- The author built a JS1k competition entry years ago: a world map using ASCII characters, aiming for under 1KB.
- They later tried using AI (Codex) to reduce size further; AI initially suggested SVG but it failed due to complexity, leading back to ASCII format.
- Optimizations included removing water dots, cropping margins, and using land-only characters, which improved compression due to repeated runs.
- The final compressed map data was 445 bytes, with the HTML under 1KB, highlighting the importance of compression-friendly representation.