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AI World Clocks

clocks.brianmoore.com

351–360 of 404 posts

Re: AI World Clocks

#351
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. Actual engineers have professional standards bodies and legal liability when they shirk and the bridge falls down or the plane crashes or your wiring starts on fire. Software "engineers" are none of those things but can at least emulate the approaches and strive for reproducibility and testability. Skilled craftsman; not engineers. Prompt "engineers" is yet another few steps down the ladder, working out mostly b…

Engineers use their ingenuity. That’s it. If physical engineers understood everything then standards would not have changed in many decades. Safety factors would be mostly unnecessary. Clearly not the case.

>> Engineers use their ingenuity. That’s it.

If this was enough all novel creation would be engineering and that's clearly not true. Engineering attempts to discover & understand consistent outcomes when a myriad of variables are altered, and the boundaries where the variables exceed a model's predictive powers - then add buffer for the unknown. Manipulating prompts (and much of software development) attempts to control the model to limit the number of variables to obtain some form of useful abstraction. Physical engineering can't do this.

Re: AI World Clocks

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In lucid dreams there's a whole category of things like this: reading a paragraph of text, looking at a clock (digital or analog), or working any kind of technology more complex than a calculator. For me personally, even light switches have been a huge tell in the past, so basically almost anything electrical. I've always held the utterly unscientific position that this is because the brain only has enough GPU cycles…

Wait, lucid dreamers need tells to know where they are?!?

Didn't you ever watch Inception? You have to carry around a little spinning top to test which level of VM you're inside of.

Re: AI World Clocks

#353

Watching this over the past few minutes, it looks like Kimi K2 generates the best clock face most consistently. I'd never heard of that model before today! Qwen 2.5's clocks, on the other hand, look like they never make it out of the womb.

Interestingly, either I'm _hallucinating_ this, or DeepSeek started to consistently show a clock without failures and with good time, where it previously didn't. ...aaand as I was typing this, it barfed a train wreck. Never mind, move along... No, wait, it's good again, no, wait...

Re: AI World Clocks

#354
post #236

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!

I gave this "riddle" to various models: > The farmer and the goat are going to the river. They look into the sky and see three clouds shaped like: a wolf, a cabbage and a boat that can carry the farmer and one item. How can they safely cross the river? Most of them are just giving the result to the well known river crossing riddle. Some "feel" that something is off, but still have a hard time to figure out that wolf,…

Claude has no problem with this: https://imgur.com/a/ifSNOVU

Maybe older models?

Re: AI World Clocks

#355
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave this "riddle" to various models: > The farmer and the goat are going to the river. They look into the sky and see three clouds shaped like: a wolf, a cabbage and a boat that can carry the farmer and one item. How can they safely cross the river? Most of them are just giving the result to the well known river crossing riddle. Some "feel" that something is off, but still have a hard time to figure out that wolf,…

Claude has no problem with this: https://imgur.com/a/ifSNOVU Maybe older models?

Try to twist around words and phrases, at some point it might start to fail.

I tried it again yesterday with GPT. GPT-5 manages quite well too in thinking mode, but starts crackling in instant mode. 4o completely failed.

It's not that LLMs are unable to solve things like that at all, but it's really easy to find some variations that make them struggle really hard.

Re: AI World Clocks

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is it. They’re language models which predict next tokens probabilistically and a sampler picks one according to the desired ”temperature”. Any generalization outside their data set is an artifact of random sampling: happenstance and circumstance, not genuine substance.

However: do humans have that genuine substance? Is human invention and ingenuity more than trial and error, more than adaptation and application of existing knowledge? Can humans generalize outside their data set? A yes-answer here implies belief in some sort of gnostic method of knowledge acquisition. Certainly that comes with a high burden of proof!

Yes

Re: AI World Clocks

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe LLMs always fail to generalize outside their data set, and it’s just less noticeable with written language.

They definitely don't completely fail to generalise. You can easily prove that by asking them something completely novel. Do you mean that LLMs might display a similar tendency to modify popular concepts? If so that definitely might be the case and would be fairly easy to test. Something like "tell me the lord's prayer but it's our mother instead of our father", or maybe "write a haiku but with 5 syllables on every l…

They used to do poorly with modified riddles, but I assume those have been added to their training data now (https://huggingface.co/datasets/marcodsn/altered-riddles ?)

Like, the response to "... The surgeon (who is male and is the boy's father) says: I can't operate on this boy! He's my son! How is this possible?" used to be "The surgeon is the boy's mother"

The response to "... At each door is a guard, each of which always lies. What question should I ask to decide which door to choose?" would be an explanation of how asking the guard what the other guard would say would tell you the opposite of which door you should go through.

Re: AI World Clocks

#358
post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s phones… specifically dialling a number manually. No matter how carefully I dial, the number on the screen is rarely correct.

It seems that I’ve been stuck in a lucid dream for a couple of decades, no matter how carefully write text on a phone keyboard it never comes out as intended.

Tank ypu foe wriiting this

Re: AI World Clocks

#359

hi, I made this. thank you for posting. I love clocks and I love finding the edges of what any given technology is capable of. I've watched this for many hours and Kimi frequently gets the most accurate clock but also the least variation and is most boring. Qwen is often times the most insane and makes me laugh. Which one is "better?"

If you're keeping all the generated clocks in a database, I'd love to see a Facemash style spin-off website where users pick the best clock between two options, with a leaderboard. I want to know what the best clock Qwen ever made was!

Not the best, but the most amusing.

Re: AI World Clocks

#360

hi, I made this. thank you for posting. I love clocks and I love finding the edges of what any given technology is capable of. I've watched this for many hours and Kimi frequently gets the most accurate clock but also the least variation and is most boring. Qwen is often times the most insane and makes me laugh. Which one is "better?"

Why is this different per user? I sent this to a few friends and they all see different things from what i'm seeing, for the same time..?

It’s different per minute, not per user.
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