Say It Four Times (In Your System Prompt) | Hacker News Reader

Say It Four Times (In Your System Prompt)

khola.blog

10 pointsnkhola18 comments

I'm really put of reading ai-isms like "It quits working around the fourth time, and the average hides who it worked for"

This is classic Claude, and makes me think the author didn't read, edit, or invest in their own words.

The author's AI applied a thin layer of varnish to what is more or less handwaving. I think more people need to take an undergraduate level statistics course; the conclusions made are completely unsupported by the random trials.

Weighing six rocks a hundred times doesn't tell you the average weight of a mountain.

Great criticism. I should have examined the numbers and the experimental setup more closely before publishing. The signal is there - repetition does help but the exact quantitative conclusions are erroneous in this post.

That aside, I like the way it's put - "Weighing six rocks a hundred times doesn't tell you the average weight of a mountain".

No offense nkhola, but even this comment feels entirely like a chatbot response.

ROFL, is it because they all say "you're right" or something like that - lol maybe I am influenced by them, I need to really think hard about how I phrase things when I type a response in a hurry. I genuinely wanted to just thank the guy. As an aside, not sure if you are following this thread still, but I reworked the experiment and rewrote the post - this time it is all me :D.

First of all, thanks for your criticism again, nateb2022. It woke me up. I tried to run a few more tasks and not make any grand claims this time. Actually there is no golden number of repetitions that I can suggest. In fact, the picture is rather noisy. What does happen is that the median task improves in compliance pretty fast after 2 repetitions. I did a sign test and I rewrote the entire post in place. It also gives you due credit and I borrowed the "Weighing mountains" phrase for a section header. I am incredibly thankful to you for being a careful reader. I am super humbled and would love to connect with you. Perhaps I can count on you for future discussions and posts.

Hard to open with something that is not defensive here. Let me first thank you for your attention. Call me naive but I had no hope that I could get any audience for this blog. I started this on the side at a very busy time of my life and thought AI could write catchier posts. I had given detailed instructions on the sections or outlines and what to cover, style etc, but ultimately, THIS LINE MATTERS MOST "makes me think the author didn't read, edit, or invest in their own words." And from now on, I have decided, if I ever write a post it will entirely be written by me - however, flawed, however less worthy of eyeballs. So, I rewrote the entire post in place to actually articulate what I wanted to with this idea- feel free to run substack's native AI detection on it :D.

What surprised me is that this post got much over 1k views. It actually made me believe that I can actually have an audience that I can learn from, connect with. Thanks for opening my eyes and many thanks to hackernews for bringing so many people together. I have many ideas to explore in this moment that we share as humans where we can ask these intelligent machines to execute (hopefully) our will and would love to go in this journey together. I request you to help me grow thanks for your love.

To all the folks in this great community, I thank with all my heart for the attention you gave to this post. The feedback I received has made me feel incredibly humbled and loved. It made me see in full light what a part of me believed - in times like this, human voices matter, and the social connection matters. I would like to continue learning from all of you. FWIW, any posts I write (including the current one that I rewrote in place) will be 100% human. I as a human have a lot of value to offer through my ideas and explorations and the only way to do justice to those ideas and my audience is to say them in my own flawed human way. Lots of love.

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