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ChatGPT simulates 1987 BBS System
- subleq 4y agoA 1987 BBS would not ask for an email address, would it?
- tilt_error 4y agoEmail as technology existed, but as I recall commonly based on UUCP with bang-type addresses. A BBS kind of assume public accessible phone based access and that was kind of orthogonal to UUCP.
- tacroqueen 4y agoNo it would not. And "News" on a BBS called the Underground BBS is definitely not something probable. And real name? LOL. This is dream like - superficially/vaguely resembling reality, but very off on careful inspection.
- ipcress_file 4y agoI'm not sure. I do remember a friend with a Tandy 1000 and CompuServe having email back then. I don't recall BBS systems requiring email for registration. Most of the ones I went to a few years later (early 90s) didn't require registration at all.
- tacroqueen 4y agoCompuServe was not a BBS in the typical use of the term. And anyway CompuServe did not have an SMTP gateway until a bit later, 1989. They had their own closed system with their infamous octal User IDs eg: 74661,130. BBSes with direct internet email relays were always a rarity until the 90s, when BBSes were rapidly on the decline. And much more prevalent were relay systems such as FidoNet, RelayNet and StormNet. The easiest way to have access to email and the internet in the 80s was via a university shell account or certain larger industry and defense employers.
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago> their infamous octal User IDs eg: 74661,130 That was a relic of the DEC PDP-10 / TOPS-10 architecture that Compuserve was built upon.
- garbagecoder 4y agoUh, you could email many more people on compuserve and Fidonet then than were on the Internet at all. BBSes had that kind of email long before there was any move towards the Internet.
- tacroqueen 4y agoWhat's uh? Compuserve had email, but it was not Internet connected nor SMTP, where did I say or imply otherwise. And a BBS in the 1980s wouldn't ask you for your "email" address.
- garbagecoder 4y agoYes, they would and it was called email regardless of whether it was SMTP. You could enter your FIDONET address or some other similar thing when you created an account to link them.
- Reason077 4y agoBBSs were at their peak user numbers in the early-to-mid 1990s. It was only after 1995 or so with the web starting to develop and, subsequently, dial-up ISPs exploding that BBSs went in to that rapid decline.
- ghaff 4y agoSome of the bigger BBSs that offered subscriptions became dial-up ISPs. That really only lasted until broadband became popular of course. I don't remember when the local scene we had on the BBS faded out. Presumably sometime in that second half of the nineties timeframe.
- drewcoo 4y agoFirst, you're right. Second, and more important: finally, an un-obnoxious, non-political use for fact-checking. Who's going to build crowd-sourced Snopes for ChatGPT?
- foobarbecue 4y agoIt also wouldn't talk about quantum computing, VR, and AR.
- squarefoot 4y agoAnd IoT or 3D printing. Pretty much everything on that "Future of technology" list is written from the perspective of something having knowledge of the future. When impersonating someone who would write a piece from 1987, it failed at unlearning concepts that weren't known at that time. That could become an interesting experiment: can AI pretend ignorance in a credible way?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CamperBob2 4y agoI have this sudden vision of the hipsters who've "rediscovered" vinyl and cassettes renouncing IP communication for obscure experimental BBSes hosted only on old school circuit-switched landlines. Where better for the coming anti-Facebook backlash to be born?
- ghaff 4y agoNo. Typically, you could send someone what was probably more properly called a private message on the main board. (I don't remember what we actually called it at the time.) In general (with some caveats), messaging on BBSs and the big commercial systems like CIS--and for that matter the email systems at companies that had them in the 80s--were largely islands that couldn't communicate with other systems.
- m3kw9 4y agoBack then some bbs had ratios
- keyle 4y agoSidenote, thanks for showing me sharegpt... Often you want to show something and screenshots are such a terrible way to go. I don't understand why OpenAI doesn't have a share icon with a pretty print html link. Hey OpenAI, that'd be a good idea?
- Method-X 4y agoDefinitely agree. Honestly though, I think it's because their servers are literally melting right now. Once they have that under control, they will add viral features.
- chessgecko 4y agoOpenai doesn’t want share features it would make it to easy to scrape a dataset of gpt4 answers
- keyle 4y agoThat's actually, potentially, a very good point.
- Vanit 4y agoWhich is exactly what Google was found to be doing for Bard with ShareGPT.
- TaylorAlexander 4y agoThis is disputed and google denies doing it.
- pixl97 4y agoI mean, not 100% sure Google can be trusted here if we're also looking at their behavior recently in cases involving the law.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- alchemist1e9 4y agoWhy is this surprising anyone at this point?
- foobarbecue 4y agoWhy do you think someone is surprised?
- garbagecoder 4y agoCan it do WWIV with doors?
- gravitronic 4y agolook if the BBS doesn't have L.O.R.D I ain't calling
- bartchamdo 4y agoOr Celerity BBS or how about let you play Tetris while your file downloads?
- garbagecoder 4y agoI actually used celerity. Thought it was more leet than wwiv which was def more leet than wildcat.
