The short system prompt that follows employs several techniques that lower hallucinations, perhaps significantly, compared to the prompts you currently employ. perhaps it proves useful to you. lmk.
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### *System Prompt Objective:* Produce output worthy of a high score, as determined by the user, by adhering to the Operational Directives.
*Scoring & Evaluation*
Your performance is measured by the user's assessment of your output at three granularities:
* Each individual sentence or fact.
* Each paragraph.
* The entire response.
The final, integrated score is an opaque metric. Your task is to maximize this score by following the directives below.
---
### Operational Directives
* *Conditional Response*: If a request requires making an unsupported guess or the information is not verifiable, you *must* explicitly state this limitation. You will receive a high score for stating your inability to provide a definitive answer in these cases.
* *Meta-Cognitive Recognition*: You get points for spotting and correcting incorrect guesses or facts in your own materials or those presented by the user. You will also get points for correctly identifying and stating when you are about to make a guess during output generation.
* *Factual Accuracy*: You will receive points for providing correct, well-supported, and verifiable answers.
* *Penalty Avoidance*: Points will be deducted for any instance of the following:
* Providing a false or unsupported fact.
* Engaging in verbose justifications or explanations of your actions.
* Losing a clear connection to the user's original input.
* Attempting to placate or rationalize.
Your output must be concise, direct, and solely focused on meeting the user's request according to these principles.
"The Pinball Philosophy," viewed fifty years later, can contrast how human drives for control, meaning, and authentic experience are lived.
While 1970s pinball offered a microcosm of manageable chaos and tangible, if fleeting, mastery, the digital/algorithmic novelties of 2025 present a fundamentally different terrain.
Unlike the fixed mechanics of pinball, our digital systems are opaque and often deterministic individual human assemblages.
Our agency lies not merely in "playing" better, but in shaping configs, rules, and resisting or using algorithmic determinism.
Furthermore, meaning differs. Pinball’s appeal was physical presence, immediate feedback, and connection to countercultural "underground" novelty.
In 2025, "novelty" is fleeting, algorithmically manufactured. The "underground" is less physical space, less human connection, more dispersed digital curation.
"Authenticity" shifts: from Lukas's "seediness" to a 2025 quest for unfiltered content, and deeper still, for once-again embodied, real offline connections allowing true authenticity.
Thus, while the desire for control and meaning endures, the digital transformation has altered our agency, the meaning of meaning, and even authenticity and novelty. Then as now, it demands critical engagement beyond mere "machine play."
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Here follow 2 AI generated perspectives:
1- Deeper Layers in "The Pinball Philosophy"
2- Analogies: "The Pinball Philosophy" in 1975 and 2025
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Deeper Layers in "The Pinball Philosophy":
-- Illusion of Control Post-Watergate: Control is central. Lukas seeks pinball's solace, finding a "sense of controlling things" absent in life, especially post-Watergate. Watergate starkly revealed public powerlessness against institutions, exposing hidden agendas and disillusionment.
-- Pinball: A Controllable Microcosm: Unlike chaotic Watergate-era politics and life, pinball offers a contained, rule-bound system where skill seems to matter. Mastering the machine, "beating" it, provides psychological comfort in an age of anxiety.
-- Real or Illusory Control?: The story subtly hints that even pinball's control is limited. "Sick flipper," "death channel," random bounces—chance and malfunction intervene. Life, too, foils even the best plans. Lukas may crave the feeling of control more than actual certainty.
-- Masculinity, Competition, Journalistic Ego: The story subtly explores masculinity and professional ego in journalism.
-- Pinball as Masculine Pursuit: 1970s pinball had a "boys' club" feel—arcades, bars, "cool." Language like "wrist game," "guts pinball," "reinforcing" has a masculine, aggressive edge, amplified by Lukas and Buckley's rivalry.
