
How portable is it?

07:56.89
Ben Holmen
Uh, not very.

08:00.82
Ben Holmen
I thought about like, since this has got the response that it has, I've, there's some interests.

08:02.18
Joe Tannenbaum
that

08:05.65
Ben Holmen
Um, like I could put together an interesting conference talk about here's how I built this ridiculous thing. And like basically the podcast that we're recording here, I think I could turn into something that people would enjoy.

08:16.79
Ben Holmen
And so I've considered, of course, if you give a 25 minute conference talk, you want this thing to be draw something in 25 minutes next to be on stage.

08:17.26
Joe Tannenbaum
Yes, yes, yes,

08:24.19
Ben Holmen
Right.

08:24.70
Joe Tannenbaum
yes. yes yes yes yes

08:25.34
Ben Holmen
And so I've considered like what, in what conference could I drive this to And how could I set it up on stage? It has like a metal bracket that runs behind it.

08:36.95
Ben Holmen
ah That is, there's a matching bracket on my wall. But like, it's not something I can ship. It's something i would like carefully put in the back of my minivan and carefully drive to wherever I need it to be.

08:49.14
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

08:50.35
Chris Morrell
i I also feel like you you don't want it to draw one thing over the course of 25 minutes. You want to click through slides and wait five minutes for each slide to change.

09:03.43
Ben Holmen
This is the anti Dave Hickey, right? So Dave Hickey did a tight 10 minutes with like 60 slides.

09:06.66
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

09:09.05
Ben Holmen
You have never seen so many slides per second in a talk. What if I did a talk with like two slides that are slowly revealed?

09:16.99
Chris Morrell
I think that's, it would be so much fun and it would actually be a really interesting challenge to try to like draw, maybe draw text right in the middle in a way where you could like think about the wording and the font choice ahead of time such that like you can actually change from one set of words to another set of words by only moving a few pixels.

09:27.75
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

09:37.15
Ben Holmen
Yeah. With minimal pixel changes.

09:38.41
Joe Tannenbaum
Man, that'd be so sick.

09:40.98
Ben Holmen
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

09:41.34
Joe Tannenbaum
That'd be so sick, yeah.

09:41.52
Chris Morrell
Like that would be so fun.

09:42.09
Ben Holmen
I love that.

09:44.47
Chris Morrell
And I just love the idea of you like being on stage and like, like holding up a clicker and clicking the button and the the the arms start moving to draw your next slide. Like, I'm sorry, but now that's the only way you can do it.

09:54.01
Joe Tannenbaum
Or even better, it's just continually it's continually going and you're just timing your talk to whatever the slide.

09:59.88
Ben Holmen
but ta yeah The to the display.

10:01.75
Joe Tannenbaum
like It's just constantly changing. And when you hit the word from the slide, it's like right there when you need it.

10:03.49
Chris Morrell
Sure.

10:06.55
Joe Tannenbaum
and like, i don't know, that'd be so cool. That'd be so cool.

10:08.85
Ben Holmen
I just want to go back to the part where Chris said, I don't want to put any more work on your plate. And we just workshopped a conference talk, hard level already, and then time it down to basically 10 seconds or so.

10:18.90
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

10:23.11
Ben Holmen
So you're hitting your marks every couple of minutes down to the second as this machine that you built and drove across the country is drawing your slides for you.

10:33.83
Joe Tannenbaum
Okay, but that's the level of confidence that we have in you. We think we know that you can do that.

10:37.11
Chris Morrell
Exactly.

10:38.29
Ben Holmen
Oh, God. Yeah.

10:40.14
Chris Morrell
we We expect no less than that from you now.

10:43.64
Joe Tannenbaum
I mean, a very much simpler thing to do with it, you know, like like social accounts like draw Paddington into a movie ever or Photoshop Paddington into a movie every day until I forget.

10:53.79
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

10:54.31
Joe Tannenbaum
Like, have you seen something like

10:55.66
Ben Holmen
Yeah, yeah.

10:55.90
Joe Tannenbaum
you you could like, you know, just take photos of the final results, like as like, if you can automatically extract a photo of the final image and like, draw a GIF over the course of, you know, two days, and then at the end, like, restitch it back together to a GIF, but it's your kilopixel, you know, so it'll post that photo every time it's like done with the frame and people can follow along with it. And then it'll say like, and here's the final GIF, like,

11:20.42
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

11:20.47
Joe Tannenbaum
And it'll, you know, kind of cycle through that. It's not as exciting as a conference talk where you time the whole thing exactly, but it is a simpler mode that you could probably already do right now.

11:27.55
Ben Holmen
Maybe more.

11:29.98
Joe Tannenbaum
You know what i mean?

11:32.26
Chris Morrell
I also really like the idea of turning it over to somebody and not streaming it and just like,

11:32.55
Ben Holmen
I love how ambitious these ideas are.

11:42.27
Chris Morrell
taking a picture if it ever does something that you think is noteworthy. Just be like ah like, it would be an interesting experience to try to control it without being able to see it.