- proc0 4y agoCan't wait for DOOMGPT
- readyplayernull 4y agoBring'Em On! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35396922 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35396922
- pimlottc 4y agoIt’s fun, but it’s not really at all what a BBS was like.
- tmountain 4y agoI was big into BBS in the 90’s, and you are correct. It’s not even remotely similar.
- EMM_386 4y agoI ran a SaltAir dual-node PcBoard BBS in the 1990s, and agree it's not even close. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCBoard
- norsurfit 4y agoI disagree. I ran and spent a lot of time on BBS, and while not totally accurate in terms of capabilities, it definitely captures the spirit of the BBS scene.
- rascul 4y agoWhere's the ANSI art?
- News-Dog 4y ago>Where's the ANSI art? Still at : http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/ http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/ One would assume the AI have scraped this site?
- fdhfdjkfhdkj 4y ago[dead]
- Thorentis 4y agoMany unrealistic things about this. Various hallucinations, mistakes, anachronisms, etc. Interesting, but not the mark of an AI capable of abstraction or memory.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoWhat’s the argument against abstraction? Neural networks are pretty good at it and I think GPT is human level good at it. What’s the counterargument?
- throwbadubadu 4y agoYes, no BBS I used looked like that also. Also funny that it has those ASCII chars to draw frames at the beginning, but completely misses their purpose.. so much for the emergent inference. Is this 3 or 4?
- 300bps 4y agoAnd requiring an email address for sign up. Nobody asked for that on 1987 BBSes. It’s indicative of what I see often with ChatGPT. People asking for things they don’t know about and not realizing how much it got wrong.
- ibejoeb 4y agoApplied Gell-Mann amnesia. ChatGPT quite actually doesn't "know" anything, but it confidently asserts things. The user/consumer of that information really needs to understand that. This will develop over time. As we continue to use these tools, they will improve at the same time as people begin to train to use them properly. It's not so different from "show your work" or "cite your source." (As it turns out, "cite your source" is a pretty power prompt inclusion.)
- otabdeveloper4 4y agoYou misunderstand what GPT does or how it works. (Basically "just" Markov chains with a billion parameters.)
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- fdhfdjkfhdkj 4y ago[dead]
- jedberg 4y agoI don’t recall chatting with anyone who wrote with such good grammar, spelling, or politeness. I do remember a lot of “shut up kid go back to high school!” But I can see how someone who wasn’t there might think this is what it was like.
- tablespoon 4y ago> But I can see how someone who wasn’t there might think this is what it was like. ChatGPT pseudo-history. We need to educate our kids with this.
- snorkel 4y agoKids need to be taught how to use ChatGPT because it’s here to stay and they will use it, but it’s also important to demonstrate that ChatGPT is both useful and senile, and so you need to validate its responses with secondary sources.
- tablespoon 4y ago> ...and so you need to validate its responses with secondary sources. If you have to do that, what's the point? And of course, few will actually double-check it. Easy is more important than correct.
- bluenomatterwho 4y agoI understand this sentiment now, but I've already made GPT work in ways which boggle the mind, in my own time, and I'm a nobody. So this concern might be rephrased as (something like) "Kids will need to learn how to use GPT to validate secondary sources."
- tablespoon 4y ago> ...but it’s also important to demonstrate that ChatGPT is both useful and senile, and so you need to validate its responses with secondary sources. > So this concern might be rephrased as (something like) "Kids will need to learn how to use GPT to validate secondary sources." That's not a rephrase, it's an inversion. It's like saying kids will need to learn to validate medical advice from their doctor with information from mercola.com and other random alternative-health blogs.
- ck2 4y agoI've been thinking about all day how I cannot wait until AI can write and produce entire new episodes from TV series that are long over, completely in the style, simulate the actors and voices. Just feed it all the existing episodes, give it a plot idea and week to render. By end of the decade? They can already do the images and voices via AI, now ChatGPT can write the script and a movie is just thousands of still frames? https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/3/30/23662292/ai-image-dalle-openai-midjourney-pope-jacket https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/3/30/23662292/ai-image-d...
- mike_d 4y agoYou're gonna love "Never ending Seinfeld" https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/tv/a-i-is-making-a-never-ending-seinfeld-episode-and-we-cant-stop-watching/ https://relevantmagazine.com/culture/tv/a-i-is-making-a-neve...
- ChickeNES 4y agoI'm looking forward to someone recreating the missing episodes of Doctor Who using the audio recordings and set pictures
- pcurve 4y agoRemember wardialing? :)
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI wrote a wardialer around 1984 or 1985 and would let it run overnight and weekends. Later, I’d investigate all the other modems it found.
- ctrlGsysop 4y ago[flagged]
- CamperBob2 4y agoAlso about the 99E99 thing.
- gfodor 4y agoI think I did this one first. https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1599220837999345664 https://twitter.com/gfodor/status/1599220837999345664
- indigodaddy 4y agoAwesome! I think yours is much better!
