The Glorious Transhumanist Centaur Future

[brin_bellway]

Apparently I am a good level of tech-savviness for vibe-coding a Linux version of this thing.

"Write, from scratch, a program that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white": beyond my skill level.

"Here is a Python script that monitors a specified area of the screen and makes an alert sound if any of the pixels in it turn white! It has one (1) critical bug causing it to silently fail. Figure out that the bug exists, then track it down, then fix it": *not* beyond my skill level, actually.

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(I *was* originally running the linked program in a Windows 7 virtual machine (connected to the Internet, but not logged into anything), but at least one of the following possible explanations had started to happen:

(1) Windows was pissed that I didn't give them a software key and, after a grace period, started throttling me.

(2) The updates Windows 7 had downloaded (apparently Microsoft is still running update servers for 7, just not uploading new patches to them?) had increased its minimum viable specs beyond the specs I'd given the VM.

(3) It was getting clogged with viruses.

(4) Other.

A Linux Lite VM should be better at these. (Except maybe "other".))

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the code (click to expand)

import time
from PIL import Image
import os

# Define region to monitor: left, top, width, height
REGION = (100, 100, 200, 150) # x, y, w, h

# Path for temp screenshot
SCREENSHOT = "/tmp/screen_region.png"
SOUND = "/usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga" # replace if needed

def capture_region():
os.system(f"scrot -o -a {REGION[0]},{REGION[1]},{REGION[2]},{REGION[3]} {SCREENSHOT}")

def contains_white_pixel(image_path):
img = Image.open(image_path)
pixels = img.getdata()
return any(pixel[:3] == (255, 255, 255) for pixel in pixels)

while True:
capture_region()
if contains_white_pixel(SCREENSHOT):
os.system(f"ffplay -nodisp -autoexit -loglevel quiet {SOUND}")
time.sleep(1) # avoid repeated alerts
time.sleep(0.5) # check interval

Everything *except* the bolded "-o" was written by ChatGPT (current default free tier). If you don't include the "-o" (for "overwrite"), each screen capture is written to a new file with a new filename, but the program only tests the *original* file for white pixels. So it only actually functions during the very first screen-check after you start the program, and each new check after that just re-does the first check over and over (while also piling up more and more screenshot files it isn't looking at).

You also have to figure out yourself (and manually edit) what the pixel coordinates should be for your particular usecase, but that's fair.

(Note: I haven't included the part where ChatGPT explains which prerequisites I should make sure I have installed in order to run this, but it did explain that and it does seem to have been correct.)

---

This may all have sounded like faint praise, but as someone who has barely used LLMs other than Whisper, I am genuinely very impressed by how close it got. Nullius in verba, sure, but that's true of Stack Exchange too.

Rather than digging around trying (and failing, other than the Windows program) to find someone who has posted *almost* what you were looking for so that you can tinker with it until it does *exactly* what you were looking for, you can directly ask an Internet egregore to manifest the software that post *would* contain if it existed!

The future is *wild*.

Comments

[ilzolende]

If it's not too personal a question, what do you want this program for?

[brin_bellway]

Once upon a time (two weeks ago), there was a streamer who had an affiliate deal with a casino. Part of the deal was that if you watched his stream and paid enough attention to type the keyword in the chat during the specified times (and no other times; one idiot rigged a bot to post the keyword every two minutes and got banned), he would give you loyalty points that could be redeemed for discounts on casino chips. If you got enough loyalty points to buy every discount option each week (entirely doable), this was good for about $120/week of expected value.

The way you knew that you were in a loyalty-point-collecting period was that there would be a little timer in a certain area of the screen. The timer's numbers were white. When the timer was not running, that area of the screen was not white. So you didn't actually have to watch this guy's terrible soul-draining stream, if you had a bot watching it for you and pinging you whenever the timer area turned white.

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Not only was this a nice little† boost during the glorious few weeks after Crown Coins expanded into Canada and before they realised that *almost all their Canadian whales were actually parasites*†† and started desperately cracking down (on everybody, including the Americans, though *especially* the Canadians), there was a loophole: you could still get streamer discounts even if you were banned from participating in their regular promotions.

Last week, after I wrote this post but before I published it (I wanted to get "Hath smaller fleas that on him prey" out first), they closed the loophole, so I don't actually need this software anymore. But it was a good learning experience, and helpful for a few days.

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†relative to their *other* promotions, which were insanely profligate (once you got the hang of exploiting them properly)

††that's what happens when you don't advertise well enough! if you rely on word-of-mouth, you might not like which networks the word is spreading in!

[ilzolende]

Aha. Thank you for the explanation. You really are very devoted to your crafts, it's impressive.

[contrarianarchon]

It does seem like the real power of vibe-coding is allowing dutiful sensible people who could have been programmers but happen to not to be to pretend to be entry-level programmers for a few hours when they need to is legitimately one of the biggest value-ads to vibe coding.

(The impact of this on the implied skillset of people currently claiming to be entry-level programmers is left as an exercise to the reader, because apparently we live in a world of people too stupid not to cheat themselves on their own education - which is just starting to filter into my workplace right now, my more-junior coworker is diligent to understand why he has to do his own scut work but thinks that things that chatgpt doesn't know can't be known, which is a concerning attitude.)

... does this greatly annoy me, as someone who got to that skill level the hard way and then stalled out for lack of spoons and progressional opportunities? A little! But I'm sure I'll find space to climb that tower further at some point.