The context seemed to last a few seconds. I went from a mock up screenshot of a fantasy video game, complete with first person weapon. Then as I moved forward the weapon became part of the scenery and the whole world blurred and blended until it became some sort of sci-fi abstract space. Spinning the camera completely changed look and style.
I ended up with a UI that closely resembled the Cyberpunk 2077 one complete with VO modal popup. I guess it must have featured a lot in the training data.
Really not sure what to make of this, seems to have no constraints on concept despite the prompt (I specifically used the word fantasy), no spatial memory, no collision, or understanding of landscape features in order to maintain a sense of place.
I'd put this closer to gpt2 tbh. GPT3 was already quite impressive and functional. We haven't come particularly far since imo. More small noticable steps, but no significant jumps.
Skill issue. The below is an excerpt from some of my early notes from a project spanning 2020-2022 using the babbage model, not even davinci. This is pre-"chat" or instruction tuned models. I have many more notes, including more code generation, mermaid graphs, spatial reasoning, in context learning examples, examples of using it in agentic ways to write a medium size code project that worked, etc. I have these historic records and can tell you improvements have been minimal. Do you have any historical records or just vibes, feelings, and a lack of skill? I can confidently tell you that what has improved is size of model required to get decent output (smaller) and more importantly, operator skill required to get decent output (lower). Beyond that, it is same old.
In the below, lines which are questions were me, paragraph following was gpt3-babbage. No stop tokens used, just manually breaking off generation when it began talking as me.
---
how do mobile phones work?
Mobile phones work by connecting to cellular networks, which are made up of a series of cell towers that are spread out across a wide area. When you make a call or use data, your phone will connect to the closest cell tower, which then connects you to the wider network. This connection allows you to access features such as calling and texting, as well as data services such as web browsing and streaming.
how do cell towers work?
Cell towers are the infrastructure used in cellular networks to transmit wireless signals. They are typically tall structures that house antennas and other equipment that enable wireless communications. Cell towers work by receiving and transmitting wireless signals over a certain frequency, which is then picked up by mobile devices like smartphones. The tower then passes the signal to a base station, which then routes it to its destination.
how do wireless signals work?
Wireless signals are transmitted using radio waves. These radio waves are generated by a transmitter and then received by a receiver. The transmitter converts an electrical signal into an electromagnetic wave, which is then sent out into the air and picked up by the receiver. The receiver then interprets the signal and converts it back into an electrical current or data that can be used by the device.
what are radio waves?
Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths ranging from as long as one meter to as short as one millimeter. Radio waves are used for a variety of communication purposes, including radio and television broadcasting, cellular phones, radar, and satellite communications.
what is electromagnetic radiation?
Electromagnetic radiation (EM radiation or EMR) is a form of energy release in the form of waves or particles that travel through space. It includes visible light, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, microwaves and radio waves. All of these types of radiation are produced by the sun and other natural sources on Earth.
what is energy in the context of electromagnetic radiation?
Energy in the context of electromagnetic radiation is the amount of work done by a photon, which is equal to its frequency multiplied by Planck's constant. It is also referred to as radiant energy and is closely related to intensity and power.
what is a photon?
A photon is a particle of light, which is an elementary particle that is the basic unit of all forms of electromagnetic radiation, including light. Photons have no mass and no electric charge and travel at the speed of light.
give me the formula for photonic energy in latex format?
$$\frac{hc}{\lambda}$$
explain this formula $$\frac{hc}{\lambda}$$This formula is used to calculate the energy of a photon. It is calculated by dividing the product of Planck's constant (h) and the speed of light (c) by the wavelength (λ) of the photon. The result is the energy (E) of the photon in joules.
write a python script that solves for lambda in this formula
```python
# Import the math library to use sqrt
import math
# Define constants
h = 6.626e-34 # Planck's constant in m2 kg / s
c = 3.0e+8 # Speed of light in m/s
E = 4.5e-19 # Energy of photon in joules
# Calculate lambda using the formula lambda = hc/E
lambda_val = (hc)/E
# Print the result
print('The wavelength of the photon is {} meters.'.format(math.sqrt(lambda_val)))
```
write a python script that solves this formula
```python
def calculate_energy(h, c, λ):
energy = (h c) / λ
return energy
h = 6.626e-34 # Planck's constant in joules/second
c = 3e8 # Speed of light in m/s
λ = 500e-9 # Wavelength of the photon in m
energy = calculate_energy(h, c, λ)
print("The energy of the photon is", energy, "joules.")
I do enjoy these kinds of write ups, especially when it's about something that might seem so simple on the surface, but in order to get looking great you really have to go in deep.
Lucas Pope did a really nice write up on how he developed his dithering system for Return of The Obra Dinn. Recommended if you also enjoyed this blog post.
You've just brought back an old memory there. We used to do LAN parties at the weekend, and none of us has network cards, but one of our friends worked in the IT department of the local university. So he would bring a stack of cards with him and we'd spend hours setting them up and getting each PC on the network, often with great failure if he couldn't bring a batch of same branded cards.
We did learn over time which cards hated connecting with each other, and if he could bag a full batch of 3com we knew we'd likely be in for some early gaming.
