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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

#351

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.

Why not! We did this in 2024 for our website (1) to have zero CSS.

Still works, only Claude can not understand what those tables means.

1. https://www.tirreno.com

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

#352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe? But it also seems like you are that you are not accounting for new information at inference time. Let's pretend I agree the LLM is a plagiarism machine that can produce no novelty in and of itself that didn't come from what it was trained on, and produces mostly garbage (I only half agree lol, and I think "novelty" is under-specified here).

When I apply that machine (with its giant pool of pirated knowledge) _to my inputs and context_ I can get results applicable to my modestly novel situation which is not in the training data. Perhaps the output is garbage. Naturally if my situation is way out of distribution I cannot expect very good results.

But I often don't care if the results are garbage some (or even most!) of the time if I have a way to ground-truth whether they are useful to me. This might be via running a compile, a test suite, a theorem prover or mk1 eyeball. Of course the name of the game is to get agents to do this themselves and this is now fairly standard practice.

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

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not! We did this in 2024 for our website (1) to have zero CSS. Still works, only Claude can not understand what those tables means. 1. https://www.tirreno.com

> Why not!

Responsive layout would be the biggest reason (mobile for one, but also a wider range of PC monitor aspect ratios these days than the 4:3 that was standard back then), probably followed by conflating the exact layout details with the content, and a separation of concerns / ease of being able to move things around.

I mean, it's a perfectly viable thing if these are not requirements and preferences that you and your system have. But it's pretty rare these days that an app or site can say "yeah, none of those matter to me the least bit".

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

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why not! We did this in 2024 for our website (1) to have zero CSS. Still works, only Claude can not understand what those tables means. 1. https://www.tirreno.com

That's a fun trick, but please consider adding ARIA roles (e.g. role="presentation" to , role="heading" aria-level="[number]" to the elements used for headings) to make your site understandable by screen readers.

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

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turning the question around, what other part of the system _could_ do this job? And how would the compositor do any part of its job if it doesn't have access to both window contents and displays? I'm not super deep in this area but a straight-forward example of a non-managed app and a color-aware graphics app running on a laptop with an external display seems like it is enough to figure out how things need to go toge…

I'm questioning the idea that people should be writing compositors at all. Why doesn't Wayland itself do the compositing and let everyone else just manage windows? It's like going to Taco Bell and they make you grind your own corn for your tortillas.

Why? Probably better to ask the Wayland developers that. Maybe you're right. That said, whether everyone uses the same compositor and window management is modular, or not and shared code travels as libraries, I don't think the complexity of color management is much different.

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

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned recently that this is still how a lot of email html get generated.

Apparently Outlook (the actual one, not the recent pretender) still uses some ancient WordHTML version as the renderer, so there isn’t much choice.

Fun fact: until Office 2007, outlook used IE’s engine for rendering html.

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

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Maybe? But it also seems like you are that you are not accounting for new information at inference time. Let's pretend I agree the LLM is a plagiarism machine that can produce no novelty in and of itself that didn't come from what it was trained on, and produces mostly garbage (I only half agree lol, and I think "novelty" is under-specified here). When I apply that machine (with its giant pool of pirated knowledge) _…

I'm not here to convince you whether Markov chains are helpful for your use cases or not. I know from personal experience that even in cases where I have a logically constrained query I will receive completely nonsensical responses¹.

¹https://chatgpt.com/share/69367c7a-8258-8009-877c-b44b267a35...

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

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I yearn for those days. CSS was a mistake. Tables and DHTML is all one needs.

You jest, but it took forever to add somewhat intuitive layout mechanism to css which allowed you to do what could be done easily with html tables. Vertically centering a div inside another was really hard, and very few people understood the techniques you would use, instead of blindly copying them.

It was beyond irony that the recommended solution was to tell the browser to render your divs as a table.

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

#359
It seems to me that Claude's error here (which is not unique to it) is self-sycophancy. The model is too eager to convince itself it did a good job.

I'd be curious to hear from experienced agent users if there is some AGENTS.md stuff to make the LLM more clear speaking? I wonder if that would impact the quality of work.

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