11:56.49
Chris Morrell
And then basically you could just be like, if it if you manage to do something cool with this, I will post about it. You know what i mean?

12:03.20
Ben Holmen
yeah

12:04.25
Chris Morrell
like I don't think you have to live stream it. I think you could just... You know, if you see something in your Zoom background that looks cool, just hop out of the frame, take a screenshot and like say something about it.

12:17.03
Chris Morrell
You know what i mean?

12:17.56
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

12:17.63
Chris Morrell
that That would also be kind of interesting.

12:21.15
Ben Holmen
That's interesting. It also makes me think maybe instead of totally handing over the API to someone else and this machine just blindly hitting someone else's API. So for example, I have a mode that scans the whole, like I can set the pixels to an unknown state.

12:39.13
Ben Holmen
And that will tell the controller, hey, I don't know what this pixel is, but go there and then don't poke it. Just tell me what it is. And so it sets all thousand pixels to this unknown state.

12:46.51
Chris Morrell
yeah

12:49.16
Ben Holmen
And then it takes 10 minutes maybe to go read all that. um That's really useful to know like this is actually the state. Nothing has gone awry, essentially. And that's kind of a feedback loop that's useful to have.

13:04.34
Ben Holmen
um that third-party API wouldn't have. So maybe mine sits in the middle and says, I know what the state of the machine is.

13:07.89
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

13:10.73
Ben Holmen
You tell me what you want it to be and I'll figure it out.

13:11.31
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah.

13:14.58
Joe Tannenbaum
was going to say, I think you need to sit in the middle between those two things, in my opinion, just to sort of negotiate.

13:14.81
Ben Holmen
But it does...

13:19.15
Ben Holmen
That takes away the next pixel algorithm.

13:19.26
Chris Morrell
i I disagree. i disagree so wholeheartedly.

13:21.18
Joe Tannenbaum
Ah, come on, Chris. Come on. no

13:23.79
Chris Morrell
Because cause then, yeah, I think it's got it's got to be full control.

13:24.41
Joe Tannenbaum
Just full control.

13:27.91
Chris Morrell
Because like half the fun is navigating like how do you want to draw it? like you know what method like What method do you want to do for picking the pixels?

13:34.04
Ben Holmen
Yeah. Yeah, you lose that.

13:38.87
Chris Morrell
like

13:39.00
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, but how does him sitting in the middle stop that? Like, yeah i think I think the middle part is just a sanity check of like setting some bounds, like saying like, don't throw me a pixel that's outside the back, you know, things like that.

13:44.05
Ben Holmen
Oh, I see.

13:49.51
Joe Tannenbaum
i don't know if you have those guardrails set up on the controller itself, but like, it's just a safety mechanism, not so much a I'm controlling anything mechanism. You know mean?

13:57.68
Ben Holmen
Right.

13:58.34
Joe Tannenbaum
Like a sanity check middleware sort of thing.

13:58.38
Chris Morrell
I guess.

14:00.88
Ben Holmen
Yeah, that's probably a good idea. basically, basically The kilopixel could hit kilopix.com, the normal API does. Kilopix.com, instead of saying, here's what you should do, hits your API and says, what you want next?

14:13.43
Joe Tannenbaum
Right.

14:14.69
Ben Holmen
And then sanitize it like you didn't give me a negative pixel value or something I wasn't expecting.

14:15.28
Joe Tannenbaum
Right.

14:18.29
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, yeah, that's all I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:19.96
Ben Holmen
Yeah, yeah.

14:21.11
Chris Morrell
Sure.

14:21.22
Joe Tannenbaum
You're going to sit here on over-engineered and tell me not to over-engineer something, Chris?

14:24.59
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

14:27.58
Joe Tannenbaum
Come on, man.

14:28.50
Chris Morrell
Let's be practical here. Come on.

14:30.08
Joe Tannenbaum
Come on.

14:31.61
Ben Holmen
Yeah, so I'll just put this out there.

14:32.30
Joe Tannenbaum
Chris is throwing caution to the wind.

14:33.21
Ben Holmen
If you have an idea, if you've been listening to this conversation, you have the seed of an idea, reach out to me. I'll consider anything and everything. So worst I can say is no, that doesn't do it for me or that's not going to work because of this reason.

14:46.97
Ben Holmen
But I would love to explore ideas with anyone who's listening.

14:50.51
Joe Tannenbaum
for a very reasonable price, very reasonable price.

14:50.86
Chris Morrell
I can't wait.

14:52.74
Ben Holmen
Very.

14:53.12
Joe Tannenbaum
Don't don't worry.

14:53.45
Ben Holmen
This is how I make some money.

14:54.55
Joe Tannenbaum
he'll get He'll give you a discount. He'll give you a discount.

14:56.95
Ben Holmen
For tens of dollars, per perhaps.

14:59.78
Chris Morrell
Unless you're Microsoft, and then it's tens of thousands of dollars.

15:02.20
Ben Holmen
Yes.

