Show HN: 500 clocks in one 6.3 MB HTML file by Opus 5.5

(tkgally.github.io)

38 points | by tkgally 3 hours ago

10 comments

  • vunderba 2 hours ago
    Nice job. The Pong one was a nice touch where the ball traveled within a second from each paddle. I also enjoyed the interactive fiction game clock. It doesn’t really have much to do with time, but I still appreciated how the little descriptions changed over time.

    Looking through all of these, you can definitely start to see patterns in themes. For example, it’s a clock but in a different language. Or it’s a clock but wrapped around a classic game - I think I saw Nine Men's Morris, Mancala and Scrabble among others.

    I made the Chamber of Clocks [1] about half a year back which is a set of 12 different clockwork visualizations that I came up with so I was curious (and a bit trepidatious) when I saw this post. I was rather relieved to see that Opus 5.5 left to its own devices didn't create a single thing that resembled any of the ones I came up with.

    The closest might be the Ctesibian water clock, but mine is significantly more elaborate, modeled as a 3D physical water wheel.

    There’s another one I’ve seen floating around on HN — the Triclock [2] — which is particularly nice as well and worth checking out!

    [1] - https://clocks.specr.net

    [2] - https://triclock.franzai.com

    • tkgally 1 hour ago
      Very nice! I particularly like that pi clock.

      I agree that Claude did tend to repeat certain themes. If someone wanted to extend the gallery to the thousands of clocks while maintaining the variety, they would probably need to seed the model with some original ideas. (Whether those ideas could come from a model or would need human taste is an interesting question.)

      Also, Claude’s realizations of some of its ideas are a bit rough. If I wanted to create a standalone widget for a clock I particularly liked, I would spend more time with Claude (or another model) refining and polishing it first.

      Nevertheless, considering that nearly all the ideas came from Opus and all the graphics are created with pure code, I remain impressed with what it was able to do.

  • elxr 31 minutes ago
    80% of these are hideous. Why choose 500 instead of whittling it down a bit but having the quality bar a bit higher?
  • userbinator 30 minutes ago
    Claude’s summary of the prompting process and page design is here:

    Was the README written by Claude too? I was expecting the usual Claudish, but it looks far more like normal human English.

    and a helper library U

    Perhaps Utility library would fit the name better.

  • ozanbora 18 minutes ago
    490,000–670,000 tokens each session a bit much, no?
  • gavmor 54 minutes ago
    Gosh, these are so enticing yet such a let down.

    For example, the Lorenz Attractor which, apparently, doesn't have anything to do with the clock.

  • compounding-err 10 minutes ago
    this was almost interesting
  • ksimukka 1 hour ago
    Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
  • tamimio 46 minutes ago
    It’s cool, but i think the actual use case of this, if someone is wasting your time you can share the 500 clocks and they can choose whatever they like to understand how important time is.
  • kromokromo 1 hour ago
    Once again, impressed by Opus 5.5 for a job well done. How much did this cost you?
  • vishwasaraxit 2 hours ago
    [flagged]