I wish they would let me use claude desktop, I really hate looking at the terminal and don’t know how to customize it to make it more readable
On a comment where you discuss a powerful tool for looking up information, you claim ignorance about a piece of information that same tool could explain to you! What the heck!
Did they test every possible input/output combination?
No, because that would be impossible.
You perform a series of more specific tests. In this case, it's "working" in so far as that Super Mario Bros. appears to be playable, for example.
Does not mean that it behaves perfectly according to some spec, or identical to another CPU (like the NES's 6502), of course, but it's clearly a working CPU to some 6502-compatible extent.
But to answer your question, it's in the readme: https://github.com/dbreunig/nesformer#how-it-was-checked
Reality says otherwise, especially from those who run LLMs in production at a large scale. Hacks such as baking in the weights with tiny experiments doesn't disprove anything.
The same LLM boosters also continue to repeat one of the biggest misconceptions: "sEt TeMperaTurE tO zERo tO aChiEvE fUlL dEterMinIsm."
I like these kinds of projects because it helps to show the massive compute requirement between LLMs and ordinary programs.
A while back I saw some people saying we would just have LMMs hallucinate an entire operating system every single frame. I guess technically it's now proven to be technically possible, but it would be thousands of times slower while requiring thousands of times more compute (a multi-million x difference from an ordinary OS!).
For example, Minecraft in Minecraft [0] is (while impressive) slow and inefficient too, but it doesn't tell us much about humans except that some of them are weirdly ambitious in their projects.
First off, Opus 5.5 built working weights and code with only two prompts:
1. Read this article and any relevant source code: https://divagr.com/blog/qwenputer. Then explore if you could emulate the chip and ram in a Nintendo Entertainment System (as people do today with FPGAs in MISTRs) using this technique. If so, what size model would you have to build and if you could use smaller faster ones, could you get it to be at the standard clockspeed.
It returned charts well illustrating any model would be _slow_. But it's still fun, so the second prompt was:
2. I think we should build it! Just for fun. It's okay if it's not fast. We want to be able to have the weights, and a cli to run them that we can point at a ROM.
Now while this was an _epic_ run by Opus (5.5 is a crazy capable model), this is a surprisingly well-structured challenge.
There is a long-lived and incredible community of classic gaming emulation work online for it to reference. And that community has created…conformance tests! Opus found them and built against one, that has >3k golden instructions: https://github.com/christopherpow/nes-test-roms/blob/master/...
Also, there is the original Qwenputer repo that Opus used to drive the weight writing. That was essential.
But this is a great example of what these models can do with proper reference materials, great specs, conformance tests, and clear direction.
18 months ago: it can do some things but it’s generally not useful.
12 months ago: wow; this can write ok code that a human has to do a lot of review to make sure it’s ok.
6 months ago: holy fuck I’m shipping great stuff with only the occasional redo.
3 months ago: Jesus Christ this is actually pretty fucking great. I have to work entirely differently; becoming a manager of my single agent launching sub agents.
1 month ago: my god I am shipping more, faster, and more useful than ever.
Today: we have fleets of highly effectively domain expert agents working entirely autonomously and shifting between fleets depending on domain, available usage remaining, and we’re shipping 10x with 100% better reviews than before—expanding by the day and self-improving its own harness.
—-
Next week: the agents will prioritize code golf.
The week after that: everything is written in ASM.
We’ll come full circle in 3y
e: fyi; this is my personal progression with LLMs.
I have experienced directly what the evolution of cloud based software, and now AI based tooling, has done to team sizes on delivery projects.
Cannot understand how they don't get how all the performance improvements directly correlates to smaller team sizes, in shareholders driven economy.
So far I have been lucky, and just hope to have enough savings when time comes, as finding jobs after 50s wasn't already easy without having to add AI on top.
I want to do MORE with the same amount of folks.
This is an genuinely good minimalist good editor that is created in mostly assembly that was created with the help of AI[0]
I maintain a fork of it which basically adds scratchpad ability to it and is something that I use daily myself for what it's worth[1]
My fork was created with the help of GLM 5.3 (an open-weights model)
The future is already here in some sense. I could in theory add more features but I intentionally add not more features because asm is still slightly difficult for it to write but in some sense the tradeoff has been/could be worth it. It was more of an experiment really and I am really impressed by it.
in many ways, forcing AI to write asm does make you now think intentionally of features and ironically prevents feature creep and makes you think of stability of the product (atleast right now for me anyways)
[0]: https://rhun.app
Also “1 month ago,” but s/ASM/Rust
This concept was hyped up (because DeepMind) for a while at the time and in reality it amounted to nothing. This is just the second reincarnation of a similar concept but with added extra saturated slop and hype on top.
It's called a Nintendo emulator.
That's kind of the point here.
Code isn't going anywhere. It can be literally billions or trillions of times more efficient than an AI, and as AIs scale up that number just continues to grow and can completely plausibly hit quadrillions in our lifetime. What relationships humans have with code is a completely different question, but the idea itself isn't going anywhere. Anyone who thinks otherwise has failed to grasp just what producing a single token from an AI actually entails.
It’s a bit like when a human brain remembers facts, if you sat down and computed the hash values of the thing you were trying to remember, and traced out a DB lookup in your mind, it’d be a lot slower than just “oh yeah I remember that”.
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