Reminds me of the falling-blocks one, where IIRC he made the blocks 'spontaneously' create the necessary time by starting with them in the right order and then

Reminds me of the falling-blocks one, where IIRC he made the blocks 'spontaneously' create the necessary time by starting with them in the right order and then simply displaying it in reverse, due to the temporal reversibility of physics. So it simply looked 100% correct as somehow the blocks magically all bounced exactly right so as to turn into the time. If you did it 'forward', you'd be baffled, but it becomes trivial if you think like a Heptapod. :) One could probably do the same trick here: start with the flies in the clock shape, then diffuse them, then display it in reverse. And stitch together each sequence by a bit of biased sampling to move each fly to its nearest counterpart in the next sequence? Then the flies magically assemble themselves into the time without ever moving unnaturally. "How do they know how to coordinate?! I just don't understand!" (Also a good analogy to AI diffusion models...?)