[abtinf]

> 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.

[not-a-llm]

> 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

[SamBam]

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.

[nnevatie]

No one, ever, uses centiseconds in this context.

[tom_]

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).

[jamesrandall]

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.

[nnevatie]

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

[jamesrandall]

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

[spudlyo]

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.

[jamesrandall]

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.

[slopinthebag]

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.