GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

(earth.ethanplus.ai)

24 points | by ethanplusai 1 hour ago

20 comments

  • encomiast 25 minutes ago
    I wonder if we will get to the point where this is all so easy that we'll need something like Flickr to organize all the random things one has vibe-coded.

    It's already starting to feel like the days when your uncle would make you sit in a dark room and look at his vacation slide show. Sure, they're fine photos, but we quickly got to the point where a photograph was so easy to create that it needed to be extraordinary not just in execution, but in vision, timeliness, originality, etc. And even then, if you couldn't get it in front of the right editor, it just sat in a pile.

    It is amazing, that just a few years ago this would have been a pretty amazing, portfolio-worthy project and today it's "pretty cool", said with a shrug.

  • royal__ 18 minutes ago
    I've been seeing lots of demos like this, especially with games. Yes, they are impressive, but I'm surprised nobody is talking about some of the things I've noticed with GPT-6: the code it writes, by default, is surprisingly messy and obviously unmaintainable. It's also very...not human. No human would write code like it does. I get the sense that the optimization of these models on benchmarks is causing their behavior to morph into a very brute-force type of approach. It makes you think: when code is suddenly very cheap, does good style and organization even matter as much? Or were those just important for humans? (I think they still do, for the record).
    • ViktorRay 14 minutes ago
      Wonder if someone might use an LLM to specifically vibe code a program that takes LLM code and makes it appear like non-LLM code.
  • Tiberium 38 minutes ago
    I hope the future generations of models will stop with the fluff/textual clutter/overexplanations - I don't know the right term. They easily fix those once you tell them, but they still do them by default. What I mean on this page, for example:

    > A WORLD, FOUR BILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

    > DEEP TIME · CONTINENTS IN MOTION

    > Distance becomes an ocean.

    > Continents drift apart. Shallow seas spread across land that will one day be dry.

    > EXPLORE 4.54 BILLION YEARS OF EARTH HISTORY

    > EARTH THROUGH TIME

    > Scroll to travel through time Drag to orbit

    > THE PAST IS ANOTHER WORLD. IT IS ALSO OURS.

    > ILLUSTRATIVE TRANSITION

    > Ga = billion years · Ma = million years / Event spacing is not linear

    It gets to the point where if you ask a model to make a tiny toy "OS", it'll write stuff like "REAL MODE. REAL MULTITASKING. DRAG WINDOWS / TAB TO SWITCH" directly in the background of the desktop of said toy OS.

    • cnqso 16 minutes ago
      A good 6th prompt would have been "remove the title/subtitle idiom wherever it appears in the application"
    • madrox 31 minutes ago
      It's a landing page trope, and I wonder if it emerges out of overtraining on the front door of web sites.
    • treetalker 31 minutes ago
      - poetic invocation of awe

      - rhetoric of universal humanity as backdoor to software anthropomorphism

      - commercialistic exposition of features (in sentence fragments) and foolproof instructions for use

      "Put 'em together and wadda ya got?" TURN OFF YOUR BRAIN

    • willguest 36 minutes ago
      it's flimflam. at least that's what i call it, and banning flimflam in the strongest possible verbiage seems to help
      • DrewADesign 8 minutes ago
        I’ve only heard the term flimflam as a name for a scam that involves tricking a cashier into giving you a bunch of money with confusing overlapping talk.
    • criley2 29 minutes ago
      The term that Anthropic is now using is "mannered prose". If the creator of this example simply prompted "Remove all mannered prose" then the entire experiment would suddenly become normal sounding. In the fable 5.1 prompting guide, they have a longer prompt for removing mannered prose too if needed. I find it works on Astra as well.

      https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/prompt...

  • jonplackett 25 minutes ago
    It looks cool but I just can’t be that bothered to engage with something that contains so little of a human’s input.
    • thefourthchime 24 minutes ago
      If one wants human attention, one must put in human effort
    • llm_nerd 12 minutes ago
      The overwhelming majority of the universe contains zero human input. I'm not saying that makes this interesting (though obviously it was entirely built on human input, if involuntary), but I find physics and chemistry and astronomy and space and energy and so on extraordinarily interesting, despite humans being irrelevant to their construction or behaviour.
  • jonny211 24 minutes ago
    This is objectively wrong. Over the north pole, Greenland looks as large as North America does when it is the center of the viewport. This is some strange mercator-esque projection applied to a globe.
    • r5Khe 18 minutes ago
      That's the ice cap.
      • jonny211 16 minutes ago
        You're right. My mistake.
        • DrewADesign 7 minutes ago
          Don’t worry it’ll be gone pretty soon.
  • sjs382 43 minutes ago
    When I see things like this, what I'm most interested in is seeing the full conversation/prompts and their associated changes/diffs.

    I'm more interested in seeing how others are prompting and working with LLMs than the result itself.

    Care to share?

  • randyrand 3 minutes ago
    For anyone wondering, its about 5K lines of code. Reasonably small, but yes AI is very impressive.
  • MomsAVoxell 38 minutes ago
    At some point I wonder where and when AI will just be taken as a means of exfiltration of knowledge from the traditional cathedrals/bazaars/silos - I mean, obviously, the more that knowledge is shared the more valuable it becomes .. but couldn’t this also mean that the training data included apps like this?
    • GolfPopper 20 minutes ago
      A giant for-profit corporation based in Silicon Valley, funded by titans of finance, and in bed with the government is about as "traditional" as it gets.
  • ttruett 25 minutes ago
    Very cool. I built something similar to simulate climate change... my first project built exclusively via prompting.

    https://terrashift.io/ (it doesn't work on mobile right now, lame I know)

    What a fun time to build!

    • waterthrowaway 19 minutes ago
      This does not simulate climate change and you should not describe it as such
  • cyclopeanutopia 23 minutes ago
    Garbage. There is one good joke there though: "created by Ethan".
  • kylecazar 34 minutes ago
    The 'Civilization' view took non-Eurocentrism to a new level.
  • ionwake 26 minutes ago
    Literally can’t see an earth on safari iOS

    Edit> on second refresh it worked

    • eps 25 minutes ago
      Works fine here.
  • sosodev 24 minutes ago
    I’ve wanted something like this for a long time. However, I wanted it with extensive fact-checked information and AI slop is the opposite of that so I feel this is kinda pointless.
    • BeetleB 17 minutes ago
      Yes, but ... did it ever occur to you that similar sites in the pre-LLM days made as passion projects by one person likely contained a similar number of errors?
  • ViktorRay 16 minutes ago
    I thought this was super cool…

    And then I clicked the “Explore” button on the top right and there are even more things that you can see! Pretty neat.

  • OutOfHere 17 minutes ago
    There is an old site that offers the same functionality: https://dinosaurpictures.org/ancient-earth

    (Use its dropdown.)

  • varispeed 40 minutes ago
    Was it before or after GPT-6 got nerfed?

    Publish the prompts or re-run them today to see if you get the same quality result.

  • FrustratedMonky 36 minutes ago
    is this for real? 5 prompts? this is pretty cool.
  • Romanulus 20 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • BatchJob 34 minutes ago
    [flagged]
    • jatora 30 minutes ago
      Do you have any basis for this collection of claims? I've never heard of this intentional obfuscation.