15:02.59
Joe Tannenbaum
For sure.

15:03.88
Chris Morrell
Or Sentry.

15:04.25
Joe Tannenbaum
Yeah, if any big corporations want to reach out to Ben and you you license this technology, reach out to Ben.

15:04.75
Chris Morrell
bet you Sentry would do it.

15:04.86
Ben Holmen
I do.

15:08.99
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

15:10.19
Joe Tannenbaum
Ben would love to hear from you.

15:10.32
Ben Holmen
Yeah. do want to draw something on this? I've been hunting for ever since I made that, that shower control post, basically where I complain about how lousy shower controls are in America.

15:21.18
Ben Holmen
I've been hunting for a sponsorship from Kohler Corporation. Maybe this is how I could sell. i can draw their ads on my kilopixel and I can have a nice shower for free.

15:30.06
Joe Tannenbaum
There you go.

15:32.99
Chris Morrell
There you go.

15:34.100
Chris Morrell
Do they make a nice shower, though?

15:37.03
Joe Tannenbaum
That's a good question.

15:38.10
Ben Holmen
I think so. I don't know. I'll ask you for that. You can be the judge of that.

15:41.32
Joe Tannenbaum
Ben is like, the fine people at Kohler, they absolutely do, yes

15:47.96
Chris Morrell
Oh, man. All right. Well, despite ah that the the technical failings, this is fun. i hope that people get to hear it.

15:58.36
Ben Holmen
not To be clear, not my technical failings.

16:01.10
Joe Tannenbaum
Mine, mine, mine, mine.

16:01.16
Chris Morrell
It's 100% Joe's fault.

16:01.62
Ben Holmen
Not Joe's technical failings.

16:02.100
Joe Tannenbaum
It's me.

16:03.06
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

16:03.86
Joe Tannenbaum
It's me. Sorry, have a family. Jeez.

16:06.100
Chris Morrell
ah That's the technical failing, now that that you have a family.

16:12.08
Ben Holmen
About 45 minutes into this podcast, Joe so moved rooms. Did you close your laptop? Is that what you did?

16:17.70
Joe Tannenbaum
it it was ah It was closed and plugged into my external monitor. So as soon as I unplugged it, it just like blew up because it was like, i don't know what to do here.

16:22.34
Chris Morrell
Oh, yeah.

16:23.82
Ben Holmen
Yeah.

16:23.100
Chris Morrell
That's right. Yeah. Yeah. yep yeah

16:26.14
Ben Holmen
So Zencaster decide, oh, you guys are done recording.

16:26.34
Joe Tannenbaum
Yep, yep, yep.

16:26.36
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

16:29.17
Ben Holmen
And we come back and Chris's mic, let us know.

16:29.53
Joe Tannenbaum
Yep.

16:30.46
Chris Morrell
Well,

16:32.08
Ben Holmen
Let Chris know if you find the the first, if you like the first 45 minutes or the last 20 better.

16:33.58
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

16:34.50
Joe Tannenbaum
Shout off in the comments.

16:36.68
Chris Morrell
This, the tech technical failings abound, not limited to just Joe.

16:39.100
Ben Holmen
better

16:42.98
Joe Tannenbaum
Oh my God.

16:46.14
Chris Morrell
Yes. I don't know. this is going to be one of those ones.

16:47.98
Joe Tannenbaum
Ben's in the clear. Ben's in the clear. Yeah.

16:50.94
Chris Morrell
ah I'm going to, I, I, I, I love you, Ben. I'm going to, I'm going to actually sit and edit a podcast for the the first time.

16:59.38
Ben Holmen
Wow.

16:59.68
Joe Tannenbaum
Wow.

16:59.96
Chris Morrell
It'll, it'll, you know, and hopefully the listener gets to hear it, you know?

17:00.50
Ben Holmen
Thank you so much, Chris.

17:09.17
Joe Tannenbaum
They better. They better. Come on, man. All right, boys.

17:12.62
Chris Morrell
all right, guys, this has been blast.

17:14.02
Ben Holmen
Thanks for coming along in this. I said it earlier. I'll say it again. Thanks for being the best ah partners and encouragers and hype men that I could ask for on this. So appreciate you both.

17:23.91
Chris Morrell
Thanks for sharing it with us.

17:24.14
Joe Tannenbaum
You make it easy, man. Yeah, come on.

17:25.67
Chris Morrell
it was It was such a joy to be like you know in the inside in the beginning there, getting to see you know get see it come together.

17:26.86
Joe Tannenbaum
How much fun.

17:34.62
Chris Morrell
It was great.

17:36.76
Joe Tannenbaum
Agreed.

17:37.06
Chris Morrell
All right.

17:37.39
Joe Tannenbaum
Agreed. It was awesome.

17:37.84
Ben Holmen
Glad you there.

17:39.08
Joe Tannenbaum
Love you, buddy.

17:40.04
Ben Holmen
All right. Love you

17:45.86
Chris Morrell
Still got to do the outro live.