parrot.live
54 comments
·June 4, 2025hsx
LorenDB
> Over the years it’s burned through several TB of bandwidth per month.
I hope you're hosting it on Hetzner (or somewhere else with a generous traffic plan). They give you 20TB traffic per month.
diggan
Or if you're running a bunch of smaller projects, get a dedicated server with Hetzner and enjoy unmetered connection.
zavec
Ooh, I had a coworker who had one with zoidberg dancing once, though it seems to be dead now so maybe he didn't renew the domain. He probably used ascii.live!
petepete
There's an actual parrot emoji now for your GitHub description
oytis
Author's github history looks like an absolute coding machine
hoppp
Makes me think a life changing burn out is coming soon.
I burn out if I don't take weekends off, its nasty.
elif
Spending a little bit of my free moments throughout the day interacting with coding agents on my phone, it's almost impossible to not have solid dark green for every day.
These charts are less useful than they have ever been for determining how much code a person writes, but they are probably a good metric overall to measure the productivity gains going on in the industry overall.
TechDebtDevin
This sounds like hell.
epiccoleman
wow, using coding agents from your phone is interesting. what's your workflow look like?
fragmede
With ChatGPT Codex connected to GitHub it's pretty neat. From my phone I throw some tasks at it and go about my day and then check in with it later. After giving it some time, I come back and look at what it's done and kick off some more or look at diffs and create PRs right from my phone. It's fairly limited in what can be done from the phone so you'll need to have a laptop for anything more involved than eg spelling errors, but it's a very interesting view of the future.
roflmaostc
many of those commits are in private repos.
I've seen people pushing e.g. weather data to GitHub in regular intervals blowing up their commit numbers.
Just check this to find crazy numbers: https://committers.top/
cg5280
The days with lots of commits start rather abruptly at the end of 2023, so it being some sort of automation seems plausible.
CaptWillard
Lots of organic explanations for that.
A lone developer can get away with infrequent commits at no practical cost. Maybe something happened in 2023 that made them a more prolific committer.
mtekman
Reminds me of smithers.el
90s_dev
Reminds me that I made a rainbow unicorn that jumped across your screen as a cmdline utility to be run after all tests passed. Coworkers got a good laugh if nothing else. Fun times.
vunderba
Nice. I'm reminded of the IntelliJ extension that replaces progress bars with the Nyan Cat.
rozhok
I still use it!
nine_k
Now you can just ask an AI to write the code to show a jumping unicorn. All the magic is gone from programming!
90s_dev
Others can ask AI to write it, but I don't have to use it. I can still write my own and use what others have written by hand.
brookst
“You can use AI to write code to show a jumping unicorn” feels pretty magic to me.
nine_k
That was my attempt to be ironic.
charcircuit
Parrot.live uses computer generated ascii art rather than one made by a human artist. It seems as if people already don't value the art part either.
joshdavham
This is awesome! Are there any other things like this?
nine_k
Sadly the domain never.gonna.give.you.up was not available.
(Damn, that's the kind of stuff we entertained ourselves as freshmen on a PDP-11 with a few terminals in 1991.)
fragmede
ssh funky.nondeterministic.computer
agos
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
layer8
telnet telehack.com
jks
curl wttr.in
Liftyee
Fun little parrot! And beats installing with snap (I don't like snap).
Out of curiosity, my rudimentary measurement puts bandwidth usage at about 17 KiB/s. Some might say that's negligible nowadays, which is not that unreasonable (1 hour ~ 61 MiB). Still, my efficiency brain is tingling. I guess simply displaying chars is lower risk than running code on your computer.
derkades
Well, in some cases terminal escape seqeuences can be abused to execute code. So you shouldn't feel so safe curling random websites!
sandos
Soooo, not knowing much about either curl nor front-end.. how DOES THIS WORK?
Is this just some weird default logging in curl?
throwaway0665
Curl just downloads the http response and prints it to the terminal. The sever streams the response and yields a frame of the video every 70ms or so. It sends control characters in the response to clear the terminal and change the color.
foolswisdom
I figure that the response uses ascii escape sequences to control the terminal (and that curl is just piping the response to the terminal).
sodafountan
Short Story: this is just a website.
If you go to parrot.live from your browser it automatically redirects to the GitHub page for the project; The code for which is on line 103: https://github.com/hugomd/parrot.live/blob/master/index.js#L...
You'll notice though that if you change the user agent from your browser to include the string 'curl' you can reach the site from within the browser as the redirect logic encapsulating line 103 doesn't fire.
You can do that by:
* Opening Chrome,
* Opening Chrome Dev Tools within Chrome,
* Going to the Network Tab within Chrome Dev Tools,
* Clicking on "More Network Conditions" within the Network Tab,
* Go the the "User Agent" section and type 'curl' whithout the parens,
* Navigate to parrot.live with the network tab open and you should see the ascii animation in your browser.
Daviey
Loved to death I assume. :(
$ curl parrot.live
<html>
<head><title>504 Gateway Time-out</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>504 Gateway Time-out</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)</center>
</body>
</html>jasonthorsness
You have to use curl:
> curl parrot.live
Otherwise parrot.live redirects (which HN followed otherwise link here would be parrot.live).
mathewpregasen
this is what Hacker News was made for
financypants
That crashed my ssh session into my rapberry pi
donbreo
site crashed! I cant get a response
Wow! Surprised to see this on the front page.
I built this about 8 years ago on a whim, and it blew up. Only recently did I learn there was a memory leak, after getting a big traffic spike that caused an OOM.
Over the years it’s burned through several TB of bandwidth per month.
I built ascii.live to support different animations for fun, although I don’t have as much time to review PRs as I’d like.