A couple of years ago, after reading the book, I sketched some of them on Procreate with an isometric grid, but not all 55. I only arrived at number 4, since each took multiple hour...
Since this project (both yours and OP's) seem more for personal fulfillment and enjoyment, I wonder who got more enjoyment out of the process, and also who will remember the results better in ten years.
If you haven’t read the book yet, I’m tempted to warn you against opening the visualization. Part of the joy of reading this book is letting your mind’s eye run wild, and I fear if I read it for the first time after toying with this site, I’d be remembering the cities rather than conjuring them.
That is the exact problem with the city of Dinipro.
Citizens of this city high in the sky imagine it so fully in their minds that no one there needs to open their eyes to walk the streets and live their normal lives.
But if one makes the mistake of opening their eyes and tries to see the city directly, they would immediately fall through the clouds to the ground deep below.
How Opus 5.5 imagines these cities is a question for Opus. The real experience is how we imagine - and I believe there are no two people who have exactly the same mental image of an invisible city.
I heartily recommend the audiobook, narrated by John Lee.
The book is a trip and the dreamy sort of narration matched it perfectly. My wife and I would spend evenings listening to one city at a time, on a walk around our little park, one headphone in each ear. I don't know if it was just the environment or the time in our lives, but we both really look back fondly on this book.
I read the book decades ago, then I lost it in one of the many relocations. I always thought I should buy it again but never acted on the idea... A few years ago, I was walking by an antiquarian, and noticed a thin unmarked gray spine. I entered, picked it up, paid, and walked away.
Maybe the interactive link in the article for the optic focus can lead you on a fun journey instead. And the bottom-right of every visualization is a link to yet another fun diorama to explore.
It's a techie creating the torment nexus but the imagination version. No need to picture in your mind the invisible cities! Time to make them visible!!!
Talk about missing the entire point of the piece of literature.
Invisible Cities is my favorite piece of literature hands down. The audiobook narrated by Richard Higgins is also done so beautifully and can't recommend it more.
As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.
The first city I clicked on at random had the opening phrase:
> Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each different
The model city had like five bridges total, three of which were didn't bridge anything at all but instead sat in the middle of the river and went along its flow, the "bridges" for some reason pretending to be small islands.
This is probably one amazing positive these models have brought forward - the ability to break out of a single modality, and utilise others to help us learn and visualise. While the visuals here are amazing, my son for example prefers to learn by listening and talking, so we convert lot of his study materials into audio and real-time voice roleplay.
both the linked camera lens example as well as the last one the author linked runs at ~5fps on vivaldi and pegs CPU 100%. i have never seen any 3d visualization website have performance this bad, i assume they're not using webgl given my GPU is 0% utilization.
I was finishing Invisible Cities yesterday, because the book was due at my local library today. I was wondering whether the cities could be adapted into some visual art form. And obviously I thought about feeding it to Opus. 24 hours later, I see this post…
Citizens there gather their tools at the bottom of a giant staircase and climb up countless stairs, only to find out that what they were planning to do has already been done by the time they reach the top.
Dissapointed, they descend to grab a new set of tools and make new plans for tomorrow, only for the same thing to happen again.
It reminds me of Total War. The soundtrack and way that the map is shown. Is Total War an inspiration? Anyways, I liked the visualization. But I never read the book, so I followed (partly) droidjj recommendation
Six hours of continuous runtime is the underrated part here. Most one-shot demos fall apart well before that, so this doubles as an endurance benchmark.
Why, I once encountered a running session longer than a day!
The agent had spun up a backward shell script to watch for the shutdown of another process, but wrote a bug in the script that would have left it running indefinitely until I got home and noticed it.
This was with Fable, no less! And it happened a few more times, though I caught them sooner.
I’m not sure runtime is an important metric at all. Shouldn’t we aim for 0 runtime with maximal results?
