Hacker News Reader

Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

> This is where things got interesting. Not because AI wrote the code — the code itself isn’t complicated, it’s a 1986 game that ran in 32K of RAM — but because Claude turned out to be an extraordinary tool for interrogating 6502 assembly.

Complaining about slop with slop.

View on HN

> The tick loop waits at least 3 centiseconds per frame, giving an effective rate of about 33.33 Hz

3 centiseconds instead of 30 miliseconds, totally not a robot

Why would AI say that, when nearly every piece of training data is ever been fed would use milliseconds? I think much more likely that this is how the author thinks of it.

3 hundreds of a second == 33 Hz is very clean in my human brain.

No one, ever, uses centiseconds in this context.

Centiseconds was one of the ways time was measured on the BBC Micro. Your convenient options for accurately measuring the passage of time were vsyncs (50/sec), centiseconds (100/sec), microseconds (1,000,000/sec), or cycles (2,000,000/sec).

It's actually in the commented original disassembly and used in some of the original BBC documentation / writing. Which is how it ended up here - the article is a mix of things I wrote and things I asked an AI to write for me from the notes / findings from the archaeolgy.

Ok, that makes sense. I was commenting from a modern gamedev context.

The weird world of retro game archaeology - it's genuinely fascinating.

I was about to complain at you for jumping to conclusions, but your cited example contains two emdashes and a nested "it's not X it's Y". It certainly looks like slop. In my own writing I'm increasingly conscious of trying to avoid the appearance of slop, I would like to think I would have caught this.

For what its worth the article was a mix of things I wrote and things I asked an AI to generate from the notes I'd accumulated from the archaeology.

My focus was on the recreation - and getting it accurate was a lot of work (and a lot of fun). It's pretty easy to get an approximation (particularly if you just go with a standard physics model) but one that feels "off" if you played the original a lot.

A lot of people don't hate slop, they hate other people's slop. Of course their slop doesn't stink, they prompted it better or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com