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4th July 2026 - Link Blog

Building a World Map with only 500 bytes (via) Iwo Kadziela (assisted by Codex) figured out a way to generate a credible ASCII world map using 445 bytes of data:

A map of the world rendered as black asterisk ASCII characters, it looks very good

The key trick is to use deflate compression, which is then wired together using this neat snippet of JavaScript. I didn't know you could use fetch() with data: URIs like this:

fetch('data:;base64,1ZpLsgIxCEXnrM...==').then(
  r => r.body.pipeThrough(new DecompressionStream('deflate-raw'))
).then(
  s => new Response(s).text()
).then(
  t => b.innerHTML = '<pre style=font-size:.65vw>' + t
)