The supervisor agent will keep the session in a loop until 6 hours have passed and eventually the agent will decide to use up the remaining time rather than fighting with it
I'm a little torn by this sort of demonstration, because while many of the scenes have obvious markers of slop (impossible intersecting geometry, bridges to nowhere, and so on), the scenes largely do work to convey the intended concept/emotion, and the low-poly aesthetic is executed decently well.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that another visual medium is starting to fall to LLMs after the success of diffusion models for image generation. Nevertheless it's wild that a mostly text-focussed model is building little worlds like these.
$74 vs $ 10 vs $25 for the same prompt,
The interesting number is not actually quality, its what we can get per dollar like 6 subagents runs in parallel.
> The days of techies gatekeeping these experiences are over.
Why do people keep using the word "gatekeeping"? "Techies" made open source. Anyone could have taken the time to learn what they wanted, the tools and the resources were available.
The disdain for tech will always baffle me. Yes, this stuff is hard. A lot of it requires a certain level of skill. Even now, you still require some level of skill to get good results.
Also, the "techies" are naturally going to be a lot better at pushing AI to its limits. This doesn't change the playing field - it means more people can do more things, but the upper end of the skill range is going to be just as far ahead, if not further ahead, of everyone else as it always was.
> Anyone could have taken the time to learn what they wanted, the tools and the resources were available.
False in reality. Just ask any dev who has had to listen to family and friends' app ideas over the last decade. The good news for them is soon they will never be asked again.
This is more comparable to a mass produced plastic replica than the handcrafted work of an artist. Experience and skill are not orthogonal to creativity or taste.
Now, you just need to use someone else's words and someone else's AI built on everyone else's stolen art! But sure, yes, thats you being creative... Don't use your imagination at all.
There are three main categories of AI ethical dilemmas for me:
1. IP infringement
2. Climate impact
3. Cultural impact
I think that 2 & 3 apply to all AI right now - artistic, coding, writing, whatever. However, I don't think that #1 applies to everything. Code has been openly shared for as long as it's been possible to do so. There have probably been cases where AI trained on closed-source code, but I hardly believe that was ever necessary at any point to get where we are.
My point in saying this is that your critique of AI is valid but I think a little less so here.
I totally understand. I'm a developer with almost 20 years experience myself and it has taken me a while to come to terms with this too. Fortunately, I made enough during the good times to see me out once my job ceases to exist. I'm sorry for everyone who didn't.
A couple of years ago, after reading the book, I sketched some of them on Procreate with an isometric grid, but not all 55. I only arrived at number 4, since each took multiple hour...
https://camillovisini.com/drawing/fc4jc6-le-citta-invisibili...
https://camillovisini.com/drawing/p2yrdj-le-citta-invisibili...
Since this project (both yours and OP's) seem more for personal fulfillment and enjoyment, I wonder who got more enjoyment out of the process, and also who will remember the results better in ten years.
That looks pretty nice, I didn't know Procreate could be so good at precise line art!
If you haven’t read the book yet, I’m tempted to warn you against opening the visualization. Part of the joy of reading this book is letting your mind’s eye run wild, and I fear if I read it for the first time after toying with this site, I’d be remembering the cities rather than conjuring them.
That is the exact problem with the city of Dinipro.
Citizens of this city high in the sky imagine it so fully in their minds that no one there needs to open their eyes to walk the streets and live their normal lives. But if one makes the mistake of opening their eyes and tries to see the city directly, they would immediately fall through the clouds to the ground deep below.
On that note, I'd quite recommend the Coyote vs. Acme movie, some great world building there.
I fully agree, thank you for this warning.
How Opus 5.5 imagines these cities is a question for Opus. The real experience is how we imagine - and I believe there are no two people who have exactly the same mental image of an invisible city.
I heartily recommend the audiobook, narrated by John Lee.
The book is a trip and the dreamy sort of narration matched it perfectly. My wife and I would spend evenings listening to one city at a time, on a walk around our little park, one headphone in each ear. I don't know if it was just the environment or the time in our lives, but we both really look back fondly on this book.
