The Secret Inside One Million Checkboxes
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- My favorite story from One Million Checkboxes (onemillionchec...) - a website of mine that became shockingly popular. It begins with me thinking I was hacked and ends with my crying some (very proud) tears due to some very talented teens.
Links:
* Original site: onemillionchec...
* Blog about the tech behind the site: eieio.games/es...
* My website: eieio.games
* My mailing list: eieio.substack...
Hope you enjoy :)
![Cody Johnson - I'm Gonna Love You (with Carrie Underwood) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yy9PuYMU29g/mqdefault.jpg)
I'm used to stories of programmers putting 'Easter Eggs' into their code/program/game for their audiences to find; this is the first time I have heard of members of the audience for a game putting an Easter Egg into the game for the programmers to find. Neat!
How the turn tables
@@JoeMamaTheSecond Bobby Tables, perchance?
@@virtuous-sloth You can't just say perchance.
I did, I hid a pic of the love of my life in Halo CE
its not really uncommon, bad actors commonly use public posts to hide their messaging to one another. in technical terms, anything (e.g. an instagram post's comments) can act as a command and control (C2) server. They will add a very specific string of characters followed by the command they want to send (like #qjnc89898$$yyj START)
“The internet can still be fun”
I love this. Thank you for saying it
I like it, make more. You already nailed the typical "voice" of RUclips.
hey, this is really kind, I'm so delighted to hear this :)
+1 keep youtoubing
What? North american?
@@itseieio i support this notion. you have the cadence, you have the story telling, this was super cool
"The internet can still be fun" what a great way to end the video! 👏
This is such a wild, interesting story. I love that you and a whole community of people reverse engineered themselves into a secret information layer in your weird project on the internet. That is truly one of my favorite things about the internet. Spontaneous, clever creativity that exists for even a bried amount of time.
Keep the fun projects coming! I'd love to see more long form videos, too! Just subscribed.
(A tiny bit of be-nice-about-it feedback, since you asked: when recording something like this, if you're not reading off of a script, do your best to stare directly into the lens of your camera, rather than watching yourself in the recording window. It has the effect of creating a more natural eye contact. And if that's not what you're after -- all good!)
Ah this is really helpful - I found the camera bit hard because it's right on top of my monitor so it was hard to stare into - I was trying, but sometimes it looked off because I was kinda looking up in a weird way? So I moved the recording window to the top of my screen and stared at that lol.
Thinking I might get a separate camera to stare into and just totally hide the window to fix the angle??
And I'm so glad you enjoyed the story :)
try sticking a smiley face sticker as close to the lens as possible and staring at that. faces are much easier to look at for long periods of time
That's some cicada 3301 shit right there
I love your editing style and the text commentary you add while you speak. I thought that was a style you developed over time, I'm impressed that this is your first!
Wonderful story, brilliantly told and well done for supporting those teens!
Charles Arthur shared your story in his daily email this morning. It's blown my mind and, like you, left me with a great sense of optimism about the future. Thank you for sharing this amazing story.
Just come to say that you should definetly make more videos! I like clever programmers talking about their stuff, as I consider myself one of them, and I'm always open to see obscure ideas from other fellow programmers. Projects like this are more than someone fiddling around with some code, this is turned out to be a great social experiment in which I learned that the internet we grew up with and loved is not dead, we just need to summon the right audience with the right tools.
I can only imagine the excitement you had discovering that secret message 😭
Your ability to speak and present and make the story interesting and entertaining is incredible. That was great! sub'd
Here from the primagen recommend, loved hearing about your story and wanted to come by to support since this was so cool!
I love everything about this .... especially being reminded/taken back to my old high school computer lab days where we could tinker / explore all afternoon. Thank you for sharing!
So much fun! This touches my retro-bit heart. Kids are so smart these days -- Find a way to change the world in a fun and positive way guys!
Man i wish i saw the site sooner thats so cool 🔥🔥🔥
you technicly were hacked just not in the way you expected. but this is amazing.
Oaky, this whole thing is just wholesome.
How did you actually visualize the boxes as a 1000x1000 image?😊
I would guess that they just reverse engineered his api and then rendered it out with python or something that’s how would do it lol
Yeah, that's my guess as well. I believe they first reverse enginereed the API request to fetch the bitset that holds the state of the checkboxes. Then, they mapped each bit in the bitset to a pixel in a 1000x1000 black-and-white image, with each 0 as a white pixel (representing an unchecked checkbox) and each 1 as a black pixel (representing a checked checkbox).
Ya other comments are totally right, they wrote a bot that kept track of what boxes were checked and turned that into an image!
