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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

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

#281

Post by marcus_holmes »

moron4hire wrote: post #270
bsaul wrote: post #135

Earlier 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).

No, the thing needing proof is the novel idea: that LLMs can produce original code.

LLMs can definitely produce original other stuff: ask it to create an original poem and on an extremely specific niche subject and it will do so. You can specify the niche subject to the point where it is incredibly unlikely that there is a poem on that subject in its training data, and it will still produce an original poem on that subject [0]. The well-known "otter using wifi on a plane" series of images [1] is another example: this is not in the training data (well, it is now, because well-known, but you get the idea).

Is there something unique about code, that is different from language (or images), that would make it impossible for an LLM to produce original code? I don't believe so, but I'm willing to be convinced.

I think this switches the burden of proof: we know LLMs can produce original content in other contexts. Why would they not be able to create original code?

[0] Ever curious, I tested this assumption. I got Claude to write an original limerick about goats oiling their beards with olive oil, which was the first reasonable thing I could think of as a suitably niche subject. I googled the result and could not find anything close to it. I then asked it to produce another limerick on the same subject, and it produced a different limerick, so obviously not just repeating training data.

[1] https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-recent-history-of-ai-in...

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

#283

Post by futuraperdita »

manlymuppet wrote: post #243
personjerry wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have the raw HTML why would you need to do this at all?

I should've been more precise with my words. What I meant is doing inspect element on the Space Jam website, and doing select all + copy.

I think you're assuming a pattern existed in 1996 that didn't actually exist until the 2010s.

In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files.

Even a decade later, React and the frontend-framework sort of thinking wasn't really a big thing. People had started to make lots of things with "DHTML" in the early 2000s where JavaScript was used to make things spicier (pretty animations, some server side loading with AJAX) and still often worked without JS enabled in a pattern called graceful degradation.

What you'd get from "View Source", or "Inspect Element", and what was literally saved on disk of spacejam.com, was almost certainly the same content.

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

#284

Post by thecr0w »

mr_windfrog wrote: post #282

Maybe we could try asking Claude to generate code using , , for layout instead of relying on div + CSS. Feels like it could simplify things a lot. Would this actually work, or am I missing something?

I think it probably gets you 80% but the last 20% of pixel perfection seems to evade Claude. But I'm pretty new to writing prompts so if you can nail it let me know and I'll link you in the post.

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

#285

Post by echelon »

dang wrote: post #257
echelon wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang, can you explain how this is indignant or sensational? Anthropic's leadership and researchers continue to this day to post messages saying engineering will be fully automated. I can go find recent messages on X if you'd like. This forum is comprised mostly of engineers, who will be the most impacted if their vision of the world pans out. YC depends on innovation capital to make money. If the means of production…

"want to automate our jobs away", "Asmodai and team want you working in line at McDonald's", "You're a serf" all obviously fit that description. Low-information, high-indignation rhetoric is exactly what we don't want here, so please don't post like this.

Fair enough, I'll temper the rhetoric.

It still seems you can make the front page posting these words as long as they're externally hosted. Or maybe it's the fact Anil is a bit of a celebrity:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46128548

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

#286

Post by jweir »

manbash wrote: post #202
wilsmex wrote: post #187

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 th…

Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.

And use a single px invisible gif to move things around.

But was Space Jam using multiple images or just one large image with and image map for links?

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

#288

Post by measurablefunc »

xyzzy123 wrote: post #272
measurablefunc wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using this reasoning, would you argue that a new proof of a theorem adds no new information that was not present in the axioms, rules of inference and so on? If so, I'm not sure it's a useful framing. For novel writing, sure, I would not expect much truly interesting progress from LLMs without human input because fundamentally they are unable to have human experiences, and novels are a shadow or projection of that. B…

Sound deductive rules of logic can not create novelty that exceeds the inherent limits of their foundational axiomatic assumptions. You can not expect novel results from neural networks that exceed the inherent information capacity of their training corpus & the inherent biases of the neural network (encoded by its architecture). So if the training corpus is semantically unsound & inconsistent then there is no reason to expect that it will produce logically sound & semantically coherent outputs (i.e. garbage inputs → garbage outputs).

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

#290

Post by chongli »

zahlman wrote: post #201
chongli wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I mean, when I hear the word "compositing" I definitely imagine something that involves "alpha" blending, and doing that nicely (instead of a literal alpha calculation) is going to involve colour management.

That's on the Wayland team though. They drew up the new API boundaries and decided that all window managers would now be in the business of compositing.

If I wanted to put it most uncharitably, I'd say they decided to push all of the hard parts out of Wayland itself and force everyone else to deal with them.

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