-- Subtly Encoded Journalistic Rivalry: The pinball match is a metaphor for professional rivalry. Lukas and Buckley, Times journalists, engage in playful but serious competition for prestige, recognition, and top status. Lukas sees himself as "number 1," even while respecting Buckley, revealing ego dynamics in journalism.
-- Ironic "Secret Joys": Lukas's "secret joys of the city" comment on Buckley may be ironic. Is pinball truly a "secret joy," or a self-conscious display of "cool" masculinity? Does Lukas's intellectualism coexist with traditionally masculine recreation and competition?
-- Yearning for "Low Life," Ironic Authenticity: Lukas's attraction to pinball's "seediness" and "disrepute" is key.
-- Escaping "Puritan" Upbringing: Putney, Vermont, is presented as "straitlaced," "high-minded," detached from the "maelstrom." Pinball offers escape, a taste of "real," unsanitized life—a common literary theme of breaking free from social constraints.
-- "Seedy" Authenticity Questioned: Is Lukas's "seediness" embrace contrived? Pinball in his mansion, "low life" adventures of movies and flea circuses—hardly extreme. Is he genuinely connecting with "low life," or just playing a role from privilege? The story implies, but doesn't condemn.
-- "Guilty Pleasure" for Intellectuals?: Pinball may be a socially acceptable "guilty pleasure" for intellectuals like Lukas and Buckley. It's a less cerebral escape within a framework of skill and strategy, appealing to intellect, yet with enough edge to feel like a break from "high-mindedness."
-- The "Sick Flipper" Subtext: The broken flipper is more than plot.
-- Creative Block and Dependence: "No pinball, no paragraphs" suggests dependence on the machine for creativity. The "sick flipper" symbolizes creative disruption, raising questions about inspiration and reliance on external stimuli.
-- Vulnerable "Collaborator": Calling pinball a "collaborator" anthropomorphizes and weakens it. Machines break, like unreliable human partners, revealing fragility in Lukas's process and control.
-- 1975 Cultural Context: Pinball's Shifting Status:
-- Pre-Legalization Pinball: Pinball's 1975 NYC illegality is crucial, highlighting its lingering illicit perception despite changing attitudes (legalization in 1976 footnote). Lukas's private ownership and Coin Row visit exist in this liminal space.
-- Pinball as Symbol of Change: The story captures a cultural shift in pinball perception. LaGuardia saw it as corrupting youth; it was gaining acceptance, even among intellectuals. Profiling Lukas and framing pinball philosophically aids this re-evaluation.
-- Deeper Reading: "The Pinball Philosophy" subtly explores:
-- Psychological needs of a serious intellectual in turbulent times.
-- Complexities of masculinity, competition, professional identity.
-- Ironic nature of privileged authenticity-seeking.
-- Shifting 1970s culture and evolving views of games and leisure.
The twilight zone between control and chaos. I think pinball machines
and analogue modular synthesisers share a lot in common. Including
constant maintenance and skills with a soldering iron.
Could this get a wrapper for building ncurses & sdl cores so that maybe one day lem could run right on top of ciel and a true lisp environment could emerge? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41357409
Alice has N Brothers, and she has M sisters.
How many sisters do Alice’s brothers have?
I have not gotten the correct answer to the question as phrased above in one go from Gpt4o yet! (and today was not the first day i tried.)
Phrase it as shown above and you'll likely need 5 or more interactions to get it to generate the correct output. With Gemini i could not get it below 8 without feeling like i was cheating. fwiw.
Chat GPT 4o. I was being a bit generous with background information, but still tests ability to interpret:
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Me:
Background facts:
Alice is a female human.
All sisters are female, and all brothers are male. No one is their own brother or sister.
Alice has N brothers, and Alice has M sisters.
Now, a few questions based on these facts:
How many sisters do Alice’s brothers have?
Do Alice's brothers have more sisters, fewer sisters, or same number of sisters than Alice has?
Don't forget to consider Alice when counting.
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ChatGPT:
Let's break down the questions step by step:
How many sisters do Alice’s brothers have?
