I'm so delighted you guys are discovering this for the first time. It's been around for a long time. I think I first saw it in 2011.
ale42•Feb 13, 2026
There's a (not so visible) info button top right. It says:
cachemonet is an exploration into the serendipitous collisions that
occur between two randomly generated arrays. the arrays contain a mix
of custom and found .gifs sourced from tumblr and are set to
music. the output is autonomous, generative, art made possible through
curation & code.
You can even turn on sound...
pocksuppet•Feb 13, 2026
and it sounds like "cash money"
ale42•Feb 13, 2026
That probably depends on what is being displayed... at some point I had sounds of USB connect/disconnect (possibly from the Windows 7 era).
1f60c•Feb 13, 2026
I think GP is referring to the name of the site, which sounds like "cash money" if you pronounce it with a thick American accent.
cocoto•Feb 13, 2026
Works almost like stereograms (with duplicated object)!
I discovered this page like back in 2015 and I am grateful to find it on hackernews again, I forgot even its name in the meantime.
Bjorkbat•Feb 13, 2026
Finding out that this is over 10 years old has made me profoundly sad. Despite the age of LLMs arguably unlocking massive amounts of productivity and agency for developers and non-developers alike, it feels as though we are living in a dark age of creativity on the web, maybe even a dark age for computer culture in general.
yreg•Feb 13, 2026
New interesting artsy web projects are being posted on hn all the time. neal.fun is an obvious example but there are plenty of others as well.
I'm keenly aware, I have a pretty extensive collection of Hacker News bookmarks. It's hard to articulate why I think these are different, but I think the best way to put it is that cachemonet feels a lot more avant garde, and perhaps also a reflection of a very particular form of "web culture" that has no clear successors.
People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.
EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.
jgord•Feb 13, 2026
I wonder when peak demoscene occurred .. some of those mini code demos seem artistically and technically innovative.
jgord•Feb 13, 2026
I posit that periods of relatively high creativity [ in art science music literature ] coincide with periods of relatively low inequality.
ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.
Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.
BenjaminBarwo•Feb 13, 2026
I thought I was safe on here.
isoprophlex•Feb 13, 2026
strong overtones of Blank Banshee going on here.
good times
yreg•Feb 13, 2026
Now I know what to do with my extra monitor that I used to use for a home dashboard.
what's the symbols for that `ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ ` font? where can I find these
hmokiguess•Feb 13, 2026
also, seems like they have another project https://feel.thatsh.it/ and I'd love to find that song as well if you can help haha
neom•Feb 13, 2026
I forgot about this, thank you! It was literally my screensaver all through the digitalocean build and got me through a lot of rough days. The clicking, I dunno, I spent too much time getting into weird click rhythms on this site. I would buy whoever made it dinner. https://www.cachemonet.com/save/
18 Comments
Having to pass a vote before you were uploaded and available for real I think was a good way to do things. Like a shitty peer review but for coolness.
Made me lose interest in browsing real quick
Such a simpler time.
There's an actress called Cashae Monya
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm13392714/
And you dip dip, dip...
https://ambient.garden/
https://cannoneyed.com/isometric-nyc/
https://terra.layoutit.com/
https://ambigr.am/hall-of-fame
https://autism-simulator.vercel.app/
People are experimenting with what you can do on the web, but the experiments aren't very "aesthetically inspiring". For that reason I'm kind of lukewarm on neal.fun.
EDIT: so I think a better way to describe it is that when artists experiment with technology, you get something like cachemonet. When developers experiment with technology, you get a web experiment that challenges conventional notions of what you can do with the web, but with varying degrees of creativity. I think terra.layoutit.com is best appreciated by other web devs who can appreciate the sheer amount of work required to figure out how to render a terrain map in CSS, but otherwise it's basically just a tool to generate terrain height maps, and not a particularly good one. Generating terrain maps in CSS is not a feature, but a handicap.
ie. if everyone is working so hard to pay rent / college, nobody has time to work on side projects in the garage, or go deep into books, or dedicate spare time to a craft or do down a science research rabbit hole.
Im not sure LLMs will free up much time for people in the middle of the economy - they might produce more but get paid the same.
good times
Somehow reminded me about the biobak website from 2010s, unfortunately only available in the archive now, but still functional.
Song name is: Windowdipper from ꪖꪶꪶ ꪮꪀ ꪗꪖꪶꪶ by Jib Kidder
https://jibkidder.bandcamp.com/track/windowdipper