I read the book decades ago, then I lost it in one of the many relocations. I always thought I should buy it again but never acted on the idea... A few years ago, I was walking by an antiquarian, and noticed a thin unmarked gray spine. I entered, picked it up, paid, and walked away.
I opened it because I had no idea what Invisible Cities meant here. I thought they might be some real cities that don't come up on maps.
The website gives you a good hint before opening up the visuals. So, I got an idea.
I don't really know about Marco Polo. My only knowledge comes from the Netflix series, which doesn't talk about these invisible cities.
Maybe the interactive link in the article for the optic focus can lead you on a fun journey instead. And the bottom-right of every visualization is a link to yet another fun diorama to explore.
It's a techie creating the torment nexus but the imagination version. No need to picture in your mind the invisible cities! Time to make them visible!!!
Talk about missing the entire point of the piece of literature.
Well it still has the trademark "colored left-side of the boxes" ai slop, but otherwise looks very impressive
Invisible Cities is my favorite piece of literature hands down. The audiobook narrated by Richard Higgins is also done so beautifully and can't recommend it more.
As neat as this project is, this does no justice to whatsoever to the book. On the surface Invisible Cities seems to be a book about random cities' descriptions. In reality though, this book is about semiotics, meaning, language, and it's limits.
The first city I clicked on at random had the opening phrase:
> Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each different
The model city had like five bridges total, three of which were didn't bridge anything at all but instead sat in the middle of the river and went along its flow, the "bridges" for some reason pretending to be small islands.
You made the mistake of looking too closely
like bridge over slop and water, i will let you down.
Astra Penthesilea has towers that sometimes clip into the green... hedges? Pipes?
Opus Eutropia has a few isekai circle cities with one of them... ON the river, giving no space for ship traffic.
Slop has never been this beautiful before!
Not to mention that the slop site claims that the cities are Invisible, when I can clearly see them.
Funny note about Opus 5.5.
I once instructed it to spawn at most 20 subagents and it spawned 40, with an adversarial reviewer for each of the 20.
It doesn't follow these instructions very well.
20 sub agents, 20 doms.
I can't imagine a worse thing happening to a better book.
This is probably one amazing positive these models have brought forward - the ability to break out of a single modality, and utilise others to help us learn and visualise. While the visuals here are amazing, my son for example prefers to learn by listening and talking, so we convert lot of his study materials into audio and real-time voice roleplay.
both the linked camera lens example as well as the last one the author linked runs at ~5fps on vivaldi and pegs CPU 100%. i have never seen any 3d visualization website have performance this bad, i assume they're not using webgl given my GPU is 0% utilization.
this is amazing, wonder how much better it's going to get in a year from now
Interactive demo: https://p.migdal.pl/invisible-cities-opus-5.5/
Source code: https://github.com/stared/invisible-cities-opus-5.5
I was finishing Invisible Cities yesterday, because the book was due at my local library today. I was wondering whether the cities could be adapted into some visual art form. And obviously I thought about feeding it to Opus. 24 hours later, I see this post…
That is what happens in the city of Ternopoli.
Citizens there gather their tools at the bottom of a giant staircase and climb up countless stairs, only to find out that what they were planning to do has already been done by the time they reach the top.
Dissapointed, they descend to grab a new set of tools and make new plans for tomorrow, only for the same thing to happen again.
On the down side, $84 spent on a slot machine might have actually yielded some benefits.
It reminds me of Total War. The soundtrack and way that the map is shown. Is Total War an inspiration? Anyways, I liked the visualization. But I never read the book, so I followed (partly) droidjj recommendation
Six hours of continuous runtime is the underrated part here. Most one-shot demos fall apart well before that, so this doubles as an endurance benchmark.
Why, I once encountered a running session longer than a day!
The agent had spun up a backward shell script to watch for the shutdown of another process, but wrote a bug in the script that would have left it running indefinitely until I got home and noticed it.
