Fake, it's not hard to select colors based on hex values you're reading from a printouot ... But it does impress some people who think he's actually designing the code that way.
You've missed the point of the article. Of course the author is picking from a predefined palette and placing colors in a memorised pattern. This is a theatrical way to demonstrate the main point of the article, which is that:
it takes less space to write a 3 minutes HD animated video and music clip than than it takes to store a 32×32 pixel icon
The video very clearly demonstrated that using only a 9x9x24bit image you can encode a program that, when executed, will produce many MBs of data. It's the same concept as x (k)Bytes of data producing an infinitely scrolling procedurally generated terrain.
> the filling of the pixels with carefully chosen colors
See, to me this means "reading the colors from the printout". It's ridiculous that anyone could get the least significant bits of the color right by just eyeballing it, and I don't think the author ever claimed he was doing that.
> It's ridiculous that anyone could get the least significant bits of the color right by just eyeballing it
If you look at the video carefully, you'll see that the color picker displays numeric RGB values and that it has been sped up. Do you think the code would work if he didn't get the values 100% right?
