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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

j0nah.com

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

#321

Post by ineedasername »

jacquesm wrote: post #268
latexr wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a profoundly bad faith argument. We all understand that singular words are public domain, they belong to everyone. Yet when you arrange them in a specific pattern, of which there are infinite possibilities, you create something unique. When someone copies that arrangement wholesale and claims they were the first, that’s what we refer to as plagiarism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9huNI5sBd8

This particular user does that all the time. It's really tiresome.

It’s tiresome to see unexamined assumptions and self-contradictions tossed out by a community that can and often does do much better. Some light absurdism often goes further and makes clear that I’m not just trying to setup a strawman since I’ve already gone and made a parody of my own point.

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

#322

Post by manlymuppet »

futuraperdita wrote: post #283
manlymuppet wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not trying to dispute this though. Although I appreciate the clarity, I am aware of the web's past.

The only point I was trying to make was that this project could be better achieved by an LLM if spacejam.com's HTML is supplied.

For why you'd want to do this rather than simply use the original code is up to the developer, but I'd expect a common reason to be the ease of modern frameworks. Some justifications for making Claude create the same code again in a different framework include:

- Using tags is bad practice in a lot of modern frameworks, and it's better to just translate to React and run your logic directly within components.

- Perhaps you're using TailwindCSS, in which case it's a good idea to port over all the original CSS so you can have unified codebase.

- Hosting on modern frameworks is often conveinent.

- Sometimes (although maybe not for a website this small) the source code with a framework is less verbose.

You probably misunderstood me because I paraphrased "raw" HTML several times throughout my comments in this thread before I actually read the page source and realized it was the original source code.

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

#323

Post by ajasmin »

I'm actually surprised Claude was about to do that much.

I hadn't even considered handing it a visual mockup to work from. Event though that workflow is par for the course for any web design team.

I would assume there must be at least some prior work into locating individual assets in a larger canvas. It just needs to be integrated into the pipeline.

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

#324

Post by someguyiguess »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #317
bluSCALE4 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS was a mistake? JavaScript was a mistake, specifically JavaScript frameworks.

JavaScript? HTML and HTTP were the real mistakes.

HTML and HTTP? TCP was the real mistake.

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

#325

Post by chimeracoder »

shomp wrote: post #263
chrisweekly wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?

> Six nesting levels for tables?

Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables.

As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.

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

#326

Post by ryoshu »

Lerc wrote: post #32
daemonologist wrote: post #24

Interesting - these models are all trained to do pixel-level(ish) measurement now, for bounding boxes and such. I wonder if you could railroad it into being accurate with the right prompt.

What models are good at this? I have tried passing images to models and asking them for coordinates for specific features, then overlaid dots on those points and passed that image back to the model so it has a perception of how far out it was. It had a tendency to be consistently off by a fixed amount without getting closer. I don't doubt that it is possible eventually, but I haven't had much luck. Something that see…

I can't do that either without opening up an image editing tool. Give the model a tool and goal with "vision". Should work better.

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

#327

Post by pests »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #133
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.

Are you saying that every piece of code you have ever written contains a full source list of every piece of code you previously read to learn specific languages, patterns, etc? Or are you saying that every piece of code you ever wrote was 100% original and not adapted from any previous codebase you ever worked in or any book / reference you ever read?

While I generally agree with you, this "LLM is a human" comparisons really are tiresome I feel. It hasn't been proven and I don't know how many other legal issued could have solved if adding "like a human" made it okay. Google v Oracle? "oh, you've never learned an API??!?" or take the original Google Books controversy - "its reading books and memorizing them, like humans can". I do agree its different but I don't like this line of argument at all.

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

#328

Post by wilsmex »

thecr0w wrote: post #207
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…

Thanks, my friend. I added a strike through of the error, a correction, and credited you. I'm keeping it in for now because people have made some good jokes about the mistake in the comments and I want to keep that context.

You bet, Fun post and writeup, took me a bit down memory lane. I built several sites with nested table-based layouts, 1x1 transparent gif files set to strange widths to get layouts to force certain sizes. Little tricks with repeating gradient backgrounds for fancy 'beveled' effects. Under construction GIFs, page counters, GUESTBOOKS!, Photoshop drop-shadows on everything. All the things, fond-times. One or two I haven't touched in 20 years, but keep online for my own time-capsule memory :)

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

#329

Post by vrighter »

"there is no other way to preserve it"

Bullshit. Right click -> view source

Or just press ctrl+s and the browser will also gather all the assets into a folder for you.

The arrogance of thinking that the only way you know how is the only way....

You literally forgot the save feature all browsers have just because you set out to "solve" this using "ai"

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

#330

Post by pertymcpert »

fpoling wrote: post #184
crawshaw wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sounds like creativity and intelligence to me.
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