Animated Knots

Although it’s evidently been around since the Clinton administration(!), I recently discovered Animated Knots when I was hanging a rope swing from a tree. What an amazingly useful site!

When hanging the swing, I was working with a reference photo that I couldn’t quite figure out. I fed the photo to ChatGPT, and it correctly identified that the rope was tied using a double fisherman’s bend. I then asked it for a diagram of how to tie said bend. The robot happily generated an image with 4 spectacularly idiotic steps that had nothing to do with 1) a double fisherman’s bend nor 2) one another. So I put ChatGPT down and instead queried Kagi with "how to tie a double fisherman’s bend". Its first result was Animated Knots.

Animated Knots is a prime example of the utopian ideals of the old internet, the internet of my youth, the internet I miss. It was a place where people would share their interests and high quality information freely. They weren’t doing it to make a (few billion) buck(s), but rather for the shared good. These sites are there when you need them, aren’t trying to "capture" your "eyeballs" when you don’t, and they’re not trying to sell you anything. Wikipedia is arguably the gold standard of this modus operandi. Animated Knots is another delightful example of this approach, and I’m glad to see that it’s still going strong nearly 30 years in.