Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
ChatGPT can't produce a code sample in a light theme
3 points by harborsong 784 days ago
For close to half of the world's population who has a difficult time reading dark themes, ChatGPT is borderline useless. No amount of rewording the request fixes the issue. I'm about certain ChatGPT isn't cognizant of the appearance of the actual code sample window it is spitting code into.
4 comments

I had no idea that dark themes were hard to read for people. I have "color blindness" and for me it is a panacea, I should have known it must be anathema to another cohort.
I have partial color blindness and glaucoma which I think aren't related to my inability to read dark themes. When I try to read white or light text on a dark background, something in my eyes start flashing and I develop a headache in less than 60 seconds, it's been like that my whole life.
it depends on the quality of your monitor and your lighting environment, many of which people can't control very much.
ChatGPT is not capable of reworking site-level CSS. If it were, that would probably be classified as a security vulnerability. Your best bet is to complain to OpenAI or (if you are throwing money at a premium subscription) find a third-party client to use that has theming that you like.
It wouldn't be a vulnerability if we can request it to show its output in a legible theme, none that I can see, what am I missing?
What you're asking for potentially involves ChatGPT to be able to arbitrarily manipulate page-level CSS, which could in theory be exploited for nefarious purposes, maybe by a system prompt from the ChatGPT store.
If you are willing to install a browser plugin like tampermonkey you would be able to update the default color and background to something you like.
That would work but, I run no browser extensions.
I really dislike dark themes, I've difficulty reading after a small amount of time. It's really a dumb trend.