Doom, Played over Curl

(github.com)

79 points | by creaktive 10 hours ago ago

11 comments

  • varun_ch 5 hours ago ago

    One interesting side effect of having a LLM write the thing including the README, is that the models tend to leave little hints of the authors intention or prompt as over-explained passages that make it obvious that AI help was used.

    https://github.com/xsawyerx/curl-doom?tab=readme-ov-file#how...

    eg. > A browser hitting the same URL gets a tiny landing page that just shows the one-liner

    it’s subtle but once you notice it, it’s hard to miss.

    As an aside, I feel like projects like this used to be really fun and impressive (I guess due to the fact that you’d think “Wow a human put their time into this wacky crazy thing”), whereas now you can have Claude consistently crap out something like this in 5 minutes, so it ruins the whole appeal to me…

    • z3c0 2 hours ago ago

      Not to mention that the objectively bad practice of piping a curl call to bash is nowhere close to "playing doom via curl". It's almost as if they simply prompted "play doom with curl". In my experience, almost any overly-ambitious prompt ends similarly.

      • varun_ch an hour ago ago

        Oh wait I didn't even register that! yeah of course you can do anything in a terminal using curl if you're piping to bash!!!

  • thomasfl 5 hours ago ago

    This is a good template for making terminal based apps that run on remote servers.

  • reactordev 2 hours ago ago

    oddly enough, this is how it looked when I ran it on my 486 when I was a kid. Pretty accurate except this runs at a faster fps than mine did... ;)

    • nurettin 44 minutes ago ago

      I remember Liquid crystal displays having an unintended blur effect when something animates or rotates, but it wasn't as bad as ansi chars.

  • Leomuck 3 hours ago ago

    What the hell. First, I thought this was crazy. How could you do anything crazy with curl? But of course, curling a bash script opens lots of opportunities. Given the right permissions, you could run an enterprise Jira server via only a curl to a bash script.

    Still cool that people find more ways to play doom, but calling it "via curl" seems a little missleading to me. "Playing doom via a simple bash script" would have felt more appropriate.

  • fao_ 6 hours ago ago

    > The catch: the shell normally puts the terminal in *cooked mode,*

    Yeah, that's not the name of the mode. In this sense, it's "canonical mode". Description reads like AI slop where technical content was reformatted into marketing/PRspeak. It feels like a 30 year old PR representative desperately trying to twist any kind of technical language specifically to pander to the AAVE-derived slang of the younger set of internet-addled minds.

    As a result, this does not interest me.

    For anyone who is interested in ANSI terminal stuff, or building their own, Lexi Hale had a decent article on this: https://xn--rpa.cc/irl/term.html which got discussion here about eight years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24436860