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AI World Clocks

clocks.brianmoore.com

51–60 of 404 posts

Re: AI World Clocks

#53
post #5

Cool, and marginally informative on the current state of things. but kind of a waste of energy given everything is re-done every minute to compare. We'd probably only need a handful of each to see the meaningful differences.

It's actually quite fascinating if you watch it for 5 minutes. Some models are overall bad, but others nail it in one minute and butcher it in the next. It's perhaps the best example I have seen of model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt.

Kimi seems the only reliable one which is a bit surprising, and GPT 4o is consistently better than GPT 5 which on the other hand is unfortunately not surprising at all.

Re: AI World Clocks

#56

Since the first (good) image generation models became available, I've been trying to get them to generate an image of a clock with 13 instead of the usual 12 hour divisions. I have not been successful. Usually they will just replace the "12" with a "13" and/or mess up the clock face in some other way. I'd be interested if anyone else is successful. Share how you did it!

LLMs are terrible for out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. You should use chain of thought suppression and give constaints explictly.

My prompt to Grok:

---

Follow these rules exactly:

- There are 13 hours, labeled 1–13.

- There are 13 ticks.

- The center of each number is at angle: index * (360/13)

- Do not infer anything else.

- Do not apply knowledge of normal clocks.

Use the following variables:

HOUR_COUNT = 13

ANGLE_PER_HOUR = 360 / 13 // 27.692307°

Use index i ∈ [0..12] for hour marks:

angle_i = i * ANGLE_PER_HOUR

I want html/css (single file) of a 13-hour analog clock.

---

Output from grok.

https://jsfiddle.net/y9zukcnx/1/

Re: AI World Clocks

#57
post #30

These types of tests are fundamentally flawed. I was able to create perfect clock using gemini 2.5 pro - https://gemini.google.com/share/136f07a0fa78

Even Gemini Flash did really well for me[0] using two prompts - the initial query and one to fix the only error I could identify.

> Please generate an analog clock widget, synchronized to actual system time, with hands that update in real time and a second hand that ticks at least once per second. Make sure all the hour markings are visible and put some effort into making a modern, stylish clock face.

Followed by:

> Currently the hands are working perfectly but they're translated incorrectly making then uncentered. Can you ensure that each one is translated to the correct position on the clock face?

[0] https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...

Re: AI World Clocks

#58
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually quite fascinating if you watch it for 5 minutes. Some models are overall bad, but others nail it in one minute and butcher it in the next. It's perhaps the best example I have seen of model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt.

> model drift driven by just small, seemingly unimportant changes to the prompt What changes to the prompt are you referring to? According the comment on the site, the prompt is the following: Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown f…

presumably the time is replaced with the actual current time at each generation. I wonder if they are actually generated every minute or if all 6480 permutations (720 minutes in a day * 9 llms) were generated and just show on a schedule

Re: AI World Clocks

#59

Why? This is diagonal to how LLM's work, and trivially solved by a minimal hybrid front/sub system.

Because, LLMs are touted to be the silver bullet of silver bullets. Built upon world's knowledge, and with the capacity to call upon updated information with agents, they are ought to rival the top programmers 3 days ago.

They might be touted like that but it seems like you don't understand how they work. The example in the article shows that the prompt is limiting the LLM by giving it access to only 2000 tokens and also saying "ONLY OUTPUT ...". This is like me asking you to solve the same problem but forcing you do de-activate half of your brain + forget any programming experience you have. It's just stupid.

Re: AI World Clocks

#60

Since the first (good) image generation models became available, I've been trying to get them to generate an image of a clock with 13 instead of the usual 12 hour divisions. I have not been successful. Usually they will just replace the "12" with a "13" and/or mess up the clock face in some other way. I'd be interested if anyone else is successful. Share how you did it!

From my experience they quickly fail to understand anything beyond a superficial description of the image you want.

That's less and less true

https://minimaxir.com/2025/11/nano-banana-prompts/

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