We need more creatives like you. Definitely make more videos and more original fun wacky projects. Instant sub 🎉
I was trying for so long to remember where I've seen this guy before and then I realized he was in a Jane Street mock interview I watched lol. Awesome site btw
That was really rad dude, great job! :)
Great video I’d definitely watch whatever you make next
this is a great video, you do a great job of explaining the technical stuff so that people can understand.
This was awesome! The story is also crazy
Very cool, thank you for sharing this story!
Great story. Nice video too
Hey man, great stuff. You rock.
Welcome to: How to start a youtube career
Epic, wait thats actually so funny
1M checkboxes is this online generations million dollar homepage. Always fascinating when a simple idea, executed well, gets that kind of viral and universal appeal. And even better when it is a positive and uplifting story.
Hello! How do you do? How is the raspberry pi with graphics card project going?
@@JeffGeerling this is like, idk, 8 years late but thanks for your ansible work. I contributed back. You really helped move the needle on ansible. Now we're on to the next things :)
What I really like about this is because it's so simple it's a fantastic model to study what happens at scale: the web service is a bunch of bits in a sequence which users can interact with. By simply adding constraints and rules to this (i.e. a user can only edit a specified portion of bits, changing bit A from 0 to 1 causes bit B to flip) I think you could model every web platform on this as it's basically another representation of Turing machine.
r/place more like
great story. it checks all the boxes
cool pfp
noice 😄
Holy shit you made a whole video??? This story is incredible and I"d love to cover it
letting people edit a looooonnngg list of bytes could result in someone writing an ENTIRE game in the boxes, which would be so funny.
Imagine the dinosaur jumping game
DOOM IN CHECKING BOXES
@@idooard420 compressing the original doom is about 2.39mb, could shed a bit more if you dont care about colors and other things, so it may be possible to share doom on there
there's 1 billion checkboxes game (i heard) has dropped, so i guess
A bot that monitors specific checkboxes as input and draws sceen on other checkboxes
Honestly i wish they did a rendition of bad apple
they did ruclips.net/video/DcwD7U0958s/видео.html
they did, there's a video on youtube where someone did that
i can already hear the beats when i think about bad apple
METOO
Read the thread on twitter and then came here. Such a cool story! I love that you unknowingly provided the space for these ingenious teens to play and make something.
I was wondering, what do the colored frames around some of the checkboxes mean?
the colored squares were totally arbitrary! I wanted to provide some places for people to focus on when clicking and see if they clicked them more often (they did)
@@itseieioYes... we were trying to figure out what it meant! 😂
I did a lot of dumb crap in school as a teen too... and I will never forget one teacher that rather than punishing me tried to get me into using my "talents" positively. It was a small gesture but it helped change my life. Adults and teachers, you have no idea the influence you actually have over kids. You can make or break their future. Most of them are just curious and exploring a new world just like you did.
Really fun idea and I like that instead of horrible people using it to share hate + slurs and stuff, a bunch of teens were using it to share innocuous memes. Love that!
Basically, he made it hard for regular people to draw, which filtered many jerks and left smart ones, who are less likely to be jerks (I hope)
the boxes have been checked methinks
minestorm
I love that word
sillycord
I hope he didn’t assume someone would really check the boxes manually. 😅
I love how you ended this video so much. I'm a bit older but I grew up on IRC instead of Discord, hanging out with other kids pulling off such shenanigans. I have a career and a life now because of how much I learned and how much fun I had in those days. Hacker culture was really thriving back then. We cared a lot about physical, mental, and intellectual health. It was like modern redpill stuff without the toxicity. Just try to be your best person.
It's really easy (and correct) to lament how much damage the internet has done to society. But stories like this point out that every now and then, something beautiful happens between strangers. We all win! ❤
I was aware of 1 million checkboxes briefly. I didn't realize it was over, and I never got clued into it. But you obviously did something awesome here.
And yes, IMMEDIATELY my first thoughts when I saw it were about how to game it to my advantage. But then I had a standup meeting and forgot.
"modern redpill stuff without the toxicity", so not redpill at all? lmao
What a fantastic story behind a fantastic idea! Very cool
Man so many devs would have got upset, tried to block them, got the discord shut down, maybe even went to the cops and got these kids hit with Computer Fraud and Abuse Act charges for botting your site. Nice to see the spirit of Screwin Around is still alive on this shitty internet
To be fair, they weren't doing anything inappropriate, so I can see why they didn't get shut down.
Good luck with getting them charged for botting your little game lol the authorities don't care as long as there is no tangible damage in the form of data or money stolen. And that's as long as they take you seriously, if I tried to report a Discord server to the FBI for botting my game they'd laugh me out of there. There would be no cheaters on video games if they went after every single one of them.
