Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by californical 1187 days ago
I have been trying this, but it crashes every single time. I end up getting a huge amount of output, but I’m guessing that it exceeds the time limit and crashes losing the entire output.

Maybe I’m using it wrong, but I just describe the system that I want to build and it starts listing out multiple files. Usually by the 3rd or 4th file, it crashes with an error.

I’m not sure how to reduce the output so it doesn’t crash! I have ChatGPT Plus using GPT4, fwiw.

Did you have this problem too, and do you remedy by giving it smaller bits of information per question?
1 comments
ThePhysicist 1187 days ago
Just write "You were interrupted, please continue." - that will prompt it to pick up its train of thoughts and continue. Strange times we live in...
link
robocat 1186 days ago
It seems a lot of prompts are polite (e.g. “please”). Weird, since I don’t think we ask Google politely?

How does being polite in your prompts help you?

link
raylad 1186 days ago
It makes a big difference with Bing bot.

Try a prompt where you want it to create a list of something in two versions:

* Create a list of the top 20 blah sorted by blah

It will typically return just a few and then refuse to give you more. Then try:

* Acting as a conscientious and resourceful research assistant, use your knowledge and initiative to create a list of the top 20 blah sorted by blah.

You get much better results.

Lately I find that you can reduce its hallucinations somewhat by adding something like:

* If you are unsure of any information put in "??". Do not fabricate information. I understand that not all information is available and appreciate your work.

This is all a bit much - having to coddle an AI, but it's possible to understand why it would be the case: it's trained on lots of human interactions and apparently responds better to a friendly interaction with keywords that set it up to do a good job.

link
eric-hu 1186 days ago
The South Park: Post Covid special had Amazon Alexa androids who were girlfriends to some characters. The boyfriend had to walk on eggshells with some topics or Alexa would go into a screaming fit.

Kind of prescient.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lugeruSbnAE

link