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AI World Clocks

clocks.brianmoore.com

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Re: AI World Clocks

#92
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generate an image of a clock face, but instead of the usual 12 hour numbering, number it with 13 hours. Gemini, 2.5 Flash or "Nano Banana" or whatever we're calling it these days. https://imgur.com/a/1sSeFX7 A normal (ish) 12h clock. It numbered it twice, in two concentric rings. The outer ring is normal, but the inner ring numbers the 4th hour as "IIII" (fine, and a thing that clocks do) and the 8th hour as "VIIII"…

It should be pretty clear already that anything which is based (limited?) to communicating words/text can never grasp conceptual thinking. We have yet to design a language to cover that, and it might be just a donquijotism we're all diving into.

Really? I can grasp the concept behind that command just fine.

Re: AI World Clocks

#94
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?"

Re: AI World Clocks

#95
post #43

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!

That's just a patch to the training data. Once companies see this starting to show up in the evals and criticisms, they'll go out of their way to fix it.

What would the "patch" be? Manually create some images of 13-hour clocks and add them to the training data? How does that solution scale?

Re: AI World Clocks

#96

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!

Weird, I never tried that, I tried all the usual tricks that usually work including swearing at the model (this scarily works surprisingly well with LLMs) and nothing. I even tried to go the opposite direction, I want a 6 hour clock.

Re: AI World Clocks

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because they literally cannot do that. Doing what you're asking requires an understanding of why the numbers on the clock face are where they are and what it would mean if there was an extra hour on the clock (ie that you would have to divide 360 by 13 to begin to understand where the numbers would go). AI models have no concept of anything that's not included in their training data. Yet people continue to ant…

I wonder if you would have more success if you painstakingly described the shape and features of a clock in great detail but never used the words clock or time or anything that might give the AI the hint that they were supposed to output something like a clock.

And this is a problem for me. I guess that it would work, but as soon as the word "clock" appears, gone is the request because a clock HAS.12.HOURS.

I use this a lot in cybersecurity when I need to do something "illegal". I am refused help, until I say that I am doing research on cybersecurity. In that case no problem.

Re: AI World Clocks

#99
I've been struggling all week trying to get Claude Code to write code to produce visual (not the usual, verifiable, text on a terminal) output in the form of a SDL_GPU rendered scene consisting of the usual things like shaders, pipelines, buffers, textures and samplers, vertex and index data and so on, and boy it just doesn't seem to know what it's doing. Despite providing paragraphs-long, detailed prompts. Despite describing each uniform and each matrix that needs to be sent. Despite giving it extremely detailed guidance about what order things need to be done in. It would have been faster for me to just write the code myself.

When it fails a couple of times it will try to put logging in place and then confidently tell me things like "The vertex data has been sent to the renderer, therefore the output is correct!" When I suggest it take a screenshot of the output each time to verify correctness, it does, and then declares victory over an entirely incorrect screenshot. When I suggest it write unit tests, it does so, but the tests are worthless and only tests that the incorrect code it wrote is always incorrect in the same ways.

When it fails even more times, it will get into this what I like to call "intern engineer" mode where it just tries random things that I know are not going to work. And if I let it keep going, it will end up modifying the entire source tree with random "try this" crap. And each iteration, it confidently tells me: "Perfect! I have found the root cause! It is [garbage bullshit]. I have corrected it and the code is now completely working!"

These tools are cute, but they really need to go a long way before they are actually useful for anything more than trivial toy projects.

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