So accurate.
they didn't do anything wrong so there's nothing to complain about, besides content creators just use that for content to grow their channel - which this guy did.
Just finished your written article, liked and subscribed! Great story!!
I'm a software tester and I automated the checkboxes quickly with a javascript in the console, I even bypassed your front end limitations but it seems that although I was able to check 50 boxes per second the server didnt process them
It was a well made project, easy concept and great execution
after watching the video im thinking the backend might have processed my checkboxes but other peoples bots might have just been undoing my work.. well, we'll never know :)
why are you not blinking start blinking
evil magic
lmao this is always a problem for me when i play games (I don't blink enough and then my eyes get rly dry), it's so funny that I do it in this video and that so many people have noticed
Great video. I preferred it to reading the article version. Voice was great too. Visuals were great. Please continue!
Feedback: I think you could make better eye contact with the camera. It visually looked like you were reading off a script.
I suppose that a teleprompter could help with that.
Thanks! Yeah, a few people have mentioned that. The problem is that my camera is mounted on top of my monitor so it's pretty awkward to make eye contact with and I end up looking at me on the monitor instead. But that's super fixable, just gonna get a better camera and put it somewhere else.
7:09 of course they were Jet Lag The Game fans haha
also man this video was really well made!! keep it up man!
And now I know, it's just a game-
i sure wonder who was drawing that haha 👀
But the question is, were they Team Sam, Team Adam, or Team Ben fans?
OH nice I missed that. good spot
Just wanted to send you some positive vibes! Been following your post mortem on 1M checkboxes and now I get this treat of a video. Thank you for sharing with everyone its cool to see moments like this happy and your joy is infectious.
Chapters
0:00 - Intro
1:01 - Bit of Context 1: Constraining the Assholes
3:28 - The actual story
4:22 - I'm not hacked??
4:58 - what does that mean
5:48 - so should I click it
8:00 Outro
Very interesting video.
I've seen this project on twitter first, back when it was live. I've tried it and it didn't work for some reason (at least for me). And now randomly you pop up on my YT.
The story about those hackers is even more interesting. I've seen similar stuff and I just can't believe that that happens. I consider myself very tech savvy and "smart". I've used technology since I was a wee lad, phones since like 5-6 and a PC since maybe 10-11. I've always liked to poke around and explore, wasn't afraid to break stuff. When all the kids were just interested in playing video games I was poking around the system and BIOS and stuff. Later on that made me go into software development. However even with all of that, I am nowhere even close to what these kids are doing. I've been in a few Windows modding discord communities where they make custom themes, revive and patch old programs or OSes or leaked demo stuff. It is INSANE, because none of that you learn in school, none of that is even documented anywhere. AND THEY ARE MOSTLY JUST FUCKIN 15 YEAR OLDS!!! HOW BRO, HOW?! Like I am straight up jealous of them. On the other it really warms my heart to see stuff like that. At least some of the kids are alright.
Great video! Felt like a Vox narration. 👌🏼
4:43 i actually saw this happen and kept fighting against it but i coulden't do anything
Glad your article and video were recommended by Jason Kottke. It was nice to hear how you had fun with it instead of trying to spoil their party.
Sucks that i wasnt around for when they came. Me and my friends were making some bots for doing stuff but ig we were too early for us to get the invite
what a banger story 🔥
I can see the 1000x1000 bitmap idea - that makes sense to me. What prompted you to dump the bits as ASCII? Did you suspect there may be valid strings?
I really don't have a good answer for this!
I had dumped the data before because early on there was a bug that let people write to checkboxes outside of the 1 million range, and people abused that to fill up my database. So I guess I just...dumped it again because I already had the script on hand (I used it to validate that I had shrunk my data correctly) and I was tired? I don't have a good answer for you.
Pretty crazy to think that I could have *completely* missed this if I hadn't dumped the data.
When is there going to be season 2 with 1 billion checkboxes
Don't fall asleep first at the sleepover lest queer teenagers turn your brain into an art program
For being your first video, this was actually really fantastic. I'd say keep going
this reminds me of when I made a floating point number binary explorer, I had to put the bits in a 8 by 8 grid to fit on the screen. and unexpectedly, kids started using it to draw stuff in it that could be encoded in a single number. I think it's pretty cool how especially young people can find ways to draw and express themselves in unexpected places
Stop using that ai eye contact camera thing pls
How did you not blink for the whole video?!
