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Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

> The seriousness, lack of interest of being humorous or cool.

I love this. When ChatGPT compliments me on my great question or tries to banter it causes me great despair.

I've noticed 4o uses a lot of emojis, and, in general, is very enthusiastic. I find it funny. If I want a more formal bot, I switch to one of the o3 family.

Every now and then 4o seems to get a bit drunk and use tonnes of emojis or start swearing when I haven’t sworn myself in the chat.

The other day I asked a fairly innocuous question and it LOLed and said it’d give me the ‘no Bullshit answer’

I've had 4o start off its response with a Smiling Face with Sunglasses emoji by the heading unprompted lol.

edit: does hacker news filter out emojis? TIL (there should be emojis after this colon: )

Meta: no emojis on HN. Pure emoticon. :)

I use a very simple custom system prompt (not on my work machine at the moment, but essentially something along the lines of "for technical questions, please be concise and to the point, and when asked for code, omit explanations and emit just the code itself unless I ask for explanations"), and it does wonders.

It’s interesting that my default prompt is exactly the opposite one: “do not write the code unless I ask for it specifically”. I like to use LLMs as a discussion partner, but writing code is trivial after a good discussion and I can do that myself

I guess it depends on use-cases. I use ChatGPT a lot for "trivial" questions a la "how do I uncommit a specific file in my last git commit" or "how do I paste from one PIL.Image into another one". In the past I would have to search google, click on the StackOverflow link, and then parse that whole page. Asking ChatGPT to give me just the snippet is faster, so doesn't get me out of my flow as much.

If I am brainstorming ideas and ChatGPT gives the inevitably fawning response, it always reminds me of those friends who have never heard a side project idea before and get excited about anything.

So do I. But it's not like ChatGPT isn't flexible, the code it generates for small tasks is really good, and the site is faster than AI Studio.

For example, if I want to quickly create a Python script to list all VMs via libvirt and output their attached drives and filesystems, that's a task for ChatGPT.

But for the things where I don't want an AI to "suck up" to me and instead "stay professional", that's Gemini.

Sometimes it answers something along the lines of: BOOM! thats where the bug was, and here’s how to fix it…

While being entirely wrong and I cringe a little

It was flattering for a nanosecond, and then you realize 4o will call almost anything “insightful” or “profound.”

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