Building a World Map with only 500 bytes

According to Simon Willison, developer Iwo Kadziela—assisted by Codex—created a technique to generate a credible world map using just four hundred forty-five bytes of data. The trick combines deflate compression with JavaScript's DecompressionStream API to render a black-asterisk ASCII map. The real elegance lies in the implementation: using fetch() with base-sixty-four-encoded data URIs to decompress the map directly in the browser without requiring external files. It's a striking demonstration of how much information you can compress into a minimal package when you master the right techniques.

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