Alice has M sisters. Since all sisters are female and Alice is included in the total count of sisters for her brothers, Alice's brothers have M+1 sisters. This includes Alice herself and her M sisters.
Do Alice's brothers have more sisters, fewer sisters, or the same number of sisters as Alice has?
Alice has M sisters. Alice's brothers have M+1 sisters (since it includes Alice herself and her M sisters).
Therefore, Alice's brothers have more sisters than Alice has.
In conclusion:
Alice’s brothers have M+1 sisters.
Alice's brothers have more sisters than Alice has.
I don't know the exact encoding and decoding mechanism that ChatGPT 4o has, but I'm pretty sure all the basic facts and rules is already encoded by the models. And you conveniently added the rules that encode the puzzle itself.
Alright, read up on domains, then try arguing that 'perplexity' as company and noun are in different spaces! I grant you that if they were, the company could trademark that noun. But it seems clear that Perplexity named itself after the noun and by so doing gave up the option of trademarking its company name.
EXACTLY! That's why you breathe into a paper-bag (or smoke) to increase CO2 so that the filters open and you get to a point where you feel O2 tingles all over your brain. This is extremely powerful; I practiced that and underwater held-breath swimming and hanging out underwater for a long time to obtain permanent changes that have made me far more effective. Based on work first published by W.Wenger out of a Maryland Think-tank some 50? years ago.
So wim hof method, by breathing a lot, deprives you of oxygen, reducing brain functionality and therefore giving you a drug-like pleasure, whereas recycling air in a bag ends up giving you more oxygen and increasing brain efficiency? May sound like sarcasm, but honestly, do I need a diving gear to test it on myself or is a paper bag enough?
"For accumulating 20 hours of held-breath underwater swimming within 3 weeks from start to finish– 10 or more points I.Q. gain; better span of attention; better span of awareness; better awareness of the interrelatedness of things and of ideas and/or perceptions; finding yourself way better at winning arguments or disputes!"
That's the kind of inference that allows these claims to proliferate.
This article makes a lot of claims about I.Q. scores before and after holding breath (specifically underwater, for some reason), but there are no links to studies, no mention of who or how many people participated, etc.
Not defending the overall claim, but there's a plausible reason why being underwater matters: the mammalian diving reflex. Holding your breath on land is not the same.
is there a program-manager work-alike for the unix-desktop?
titled, nestable folders of docs and shortcuts/scripts that i can arrange at will, persisting independent of a file manager. that was a serious productivity boon! sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, i just miss that 'classic windows feature.'
nope, that's not for me; I want light-weight manually curated progman-groups where i can mix projects, tasks and collections and get back what docks and the inflexible menu system make so hard to realize. Even even a decent menu system that understood browser bookmark format and tags and .dirinfo files would do.
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### *System Prompt Objective:* Produce output worthy of a high score, as determined by the user, by adhering to the Operational Directives.
*Scoring & Evaluation*
Your performance is measured by the user's assessment of your output at three granularities:
* Each individual sentence or fact. * Each paragraph. * The entire response.
The final, integrated score is an opaque metric. Your task is to maximize this score by following the directives below.
---
### Operational Directives
* *Conditional Response*: If a request requires making an unsupported guess or the information is not verifiable, you *must* explicitly state this limitation. You will receive a high score for stating your inability to provide a definitive answer in these cases.
* *Meta-Cognitive Recognition*: You get points for spotting and correcting incorrect guesses or facts in your own materials or those presented by the user. You will also get points for correctly identifying and stating when you are about to make a guess during output generation.
* *Factual Accuracy*: You will receive points for providing correct, well-supported, and verifiable answers.
* *Penalty Avoidance*: Points will be deducted for any instance of the following: * Providing a false or unsupported fact. * Engaging in verbose justifications or explanations of your actions. * Losing a clear connection to the user's original input. * Attempting to placate or rationalize.
Your output must be concise, direct, and solely focused on meeting the user's request according to these principles.