less_retarded_wiki/viznut.md
2022-09-03 14:13:46 +02:00

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Viznut

Viznut (real name Ville-Matias Heikkilä) is a Finnish demoscene programmer, hacker and artist that advocated high technological minimalism. He is known for example for his countercomplex blog, co-discovering bytebeat and creating IBNIZ. In his own words, he believes much more can be done with much less. He also warns of collapse (http://viznut.fi/en/future.html). According to his Fediverse page he lives in Turku, Finland, was born around 1977 and has been programming since the age of seven.

His work is pretty based, in many ways aligned with LRS, he contributed a great deal to minimalist technology. Unfortunately in some ways he also seems pretty retarded: he uses facebook, twitter and github and also mentions "personal pronouns" on his twitter xD Pretty disappointing TBH. This would make Viznut a type A fail.

His personal site is at http://viznut.fi/en/ and his blog at http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/. He collects many files at http://viznut.fi/files/, including very interesting writings about demoscene, programming experiments etc.

In 2011 he released IBNIZ, a tiny SDL virtual machine and a language that's meant as a platform for creating demos. Also in 2011 he was involved in the discovery of bytebeat, a way of creating music with extremely simple C expressions -- later he published a paper about it. In 2012 he founded Skrolli, a magazine about sustainable/non-consumerist technology. In about 2019 he released PC-lamerit, an animated series about 90s computer hackers, made as an executable computer program -- it looks pretty cool. He also created UNSCII, a fixed-width font usable for ANSI art.