This type of issue comes up in the video game development world. Perhaps in part due to modern engines being off-the-shelf ready to render high quality assets and assets being so available, either internally or from an asset store. It helped push developers into putting high quality assets into games from the start, skipping the "grey box" steps.
I've had it on a number of projects now where high quality assets were pushed into early builds causing execs eyes to light up as they feel like they're seeing a near final product, blind to the issues and under developed systems below. This can start projects off on bad footing because expectations can quickly become skewed and focus can go to the wrong places.
At one studio there was a running joke about trees swaying because someone had decorated an outdoor level with simulated trees. During an early test the execs got so distracted by how much they swayed and if it was too much or too little that they completely ignored the gameplay and content that was supposed to be under review. This issue repeated itself a number of times to the point where meetings would begin with someone declaring "We are not here to review the trees, ignore the trees!"
I've brought this issue up more recently with the advent of AI, which with things like Sora, the act of creating video clips can be stitched together can look like subjectively exciting movie trailers. This now has people declaring that AI movies are around the corner. To me this looks like the similar level of excitement as seeing the trees sway. An AI trailer looks much closer to a shipping product than it should be because the underlying challenges are far from solved; nothing is said about the script, pacing, character development, story etc...
Blues News is still very much alive https://www.bluesnews.com/ I only recently rediscovered it and it was such a nice surprise to see that it still looks pretty much as I remember back in '96.
I've missed Web buttons. I remember entire movements done using them back in the mid 90's. There were some boycotts where people would put the buttons on their site to show support.
I also remember the ones proudly showing that their web page was written in Notepad or even Edit instead of some bloat ridden Frontpage or other generator site.
https://9ol.es/buttons/index.html a while back I did some archival scraping for these (using things like last modified dates, looking for meta generator tags... I forget how I wrote it exactly, it's probably somewhere)
I did some research in icon packs but as far as I can find, a bunch of these are just independent creations.
Therefore, I believe this collection is the definitive source of all of them. I found no other modern effort at collecting them.
Those are just.. buttons. But they are not 'web buttons' like you'd see everywhere on the web in the 90s. They are the same shape and size as the link above, and they were indeed often animated GIFs.
They're earlier. There's basically 3 design eras. The first used 1 bit transparent gifs (i used those on my bootstra386.com site)
The second had 40x40 buttons, then the third had 88x31...
Ironically the best place to find this evidence is in books. Head on over to archive.org, find some mass market "how to use the web" books and they're full of screenshots.
You could also do wayback machine but during the "folk art" era of the web, there was long forgotten web properties run by "just some person" with names like "web fairy's daily roundup" with these long links like homesite.unc.edu/~rhonda/links.htm or whatever.
The fetishism for dot coms is probably post-1997
When you go through these old texts it's a sea of sites you have never heard of. Some of those are in the wayback, a lot of them aren't.
You can clearly see the eras. There's also some promotional videos such as
88x31 is where most of the effort has been placed on the archives and so I kind of just pass over that one
The last thing is the hypercard cross-over ... there were many users and creators that went from that platform to the web and they took their hypercard design language with them.
The 88x31 might be called the first post-hypercard era.
I was around back then. There were many button sizes, and I did not say those weren't real, existing buttons: they were common navigational aids on homepages. But they are not _web buttons_ as anybody would interpret them today. They are just buttons. The GP and the link talk specifically about _web buttons_.
I was around then as well but I'm not going to rely on the fickleness of 30 year old memories to be more authoritative than contemporaneous manuscripts.
The fact that you see buttons made exclusively for the web and existing exclusively on the Web and covering early web culture as not "web buttons" is an interesting distinction.
I mean you do you. Language is what we make it. I just wonder where such a perception comes from
huh? 1 bit transparent gifs of the 80s? I didn't make that claim. There's two gif standards, GIF87a and GIF89a they were by compuserve. 89a introduced transparency. Netscape Navigator 2.0 introduced support for animated looping GIFs in 1995, this was the game changer.
GIF wasn't a widely used raster format of the 1980s. That would be PCX, MSP (pre BMP), PIC (Macintosh PICT), IMG (GEM), TIFF, Dr. Halo (CUT/PAL), TARGA...
None of the 1980s image formats are in use anymore except for Postscript which is a programming language so it doesn't really count. The TIFF of the 1980s (the kind that NextStep generates for instance) won't even open in modern imagemagick with libtiff stripping that support 15 years ago (along with a lot of other companies ebullient artistic license of the TIFF standard). Modern TIFF uses standards dated post 2000.
If you need to open a TIF dated from the 1980s, hit me up, I've had to resurrect these parsers before.
Oops my bad. I assumed they were from late 80s since I was under the impression the 88x31s were popularized by a Netscape button from ~93. (But I could be completely mistaken about that; I’m by no means an expert.)
I miss those 350x19 "userbar" images that people used to stack in their forum signatures. Can we get those on HN? I need everyone to know I use Dreamweaver.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyB5cvA6f78
EDIT: I see he posted a link at the bottom of the Readme.md I guess I should have scrolled to the bottom first.