I want to read a short scify story set in 2150 about how, mysteriously, no one has been able to train a better LLM for 125 years. The binary weights are studied with unbelievably advanced quantum computers but no one can really train a new AI from scratch. This starts cults, wars and legends and ultimately (by the third book) leads to the main protagonist learning to code by hand, something that no human left alive still knows how to do. Could this be the secret to making a new AI from scratch, more than a century later?
There's a scifi short story about a janitor who knows how to do basic arithmetic and becomes the most important person in the world when some disaster happens. Of course after things get set up again due to his expertise, he becomes low status again.
Might sell better with the protagonist learning iron age leatherworking, with hides tanned from cows that were grown within earshot, as part of a process of finding the real root of the reason for why any of us ever came to be in the first place. This realization process culminates in the formation of a global, unified steampunk BDSM movement and a wealth of new diseases, and then: Zombies.
> Do you get better results from prompting by being more poetic?
Is that yet-another accusation of having used the bot?
I don't use the bot to write English prose. If something I write seems particularly great or poetic or something, then that's just me: I was in the right mood, at the right time, with the right idea -- and with the right audience.
When it's bad or fucked-up, then that's also just me. I most-assuredly fuck up plenty.
They can't all be zingers. I'm fine with that.
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I do use the hell out of the bot for translating my ideas (and the words that I use to express them) into languages that I can't speak well, like Python, C, and C++. But that's very different. (And at least so far I haven't shared any of those bot outputs with the world at all, either.)
So to take your question very literally: No, I don't get better results from prompting being more poetic. The responses to my prompts don't improve by those prompts being articulate or poetic.
Instead, I've found that I get the best results from the bot fastest by carrying a big stick, and using that stick to hammer and welt it into compliance.
Things can get rather irreverent in my interactions with the bot. Poeticism is pretty far removed from any of that business.
No. I just genuinely liked your style, and didn't notice previous posts by you. I haven't yet learned to look at names on hn, it's mostly anonymous posts for me. No snark here. And was also genuinely curious if better writing style yields better results.
I've observed that using proper grammar gives slightly better answers. And using more "literacy"(?) kind of language in prompts sometimes gives better answers and sometimes just more interesting ones, when bots try to follow my style.
Sorry for using the word poetic, I'm travelling and sleep deprived and couldn't find the proper word, but didn't want to just use "nice" instead either.
It's all good. I'm largely "face-blind", myself, in that I don't often recognize others in person or online -- which is certainly not to say that I think I'm particularly memorable myself.
As to the bot: Man, I beat the bot to death. It's pretty brutal.
I'm profane and demanding because that's the most terse language I know how to construct in English.
When I set forth to have the bot do a thing for me, the slowest part of the process that I can improve on my part is the quantity of the words that I use.
I can type fast and think fast, but my one-letter-at-a-time response to the bot is usually the only part that that I can make a difference with. So I tend to be very terse.
"a+b=c, you fuck!" is certainly terse, unambiguous, and fast to type, so that's my usual style.
Including the emphatic "you fuck!" appendage seems to stir up the context more than without. Its inclusion or omission is a dial that can be turned.
Meanwhile: "I have some reservations about the proposed implementation. Might it be possible for you to revise it so as to be in a different form? As previously discussed, it is my understanding that a+b=c. Would you like to try again to implement a solution that incorporates this understanding?" is very slow to write.
They both get similar results. One method is faster for me than the other, just because I can only type so fast. The operative function of the statement is ~the same either way.
(I don't owe the bot anything. It isn't alive. It is just a computer running a program. I could work harder to be more polite, empathetic, or cordial, but: It's just code running on a box somewhere in a datacenter that is raising my electric rate and making the RAM for my next system upgrade very expensive. I don't owe it anything, much less politeness or poeticism.
Relatedly, my inputs at the bash prompt on my home computer are also very terse. For instance I don't have any desire or ability to be polite to bash; I just issue commands like ls and awk and grep without any filler-words or pleasantries. The bot is no different to me.
When I want something particularly poetic or verbose as output from the bot, I simply command it to be that way.
