Here is a presentation put together by one of the guys behind this release that explains a lot of about how it was made.

I assume you meant to link this: http://iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009...

Yes, thanks. I'm not sure where my head is today.

Any mirrors, that is down.

Ah, so that was Iñigo Quilez!

The 4kb genre in the scene is incredibly vibrant the last few years. I think this demo really helped kickstart that.

4KB using directx/opengl, very different from old time writing stuff directly in the video card.

I bet they'd still prefer to write directly to the video card, but it's kinda hard nowadays to access GPU resources without an API.

new constraints though... you got a fit a couple of shaders in there too :)

Exactly, 4kb on top of the hundreds of megabytes of libraries and drivers.

Somehow you make it sound easy or even belittling it.

I'd say this is quite an achievement anyway when I know I'd use more space than that just to store a single jpeg or mp3 sample.

I think what parent was trying to say is that it's absolutely an achievement relative to storing a jpeg or mp3 sample, perhaps not so impressive next to the old 4k intros.

...as opposed to another hundred MB or so on top of that.

Could you show me what you can achieve with 4 KB on top of hundreds of megabytes of libraries and drivers?

You don't have to be a car manufacturer to criticize a car and not an architect to criticize a building.

"If you can't do it better, shut up" is a stupid argument.

"That's easy, anyone can do it" is similarly stupid, especially when anyone who actually does stuff like this says it's impressive.

But nobody said that.

There's a pretty clear implication.

Even 4KB demo in browsers is a thing these days.

the part I loved best was how those 4kb uncompressed to over 250MB of GPU instructions