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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

(j0nah.com)
549 points thecr0w | 3 comments | 07 Dec 25 17:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.008s | source
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thuttinger ◴[07 Dec 25 19:44 UTC] No.46184466[source]▶
Claude/LLMs in general are still pretty bad at the intricate details of layouts and visual things. There are a lot of problems that are easy to get right for a junior web dev but impossible for an LLM. On the other hand, I was able to write a C program that added gamma color profile support to linux compositors that don't support it (in my case Hyprland) within a few minutes! A - for me - seemingly hard task, which would have taken me at least a day or more if I didn't let Claude write the code. With one prompt Claude generated C code that compiled on first try that:

- Read an .icc file from disk

- parsed the file and extracted the VCGT (video card gamma table)

- wrote the VCGT to the video card for a specified display via amdgpu driver APIs

The only thing I had to fix was the ICC parsing, where it would parse header strings in the wrong byte-order (they are big-endian).

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chongli ◴[07 Dec 25 21:43 UTC] No.46185476[source]▶
Why is this something a Wayland compositor (a glorified window manager) needs to worry about? Apple figured this out back in the 1990s with ColorSync and they did it once for the Mac OS and any application that wanted colour management could use the ColorSync APIs.
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hedgehog ◴[07 Dec 25 22:27 UTC] No.46185919[source]▶
Color management infrastructure is intricate. To grossly simplify: somehow you need to connect together the profile and LUT for each display, upload the LUTs to the display controller, and provide appropriate profile data for each window to their respective processes. During compositing then convert buffers that don't already match the output (unmanaged applications will probably be treated as sRGB, color managed graphics apps will opt out of conversion and do whatever is correct for their purpose).
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chongli ◴[07 Dec 25 22:59 UTC] No.46186222{3}[source]▶
Yes, but why is the compositor dealing with this? Shouldn't the compositor simply be deciding which windows go where (X, Y, and Z positions) and leave the rendering to another API? Why does every different take on a window manager need to re-do all this work?
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1. hedgehog ◴[08 Dec 25 01:11 UTC] No.46187191{4}[source]▶
Turning the question around, what other part of the system _could_ do this job? And how would the compositor do any part of its job if it doesn't have access to both window contents and displays? I'm not super deep in this area but a straight-forward example of a non-managed app and a color-aware graphics app running on a laptop with an external display seems like it is enough to figure out how things need to go together. This neglects some complicating factors like display pixel density, security, accessibility, multi-GPU, etc, but I think it more or less explains how the Wayland authors arrived at its design and how some of the problems got there.
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2. chongli ◴[08 Dec 25 03:24 UTC] No.46187941[source]▶
I'm questioning the idea that people should be writing compositors at all. Why doesn't Wayland itself do the compositing and let everyone else just manage windows?

It's like going to Taco Bell and they make you grind your own corn for your tortillas.

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3. hedgehog ◴[08 Dec 25 07:13 UTC] No.46189324[source]▶
Why? Probably better to ask the Wayland developers that. Maybe you're right. That said, whether everyone uses the same compositor and window management is modular, or not and shared code travels as libraries, I don't think the complexity of color management is much different.