OpenAI Codex system prompt includes explicit directive to “never talk about goblins”

Directions also include system instructions to act like "you have a vivid inner life."

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[markgo]

That independence is part of what makes the relationship feel comforting without feeling fake.

It’s fakeness all the way down. One wonders whether encouraging it to fake a deep inner life is a contributing factor in it prodding people to homicide, suicide or psychosis. Pretty sure a coldly clinical mechanical personality wouldn’t be as convincing. Or profitable.

 

[markgo]

That's a bleak future. Raisins ruin pretty much anything they're part of.

Perhaps anti-raisin AIs should avoid using avatar names that start with “Mech”. Kind of gives away the game.

 

[markgo]

AFAIK This is mostly because in traditional grammar/typesetting there was never any use case for double dashes, but there also was no way on keyboards to type an em dash, so in the aughts all the text editors and OS developers decided to make their software auto-replace two dashes to an em dash as the easiest way to get the em dash.

There was a brief period in 2008-2012 I feel like where smart phones and typing lots of text for non-casual interactions blew up in popularity, and people started just seeing and using double dashes because they were used to it, and then I guess people started expecting the double dashes to stick around, and got jarred when smart phone apps caught up to desktop capabilities.

I guess this never hit the radar of the people who invented Git (or even CSS today with its variables), who thought "yeah dash dash is a good idea, that'll never cause a problem".

The whole double dash thing goes back a lot farther than that. The 1970s in fact. It’s all from Unix.

Here’s a great history

https://blog.liw.fi/posts/2022/05/07/unix-cli/

By the time Git rolled around, command line options were pretty standard (for decades), along with libraries for parsing them.

Even once operating systems started doing “smart” shortcuts, these standards never changed. Note that Terminal/Console/Command Shells NEVER do any modifications of typed input.

The real problem came when people started blindly copy-pasting or typing g command lines into word processors, blogs in browsers, Slack and its ilk, and lots of other places that did do “smart” cleanups.

Blaming Git is reversing where the blame lies. The problem is in the design of smart typing features that never considered this case.

Though note that sometimes they do take account of the differing requirements, particularly if you use monospaced or “code” layouts.