42 pointsby tkgally4 hours ago10 comments
  • vunderba3 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

    • tkgally2 hours 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.

  • elxran hour ago
    80% of these are hideous. Why choose 500 instead of whittling it down a bit but having the quality bar a bit higher?
    • Haven88030 minutes ago
      Your 20% will be different to each of our 20%. So the OP did the right thing, freedom of choice by 500.
    • tkgally34 minutes ago
      I was interested in seeing how many different ideas Opus could come up with with minimal direction from me. I don’t plan to use any of those clocks myself.
    • sublinear8 minutes ago
      There really is a cheapness to the designs I can't quite put my finger on. Even if you had told me a human made them, I'd still assume the designs are knockoffs of something better.
  • userbinatoran hour 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.

    • tkgally40 minutes ago
      Yes, I as noted at the top of the README, Claude wrote it all. Excerpts from my prompt to it: “Please compose a markdown file that I can put in the README.md for the repository explaining how this page was created and how it is structured (including how the images are generated).... Be clear that all of the coding and writing was done by Claude Opus 5.5.... Make the explanations plain and straightforward, with no boosting or bragging.”
  • gavmor2 hours 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.

  • ozanboraan hour ago
    490,000–670,000 tokens each session a bit much, no?
    • tkgally40 minutes ago
      Yes, I got carried away. It used a big chunk of my Max subscription tokens for this week.
  • kromokromo2 hours ago
    Once again, impressed by Opus 5.5 for a job well done. How much did this cost you?
    • tkgally31 minutes ago
      A significant proportion of my Max subscription for this week. In the README, Claude estimates a total of about 15 million tokens.
  • tamimioan hour 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.
  • compounding-erran hour ago
    this was almost interesting
  • ksimukka2 hours ago
    Amazing. Thanks for sharing.
  • vishwasaraxit4 hours ago
    [flagged]