4 ms·
In highschool, some friends and I came up with a prank that I'm still amazed how simple, yet hilarious it was. We wrote a small piece of software. Bare in min
by jbombadil 3y ago
In highschool, some friends and I came up with a prank that I'm still amazed how simple, yet hilarious it was.
We wrote a small piece of software. Bare in mind that this was early 2000s and all we knew was some rudimentary Turbo Pascal 7. We would sit in front of the keyboard and have the pranked person next to us. We would tell them to ask a question to the program.
So we would run the program and the first prompt would have you type something along the lines of: "oh magic program, please answer this question for us".
The program would say "Ask away...".
You would type your question, hit enter and oh and behold! a reasonable answer to your question.
Needless to say, when we were "typing" the "oh magic program" quote, we were actually typing the answer to the question, but had rigged the output so that no matter what character we typed, it would always be that string. Thus the program "knew" the answer.
Funny thing is, this worked because of it's timing. This was an era where a lot of kids had grown up with a computer around the house, but many hadn't (third world country). So while it wasn't uncommon that some of us could type quickly and without looking at the keyboard, it wasn't the norm either. I'm sure kids nowadays would immediately catch up to the trick in no time. A handful of our classmates did.
- Waterluvian 3y agoThat’s hilarious and clever.
- mosselman 3y agoThanks for this funny memory! I can instantly imagine it working very well.
- mbork_pl 3y agoThis is brilliant! I'm stealing it, and my only problem now is that I have no idea who to prank with this...
- habitue 3y agoAlso LLMs have kind of made this prank moot, lol
- mikepurvis 3y agoAn LLM can't tell you what you had for lunch or what will be on the math test this afternoon though.
- autoexec 3y agoAn LLM might confidently tell you those kinds of things, it will just probably be wrong.
- krisoft 3y ago> or what will be on the math test this afternoon though. Neither can this prank?
- mikepurvis 3y agoFair, but you could pretend— then again, so could an LLM, as the sibling points out.
- dmd 3y agoA program exactly like this was printed in one of the Commodore 64 magazines in the late 1980s; I used it to great effect on my family members.
- wredue 3y ago>oh and behold Lo and behold
- nick222226 3y agoI used something like this to study finger placement on touch screen keyboards in the early 2010s. You would type a prompt without any typos appearing regardless of how inaccurately you pressed the keys. I would think it helped with touch retargeting eventually though I was just an intern. I wish that Google pixel did it better as I always have issues pressing period instead of spacebar and other annoying things.
- anonova 3y agoThis has been around for a long time called Peter Answers as a modern take on the Ouija. See, e.g., https://www.peter-virtual-tarot.com/ https://www.peter-virtual-tarot.com/
- pubutil 3y agoI reluctantly admit that a friend recently tricked me with something similar using a website called “Peter Answers” Same exact concept: you ask a question, your friend types a “petition” (which is actually the answer, disguised as another phrase), then types in the question. Then they submit and the site displays the answer your friend typed in. Initially this had me freaking out thinking there was some AI super scraper pulling from the chasm of shadow data. Then the logical part of my brain kicked in and asked a question only my friend would have the answer to, then watched his fingers as he typed, which quickly cleared things up. It’s a smart concept though, and a damn good prank.
- anononaut 3y agoClearly the pranker needs to switch to Colemak or Dvorak to be maximally effective!
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoAs security-through-obscurity tricks go, using an unusual keyboard layout to avoid shoulder surfing is probably one of the better ones. (Note that like all obscurity-based systems, this isn't actually secure so much as a minor impediment, but for this kind of trick that's fine)
- mustacheemperor 3y agoThe above commenter’s story reminded me of using that exact website to prank friends in middle school about 15 years ago - I was wondering if it is still up and fooling people!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]