What if you gave it an image comparison tool that would xor two screenshots to check its work?
I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
221–230 of 483 posts
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#222Well 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 th…
Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.
I remember building really complex layouts w nested tables, and learning the hard way that going beyond 6 levels of nesting caused serious rendering performance problems in Netscape.
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code. Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
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.
You've done this? I would love to read more about it
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
but as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produc…
If the problem you ask it to solve has only one or a few examples, or if there are many cases of people copy pasting the solution, LLMs can and will produce code that would be called plagiarism if a human did it.
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Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#225[flagged]
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. I just looked at the page source and it is in fact using a table layout. I always assumed it was an image map, which I assume would be even more obscure for the LLM.
We should check the Wayback Machine, but in my memory this was built with an image map. Maybe like, 10 years ago or something. I was googling around when writing this post and saw that there are folks still tasked with making sure it's up and running. I wonder if they migrated it to tables at some point in the last decade.
The January 1997 version used a server-side image map served via CGI: https://web.archive.org/web/19970124032137/http://spacejam.c...
This was soon moved to a static table layout with higher quality images: https://web.archive.org/web/19970412180040/http://www.spacej...
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#227Earlier 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.
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code. Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
I have a very anecdotal, but interesting, counterexample.
I recently asked Gemini 3 Pro to create an RSS feed reader type of experience by using XSLT to style and layout an OPML file. I specifically wanted it to use a server-side proxy for CORS, pass through caching headers in the proxy to leverage standard HTTP caching, and I needed all feed entries for any feed in the OPML to be combined into a single chronological feed.
It initially told multiple times that it wasn't possible (it also reminded me that Google is getting rid of XSLT). Regardless, after reiterating that it is possible multiple times it finally decided to make a temporary POC. That POC worked on the first try, with only one follow up to standardize date formatting with support for Atom and RSS.
I obviously can't say the code was novel, though I would be a bit surprised if it trained on that task enough for it to remember roughly the full implementation and still claimed it was impossible.
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I generally agree with your underlying point concerning attribution and intellectual property ownership but your follow-up comment reframes your initial statement: LLMs generate recombinations of code from code created by humans, without giving credit. Stack Overflow offers access to other peoples’ work, and developers combined those snippets and patterns into their own projects. I suspect attribution is low.
Stack Overflow deals with that issue by having a license agreement.
To be fair, their license agreement is pretty much impossible to enforce.
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting hypothesis : that LLM are fundamentally unable to produce original code. Do you have papers to back this up ? That was also my reaction when i saw some really crazy accurate comments on some vibe coded piece of code, but i couldn't prove it, and thinking about it now i think my intuition was wrong (ie : LLMs do produce original complex code).
We can solve that question in an intuitive way: if human input is not what is driving the output then it would be sufficient to present it with a fraction of the current inputs, say everything up to 1970 and have it generate all of the input data from 1970 onwards as output. If that does not work then the moment you introduce AI you cap their capabilities unless humans continue to create original works to feed the AI…
This is known as the data processing inequality. Non-invertible functions can not create more information than what is available in their inputs: https://blog.blackhc.net/2023/08/sdpi_fsvi/. Whatever arithmetic operations are involved in laundering the inputs by stripping original sources & references can not lead to novelty that wasn't already available in some combination of the inputs.
Neural networks can at best uncover latent correlations that were already available in the inputs. Expecting anything more is basically just wishful thinking.
Re: I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude
#230I like how the author calls a script on the internet "him".
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