The pure excitement when you actually joined their discord.... That must have been so fucking great.
the only thing that makes me sad about this story, is that i found about about one million checkboxes way too late when it was already closed, because i would have totally done the same too...
bro, with a better thumbnail this video could do really good
this was fun to watch!!
how do you make good thumbnails lol
(ok really this is a thing I should learn, I obviously did not spend much time thinking about it, I appreciate the nudge!)
6:22 NOITA MENTIONED 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
re preventing abuse, I think you could also have gotten away with randomizing the checkboxes per row when they are rendered. I don't think many people would notice :)
Oh interesting! But not totally sure I agree - this would have made it harder for me to demo / a worse experience when you were showing someone else, and I could imagine some users noticing and feeling cheated? might be wrong about that though (and it’s def a cool idea - not trying to be dismissive!!)
@@itseieio Yeah, I understand what you mean -- it is a more invasive method. In low-player context, I can see it being much more noticeable (especially if they know eachother!!). Anyway, thanks for the video, always fun hearing others' thought process when making something cool like this :)
I had my fun ticking boxes to make funny stuff on the website and showing it to people on the discord
catgirls for the win!
Yay you're on youtube! Keep it up!
Patt!!!!
I love how this started as a simple project and turned into something so much bigger. It's amazing what people can do when they work together.
i cant uncheck any boxes
every box checked :(
The most creative things are born to work around constraints
Your website and the passion you show in this video is great.
Good story but someone has to address the elephant in the room..
where tf are the timber hearth and dark bramble postcards???
lmao (they’re on the opposite wall, above my monitor, along with a few other posters)
@@itseieio 🥰
Very inspiring! 🤗Thank you for explaining the background and what happened 🙏
Script 10/10. Acting 10/10. Hand gestures 10/10. Fake smile 69/10. EDIT: what I’m trying to say is, be yourself, don’t exaggerate points or feelings, we see you, no need to raise your hand.
Moral: If you give the internet a canvas, the are gonna use it
this is so cool
Great vid
(I'm an old game dev, so I totally get "creating a playground"
Yeah, make more videos.
Um, is that a GTA map framed on your wall?
I have a wall full of maps of "places that don't exist"
Stanford version: Half the checkboxes could have been randomly red, the other half randomly blue. Behold the tribalism ensure...
saw this video because Steve Wozniak shared it, cool stuff!
What percent of the 650 million clicks came only from these teens and their Discord server? I'm going with 90% of all clicks.
this is a huge inspiration, amazing work
There's something called TTP in game development. Finally get something useful and not just lower my attention span using RUclips Short. Thanks
Great story! Few video tips, buy a good microphone, have an interesting background, use quickly displayed graphics to break up the technical bits, good luck
6:20 Noita mentioned let’s fucking gooooooo
This is just a story. And you're a great storyteller! So yeah - DO MORE PLEASE! :)
*Thank you for proving the internet is meant for more than one half of the world to yell at the other half* MAGA news all day on RUclips has messed with my brain. So thank you for the site. And thank you to all the peeps interacting on one million checkboxes with silliness joy fun and most importantly kindness to one another.
WHAT I spent a lot of time idly clicking boxes I can't believe this was going on! That's amazing.
Would love to see you talk more about things you've made, this was fascinating!
Eyy, I read this on twitter. Cool to see it on yt too
I had goosebumps, it's like getting a message from aliens, something you totally don't expect
Really enjoyed this story! It reminded me of some intriguing Darknet Diaries episodes.
I read the x*tter thread and then came here to watch your video! I really enjoyed your telling of what happened. Great pacing. The on-screen text notes were helpful and --most importantly-- on the screen long enough to actually read. I look forward to seeing what else you share with us here. I'll be watching!
Interesting note, because this is being done by the coordination of 50 people, it accurately reflects how resolution and artifacts works. A faster algorithm producing a lower res product.
Sounds like reddits "bad apple" video by tje Osu! Community 😅
I love this story. I had no idea these things were happening behind the scenes, that is awesome. And what a cool concept - a community gated by cleverness and ingenuity, dedicated to recruiting others like them. It is such a curious problem, designing something that people can interact with, while also avoiding causing harm. Sometimes I wonder how Minecraft even exists - how the public perception wasn't immediately flooded with dicks and hate speech (I mean, it's there, but). The sort of "good" of the creative tools won out.
Curious about those "Animated GIFs", did they do like one frame at a time and then took a screenshot of the final 1000x1000 image, stitching it back together afterwards? Or did they actually try to get it almost in real time?
I love the fact that the RUclips algorithm recommended me your video, even before Theo showed it to me. Even if it's a pretty small video, new channel, etc.