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Comment by neodypsis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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. :)

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