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Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi

81 points safaelmali 2 hours ago 29 comments

andsoitis 2 hours ago | parent

So cool. Add Los Angeles, Cape Town, Florence, Cairo, Athens, Vancouver, São Paulo.

Actually, shouldn't it be possible to auto-generate any city via AI on demand?

vunderba 49 minutes ago | parent

Maybe to a degree but this isn’t just somebody using Seeddance to generate a first-frame-and-last-frame video loop and calling it a day.

There's definitely some manual curation. They even have assets that are clearly being placed into the scene, like the boats moving in the water.

You could theoretically generate all possible animated sprites (birds, people, vehicles, etc.) for use in any given cityscape, but automatically segmenting/detecting the different valid "paths/waypoints" where those assets should be placed would probably end up looking pretty janky.

XenophileJKO 7 minutes ago | parent

Maybe??.. Opus 5.5 is a giant step function up with "manual illustration". Quite a bit better than Astra. It is entirely possible to get this quality of animation "hand drawn" from Opus 5.5...

Honestly I was blown away, it is one capability that blindsided me. I haven't been this surprised by a capability lift in a long time.

Razengan 1 hour ago | parent

Man, wish we had dynamic wallpapers like this, and we could have had it decades ago.

Why do companies like Apple & Microsoft sterilize themselves so?

Cockbrand 1 hour ago | parent

I was having a very similar thought - finally a nice use case for HTML wallpapers like Windows used to have them. I bet that there's a trick to have this as a desktop background in Wayland, but I'm too lazy to find out right now.

Either way, really nicely made, I love it! Small change request: adjust the CSS to make the controls look less vibecode-y.

Vakaiser 1 hour ago | parent

While it's not free or a first party offering, I've had great success with Cindori Backdrop:

https://cindori.com/backdrop

andsoitis 1 hour ago | parent

Wallpapers that move would make for poor usability.

richarme 20 minutes ago | parent

This was already a thing almost 3 decades ago. Active Desktop [0] was just a web page displayed instead of the wallpaper image.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

andelink 10 minutes ago | parent

Just tested and this works great on macOS with Plash [1] by Sindre Sorhus. I couldn't find too many URL parameters to control it, but the FAQ does mention an ?obs parameter to hide the interface by default and ?weather=... to choose the weather. This URL in Plash works as described:

    https://loficities.com/tokyo/?obs&weather=leaves
I was also able to omit ?obs and use the website interface controls to configure it via Plash browsing mode and then the interface went away after a moment of inactivity.

[1]: https://sindresorhus.com/plash

NDlurker 1 hour ago | parent

This would be cool as a Roku channel

timenotwasted 1 hour ago | parent

Gorgeous, very well executed. I'm guessing the primary request will be more cities but I'll deviate and say I'd love to see more views as well. Would be nice to have the same set of cities by I can see it from a studio view same way it is in the Paris view. Or from an office. Or a cafe.

thih9 1 hour ago | parent

The product hunt ad is breaking the immersion for me. I know that most cities have ads but still, I prefer ad free pixel art.

It’s also not realistic, in one landscape the billboard is taller than a 9 story building.

trevoragilbert 43 minutes ago | parent

It feels bolted on to an otherwise cool thing. Even angling the board, or smudging, dimming color, localizing language, etc. All would make it feel like it fits.

sublinear 29 minutes ago | parent

I know this is going to sound ridiculous, but the way the dithering is used feels very "generated" and chaotic.

Human pixel art tends to be very deliberate about the exact colors of every pixel and their placement tends to follow idealized (but not necessarily geometric) shapes.

The last time I saw dithering this sloppy was decades ago when people would scan photos as low color images. It is its own vibe, but it's a cold and rough one. These artifacts feel more "realistic", but it felt like slop back then too.

TomGarden 1 hour ago | parent

This is a vibe! Is this pixel art AI generated?

zaxioms 1 hour ago | parent

There's a lot of AI on the author's github, so I would assume so. I have no idea how I feel about these sorts of things. On the one hand I think it's objectively a super neat idea, but it makes me sad that a human (probably) didn't make the art/songs.

userbinator 49 minutes ago | parent

A human did --- just indirectly, in the same way as using a compiler or assembler instead of writing each byte by hand.

johnfn 45 minutes ago | parent

I use a compiler to perform a task. I don’t use pixel art to perform a task, other than to feel connection to another human —- something AI makes more challenging.

zaxioms 29 minutes ago | parent

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I feel very averse to consuming AI media, but it's not super obvious to me why. In some sense, I agree with what you're saying, but in reality no pixel art of a city I've never been to would elicit that feeling in me. Maybe I would feel differently if it were art of the city I live in and had some pixels dedicated to specific things I think are cool about the city, but for this website in particular it could be the best pixel art of SF ever made and I don't think it would be all that meaningful to me.

The main conclusion I've come to is that it's less that I dislike AI art inherently, and rather that I value the human decisions in media that I personally care about, and AI media threatens both its creation and how much other people value such things.

0gs 10 minutes ago | parent

maybe you are MOSTLY judging what you perceive to be the artist's options and then decisions, and with most AI art, it's super easy to judge both of those quickly and accurately -- they had a billion options, and they chose a really lazy one.

or i don't know if you are but this is how i think i feel a lot of the time haha

johnfn 8 minutes ago | parent

I mean pixel art is kind of weird, in that I rarely just look at a single screen of pixel art and say, wow, I feel more connected now. It’s often taken in context of a larger whole, like a game or animation where the artist is usually trying to express something, and the specific art is some small part of the overall expression. It’s kind of like how no individual still image from Spirited Away will convey the meaning of the whole movie.

userbinator 8 minutes ago | parent

other than to feel connection to another human

With AI, instead you feel a connection to the sum of all humanity.

vunderba 59 minutes ago | parent

Yes according to the author - the assets were created with AI tooling.

https://safaelmali.gumroad.com/l/lofi-cities-complete-collec...

TomGarden 31 minutes ago | parent

Ah that's a bummer. I'm unsure if this is gonna change over time, but it entirely tanks my enjoyment of any visual art project to know it was generated.

rishirathod1165 45 minutes ago | parent

So cool

namirsab 37 minutes ago | parent

Love it! Really cool idea!

iand675 12 minutes ago | parent

There's a lot to like here, but too AI-generated for me. The pixel art for Tokyo & Hong Kong don't use proper Chinese/Japanese characters. The pulsating badges in the non-pixel UI are also pretty AI-indicative in a way that is distracting.

bitwize 9 minutes ago | parent

I love the FM synth in the music. Some of the patches from Sonic games can be heard.

mft_ 7 minutes ago | parent

Nice idea, but the rain sound (at least on my system) isn't rain - it's just white noise?