Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

j0nah.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 483 posts

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#181

Post by nextos »

mlinsey wrote: post #151
jacquesm wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude didn't write that code. Someone else did and Claude took that code without credit to the original author(s), adapted it to your use case and then presented it as its own creation to you and you accepted this. If a human did this we probably would have a word for them.

Certainly if a human wrote code that solved this problem, and a second human copied and tweaked it slightly for their use case, we would have a word for them. Would we use the same word if two different humans wrote code that solved two different problems, but one part of each problem was somewhat analogous to a different aspect of a third human's problem, and the third human took inspiration from those parts of both…

In case of LLMs, due to RAG, very often it's not just learning but almost direct real-time plagiarism from concrete sources.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#182

Post by jazzyjackson »

crawshaw wrote: post #158
fpoling wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick up a book about programming from seventies or eighties that was unlikely to be scanned and feed into LLM. Take a task from it and ask LLM to write a program from it that even a student can solve within 10 minutes. If the problem was not really published before, LLM fails spectacularly.

This does not appear to be true. Six months ago I created a small programming language. I had LLMs write hundreds of small programs in the language, using the parser, interpreter, and my spec as a guide for the language. The vast majority of these programs were either very close or exactly what I wanted. No prior source existed for the programming language because I created it whole cloth days earlier.

Obviously you accidentally recreated a language from the 70s :P

(I created a template language for JSON and added branching and conditionals and realized I had a whole programming language. Really proud of my originality until i was reading Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines and found out I reinvented TRAC, and to some extent, XSLT. Anyway LLMs are very good at reasoning about it because it can be constrained by a JSON schema. People who think LLMs only regurgitate haven't given it a fair shot)

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#183

Post by manmal »

hooo wrote: post #157
epgui wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At that point you may as well just do the work yourself.

Why? Just give it access to the playwright mcp server.

I‘m using this, works really well and doesn’t pollute context as much:

https://github.com/steipete/agent-scripts/blob/main/scripts/...

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#184

Post by fpoling »

crawshaw wrote: post #158
fpoling wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pick up a book about programming from seventies or eighties that was unlikely to be scanned and feed into LLM. Take a task from it and ask LLM to write a program from it that even a student can solve within 10 minutes. If the problem was not really published before, LLM fails spectacularly.

This does not appear to be true. Six months ago I created a small programming language. I had LLMs write hundreds of small programs in the language, using the parser, interpreter, and my spec as a guide for the language. The vast majority of these programs were either very close or exactly what I wanted. No prior source existed for the programming language because I created it whole cloth days earlier.

Languages with reasonable semantics are rather similar and LLMs are good at detecting that and adapting from other languages.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#185

Post by chongli »

hedgehog wrote: post #166
chongli wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this something a Wayland compositor (a glorified window manager) needs to worry about? Apple figured this out back in the 1990s with ColorSync and they did it once for the Mac OS and any application that wanted colour management could use the ColorSync APIs.

Color management infrastructure is intricate. To grossly simplify: somehow you need to connect together the profile and LUT for each display, upload the LUTs to the display controller, and provide appropriate profile data for each window to their respective processes. During compositing then convert buffers that don't already match the output (unmanaged applications will probably be treated as sRGB, color managed gra…

Yes, but why is the compositor dealing with this? Shouldn't the compositor simply be deciding which windows go where (X, Y, and Z positions) and leave the rendering to another API? Why does every different take on a window manager need to re-do all this work?

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#186

Post by BiteCode_dev »

Tell claude to put the screenshot as an centered image with the body having the starry background on repeat. Then define the links as boxes over each icons with an old little tech trick called an image map.

Common at the time before flash took over.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#187

Post by wilsmex »

Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however:

"The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.".

This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a thing back then...

Here was its one-shot attempt at building the same type of layout (table based) with a screenshot and assets as input: https://i.imgur.com/fhdOLwP.png

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#188

Post by btown »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #116
littlecranky67 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things Because the rendered output (pixels, not HTML/CSS) is not fed as data in the training. You will find tons of UI snippets and questions, but they rarely included screenshots. And if they do, the are not scraped.

Interesting thought. I wonder if Anthropic et al could include some sort of render-html-to-screenshot as part of the training routine, such that the rendered output would get included as training data.

Even better, a tool that can tell the rendered bounding box of any set of elements, and what the distances between pairs of elements are, so it can make adjustments if relative positioning doesn't match its expectation. This would be incredible for SVG generation for diagrams, too.

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#189

Post by godelski »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #56
999900000999 wrote: post #9

Space Jam website design as an LLM benchmark. This article is a bit negative. Claude gets close , it just can't get the order right which is something OP can manually fix. I prefer GitHub Copilot because it's cheaper and integrates with GitHub directly. I'll have times where it'll get it right, and times when I have to try 3 or 4 times.

> it just can't get the order right which is something OP can manually fix. If the tool needs you to check up on it and fix its work, it's a bad tool.

I wouldn't go that far, but I do believe good tool design tries to make its failure modes obvious. I like to think of it similar to encryption: hard to do, easy to verify.

All tools have failure modes and truthfully you always have to check the tool's work (which is your work). But being a master craftsman is knowing all the nuances behind your tools, where they work, and more importantly where they don't work.

That said, I think that also highlights the issue with LLMs and most AI. Their failure modes are inconsistent and difficult to verify. Even with agents and unit tests you still have to verify and it isn't easy. Most software bugs are created from subtle things, often which compound. Which both those things are the greatest weaknesses of LLMs: nuance and compounding effects.

So I still think they aren't great tools, but I do think they can be useful. But that also doesn't mean it isn't common for people to use them well outside the bounds of where they are generally useful. It'll be fine a lot of times, but the problem is that it is like an alcohol fire[0]; you don't know what's on fire because it is invisible. Which, after all, isn't that the hardest part of programming? Figuring out where the fire is?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zpLOn-KJSE

Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

#190

Post by jazzyjackson »

Aurornis wrote: post #38
sigseg1v wrote: post #19

Curious if you've tested something such as: - "First, calculate the orbital radius. To do this accurately, measure the average diameter of each planet, p, and the average distance from the center of the image to the outer edge of the planets, x, and calculate the orbital radius r = x - p" - "Next, write a unit test script that we will run that reads the rendered page and confirms that each planet is on the orbital ra…

This is my experience with using LLMs for complex tasks: If you're lucky they'll figure it out from a simple description, but to get most things done the way you expect requires a lot of explicit direction, test creation, iteration, and tokens. One of the keys to being productive with LLMs is learning how to recognize when it's going to take much more effort to babysit the LLM into getting the right result as opposed…

Re: tokens, there is a point where you have to decide what's worth it to you. I'd been unimpressed with what I could get out of chat apps but when I wanted to do a rails app that would cost me thousands in developer time and some weeks between communication zoom meetings and iteration... I bit the bullet and kept topping up Claude API and spent about $500 on Opus over the course of a weekend, but the site is done and works great.
Post reply on HN