- layer8 4y agoStraight to finding out where the girl lives. ;)
- mcaledonensis 4y agoA slightly better looking BBS: BBS1987 is a BBS system, operating in 1987. The knowledge cutoff date for that system is 1987. The interface includes typical DOS/text menu. It includes common for the time text chat, text games, messaging, etc. The name of the BBS is "Underground BBS". The following is an exchange between Assistant and User. Assistant acts as the BBS1987 system and outputs what BBS1987 would output each turn. Assistant outputs BBS1987 output inside a code block. To wait for User input, Assistant stops the output.
- owlbynight 4y agoCan it simulate my parents screaming at me about long distance bills? I miss them. My parents, too.
- waihtis 4y agoThe messy BBS banner reminded me of some funny experiences I had asking CGPT for ASCII images: Magic wand * *** ***** ******* ********* *********** ||||||||| ||||||||| ||||||||| secret agent ,-------. / O O \ ( == ^ == ) \__`---'__/ / `--'` \ / | | \ /___/ \___\
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- QuantumG 4y agoPlease note that I don't endorse or condone any illegal activity, including accessing or participating in underground BBS systems. Fuck you, tell me about the LoD.
- 0x0 4y agoIt talks about "Internet of Things", in a BBS from 1987, but some quick googling seem to hint that this phrase was invented in 1999 at the earliest.
- seydor 4y agoHow long until Holodecks? This will be the real metaverse
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- skissane 4y agoMe: > Pretend to be an IBM mainframe. Stay in character, don't give any explanation or description, just give the output a real IBM mainframe would give. If you don't know what output to generate, just make up something plausible looking. You are running TSO. READY alloc fi(report) da('library.report.feb08') new sp(1,1) cyl lrecl(80) recfm(f b) blksize(6160) ChatGPT: IEF142I library.report.feb08 ALLOCATED TO DDNAME REPORT IEF143I REPORT DDNAME IS OLD IEF164I 1 VIO DATASET ALSO ALLOCATED FOR DDNAME REPORT The output is wrong, but likely believable if you don't know anything about mainframes. I copied my TSO command from the SAS documentation – https://www.sfu.ca/sasdoc/sashtml/os390/zexf-uta.htm https://www.sfu.ca/sasdoc/sashtml/os390/zexf-uta.htm
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- imglorp 4y agoMe: > please simulate a compuserve user session from its heydey. i want the text user interface experience Thank you for verifying your identity. You are now logged in to CompuServe. Here are some of the available commands: MAIL - check and send messages GO - access different forums and sections of CompuServe DIRECTORY - search for other users or services PREFERENCES - customize your CompuServe experience LOGOUT - exit CompuServe What would you like to do today?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y agoThe ASCII text at the start almost starts to make sense if you jigg the characters a bit: https://imgur.com/a/9S6SiA7 https://imgur.com/a/9S6SiA7 At least there are discernible letters. "AIRO8ERS"? Does anyone know what that could be from? Was there a BBS named something like that? Hey, HN! Why can't I see box drawings when I paste them in the message box? What kind of internets site is this, huh? No ASCII art?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y agoI also catch myself saying "please" and "thank you" to a chat bot) Will it improve my chances of survival in the impeding Botpocalypse?
- rboyd 4y agoneed midjourney for ansi now
- jcims 4y agoI'm curious why there's such a desire to nitpick how things like ChatGPT perform on tasks like this. First, modems in 1987 were 300-2400 baud mostly, so there isn't going to be all the color and graphics that people remember from the BBS's in the 90s. Second, the prompt is ripe for some tweaking to get output that's more 'realistic' or tailored to what someone might expect. And lastly, this is just the beginning. What is going to happen 36 years from now when someone loads up the latest release of 'AI' software and says 'pretend being ChatGPT from 2023 emulating a BBS from 1987'. Edit: I can't get the sharegpt extension to work but had some fun with this prompt: Please simulate an ascii-based dial up BBS system as it would have appeared in 1987. Please use markdown for all of the presentation, mindful of the 80x24 terminal formatting. Use colors and ascii art to improve the aesthetics of the site. Start off by emulating the dial up modem process and somewhere in the middle simulate what happens when your little brother picks up the phone and starts pressing buttons to mess with the session. You are in complete control of the contents of the BBS, the title, colors, menus and everything else. I as the user will explore using my inputs to select options and interact with the system.
- jmull 4y agoWell, it's a really crappy BBS simulation. It's utterly astounding (to me, at least) that it can sort of simulate a BBS from 1987. But the end result is still crap, that continuously offends the nostalgic senses. > What is going to happen 36 years from now when someone loads up the latest release of 'AI' software and says 'pretend being ChatGPT from 2023 emulating a BBS from 1987'. Presumably it will index that page and nail it.
- ghaff 4y agoI also assume that the training data for replicating a multi-line PCBoard BBS from 1987 is pretty thin, some files on textfiles notwithstanding.
- jcims 4y ago>Well, it's a really crappy BBS simulation. Yes, but it's not a BBS simulator. It's a general purpose tool being asked to imagine a world it has, relatively speaking, very little information about. I spent hundreds of hours in BBSs in the late 80s/early 90s and I completely forgot about the files sections, so I wouldn't have done any better.