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I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities

76 points stared 1 hour ago 29 comments

andrew-v 1 hour ago | parent

I was finishing Invisible Cities yesterday, because the book was due at my local library today. I was wondering whether the cities could be adapted into some visual art form. And obviously I thought about feeding it to Opus. 24 hours later, I see this post…

vanadium1st 23 minutes ago | parent

That is what happens in the city of Ternopoli.

Citizens there gather their tools at the bottom of a giant staircase and climb up countless stairs, only to find out that what they were planning to do has already been done by the time they reach the top.

Dissapointed, they descend to grab a new set of tools and make new plans for tomorrow, only for the same thing to happen again.

dhruv_kernlai 58 minutes ago | parent

$74 vs $ 10 vs $25 for the same prompt, The interesting number is not actually quality, its what we can get per dollar like 6 subagents runs in parallel.

glinkot 57 minutes ago | parent

The creation really is amazing. I harnet heard of the book but got a long way through it!

konart 56 minutes ago | parent

Cecilia looks like an average residential area in Russia.

pama 46 minutes ago | parent

Loads nothing on iphone lockdown mode fwiw.

speedgoose 42 minutes ago | parent

Isn’t it expected?

shieldagent 44 minutes ago | parent

Six hours of continuous runtime is the underrated part here. Most one-shot demos fall apart well before that, so this doubles as an endurance benchmark.

bilsbie 39 minutes ago | parent

How do you get it to spend six hours? I’ve done projects where it would have benefited if it put in extra work.

aetherspawn 38 minutes ago | parent

/goal spend at least 6 hours doing … works

The supervisor agent will keep the session in a loop until 6 hours have passed and eventually the agent will decide to use up the remaining time rather than fighting with it

adrithmetiqa 21 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how much co2 is being thrown into the atmosphere everyday through the steady stream of “look what I made this LLM do” and endless “benchmarking”?

Sigh

r2_pilot 16 minutes ago | parent

I wonder how much co2 you use to get through the day, and how much you use to remark on other people's creations in a way that suggests you disapprove of their utilization of their available resources. How much co2 do your projects emit, since you seem to be interested in those metrics?

adrithmetiqa 13 minutes ago | parent

I strongly suspect one HN post (or two now) is not even in the same ballpark. I could ask Claude to figure it out but that would be a complete waste of time and energy. ;)

gspr 8 minutes ago | parent

> I wonder how much co2 you use to get through the day

What a terrible thing to say to human! Being (presumably) human, it is their inalienable, natural-born right to do so.

Shame on you.

anonreplier 5 minutes ago | parent

Probably a lot less than you, clanker

simonw 6 minutes ago | parent

One useful hint here is the API token cost - in this case "about $74 in API tokens" for Opus 5.5.

We know Anthropic run inference at a margin, so that $74 means that the cost of the electricity involved is substantially less than $74. I'd love to know the actual cost there.

kojee 22 minutes ago | parent

claude slop, like from every comments you posted

SiempreViernes 36 minutes ago | parent

The first city I clicked on at random had the opening phrase:

> Arriving, you rejoice at its bridges, each different

The model city had like five bridges total, three of which were didn't bridge anything at all but instead sat in the middle of the river and went along its flow, the "bridges" for some reason pretending to be small islands.

ofirg 15 minutes ago | parent

like bridge over slop and water, i will let you down.

Traubenfuchs 11 minutes ago | parent

Astra Penthesilea has towers that sometimes clip into the green... hedges? Pipes?

Opus Eutropia has a few isekai circle cities with one of them... ON the river, giving no space for ship traffic.

Slop has never been this beautiful before!

droidjj 32 minutes ago | parent

If you haven’t read the book yet, I’m tempted to warn you against opening the visualization. Part of the joy of reading this book is letting your mind’s eye run wild, and I fear if I read it for the first time after toying with this site, I’d be remembering the cities rather than conjuring them.

vanadium1st 15 minutes ago | parent

That is the exact problem with the city of Dinipro.

Citizens of this city high in the sky imagine it so fully in their minds that no one there needs to open their eyes to walk the streets and live their normal lives. But if one makes the mistake of opening their eyes and tries to see the city directly, they would immediately fall through the clouds to the ground deep below.

FuturisticLover 15 minutes ago | parent

I opened it because I had no idea what Invisible Cities meant here. I thought they might be some real cities that don't come up on maps.

The website gives you a good hint before opening up the visuals. So, I got an idea.

I don't really know about Marco Polo. My only knowledge comes from the Netflix series, which doesn't talk about these invisible cities.

user43928 26 minutes ago | parent

Funny note about Opus 5.5.

I once instructed it to spawn at most 20 subagents and it spawned 40, with an adversarial reviewer for each of the 20.

It doesn't follow these instructions very well.

sreekanth850 13 minutes ago | parent

Does this bring any happiness? for me, No. effort need a purpose.

tuesdaynight 10 minutes ago | parent

It reminds me of Total War. The soundtrack and way that the map is shown. Is Total War an inspiration? Anyways, I liked the visualization. But I never read the book, so I followed (partly) droidjj recommendation