This was with Fable, no less! And it happened a few more times, though I caught them sooner.
I’m not sure runtime is an important metric at all. Shouldn’t we aim for 0 runtime with maximal results?
Most of that time may have been spent on testing.
How do you get it to spend six hours? I’ve done projects where it would have benefited if it put in extra work.
/goal spend at least 6 hours doing … works
The supervisor agent will keep the session in a loop until 6 hours have passed and eventually the agent will decide to use up the remaining time rather than fighting with it
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claude slop, like from every comments you posted
Does this bring any happiness? for me, No. effort need a purpose.
I ran cat /dev/urandom for six hours but I didn't need to write a blog post about it
Doesn't work right on my phone.
Vanadium (chrome)
https://imgur.com/a/nGLyJf6
I'm a little torn by this sort of demonstration, because while many of the scenes have obvious markers of slop (impossible intersecting geometry, bridges to nowhere, and so on), the scenes largely do work to convey the intended concept/emotion, and the low-poly aesthetic is executed decently well.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that another visual medium is starting to fall to LLMs after the success of diffusion models for image generation. Nevertheless it's wild that a mostly text-focussed model is building little worlds like these.
Cecilia looks like an average residential area in Russia.
$74 vs $ 10 vs $25 for the same prompt, The interesting number is not actually quality, its what we can get per dollar like 6 subagents runs in parallel.
If you're going to spend tokens on 3D stuff, then please build me a better FreeCAD first.
https://github.com/dzervas/cadara
Loads nothing on iphone lockdown mode fwiw.
Isn’t it expected?
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The creation really is amazing. I harnet heard of the book but got a long way through it!
What a beautiful website, wow. I've been online 10,000s of hours, have seen pretty much everything and this one goes straight in my Top 10.
I'm so glad I'm able to witness this Cambrian explosion of software :).
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> The days of techies gatekeeping these experiences are over.
Why do people keep using the word "gatekeeping"? "Techies" made open source. Anyone could have taken the time to learn what they wanted, the tools and the resources were available.
The disdain for tech will always baffle me. Yes, this stuff is hard. A lot of it requires a certain level of skill. Even now, you still require some level of skill to get good results.
No non-corporate tech person has ever wanted to prevent another soul from using their work or learning their craft.
The top-level comment feels a lot like the perspective of somebody who never cared to try.
With robots for agriculture, delivery, and food processing, the days of farmers gatekeeping food will be over
Also, the "techies" are naturally going to be a lot better at pushing AI to its limits. This doesn't change the playing field - it means more people can do more things, but the upper end of the skill range is going to be just as far ahead, if not further ahead, of everyone else as it always was.
> Anyone could have taken the time to learn what they wanted, the tools and the resources were available.
False in reality. Just ask any dev who has had to listen to family and friends' app ideas over the last decade. The good news for them is soon they will never be asked again.
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This is more comparable to a mass produced plastic replica than the handcrafted work of an artist. Experience and skill are not orthogonal to creativity or taste.
The examples were a one shot. The creativity hasn't even been applied yet.
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Now, you just need to use someone else's words and someone else's AI built on everyone else's stolen art! But sure, yes, thats you being creative... Don't use your imagination at all.
There are three main categories of AI ethical dilemmas for me:
1. IP infringement
2. Climate impact
3. Cultural impact
I think that 2 & 3 apply to all AI right now - artistic, coding, writing, whatever. However, I don't think that #1 applies to everything. Code has been openly shared for as long as it's been possible to do so. There have probably been cases where AI trained on closed-source code, but I hardly believe that was ever necessary at any point to get where we are.
My point in saying this is that your critique of AI is valid but I think a little less so here.
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I totally understand. I'm a developer with almost 20 years experience myself and it has taken me a while to come to terms with this too. Fortunately, I made enough during the good times to see me out once my job ceases to exist. I'm sorry for everyone who didn't.
Or, you can use your imagination building on top of the sum of all human knowledge distilled into a language model. Your choice.