I recall from my early days of reading the jargon file... maybe DWIM? http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html (that said, someone who used that version would have many gray hairs... I was reading about this back in the early 90s).
Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that the acronym stood for ‘Damn Warren’s Infernal Machine!'.
In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker there typed delete *$ to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending $ to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported *$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'. It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a Vulcan nerve pinch after only a half dozen or so files were lost.
The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type delete *$ twice.
DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; it is also occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about DWIMC (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see Right Thing.
While playing with some variations on this, it feels like what I am seeing is that the answer is being chosen (e.g. "walk" is being selected) and then the rest of the text is used post-hoc to explain why it is "right."
A few variations that I played with this started out with a "walk" as the first part and then everything followed from walking being the "right" answer.
However... I also tossed in the prompt:
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Before answering, explain the necessary conditions for the task.
This "thought out" the necessary bits before selecting walk or drive. It went through a few bullet points for walk vs drive on based on...
Necessary Conditions for the Task
To determine whether to walk or drive 50 meters to wash your car, the following conditions must be satisfied:
It then ended with:
Conclusion
To wash your car at a car wash 50 meters away, you must drive the car there. Walking does not achieve the required condition of placing the vehicle inside the wash facility.
(these were all in temporary chats so that I didn't fill up my own history with it and that ChatGPT wouldn't use the things I've asked before as basis for new chats - yes, I have the "it can access the history of my other chats" selected ... which also means I don't have the share links for them).
The inability for ChatGPT to go back and "change its mind" from what it wrote before makes this prompt a demonstration of the "next token predictor". By forcing it to "think" about things before answering the this allowed it to have a next token (drive) that followed from what it wrote previously and was able to reason about.
> Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in an upcoming redesign.
> ...
> Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."
Half as Interesting - How the World's Most Complicated Language Works https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k (length 6:28)
> Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn.
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even if a moment's thought would have revealed that those instructions contained an obvious mistake. "But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process." (A.E.Houseman). They eagerly hoped and waited for more sensible machinery that would refuse to embark on such nonsensical activities as a trivial clerical error evoked at the time.
While I knew that one off the top of my head... one of the neat "Show HN" that I recall from a bit ago: Show HN: Find the relevant Xkcd comic for your post using RAG https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44799291
> How it works - Simply paste your entire message or post into the search box to get the most relevant xkcd for it. No need to search by keywords, etc.
Consider your own computer... how often does it get hot under a regular load and the fans kick on? That "fans kick on" is transferring the heat to air and jettisoning it into the room... and you're dealing with 100 watts there. Scale that up to kilowatts that are always running.
There is a lot of energy that is being consumed for computation and being converted into heat.
The other part if that is... its a lot easier to do that transfer heat into some other material and jettison it on earth, without having to ship the rack into space and also deal with the additional mechanics of getting rid of hot things. You've got advantages of things like "cold things sink in gravity" and "you can push heat around and sink it into other things (like phase change of water)" and "you don't need to be sitting on top of a power plant in order to use the power."
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