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> A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as “Mr Tinkleberry”, he says he can tell Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on Claude.md,

> A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as “Mr Tinkleberry”, he says he can tell Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on Claude.md, when Claude stops calling him “Mr Tinkleberry” consistently this is a totally normal thing that everyone does, that no one should view as a signal of a psychotic break from reality... is your friend in the room with us right now? I doubt I'll ever understand the lengths AI enjoyers will go though just to avoid any amount of independent thought...

crystal_revenge 11mo ago
I suspect you’re misjudging the friend here. This sounds more like the famous “no brown m&ms” clause in the Van Halen performance contract. As ridiculous as the request is, it being followed provides strong evidence that the rest (and more meaningful) of the requests are. Sounds like the friend understands quite well how LLMs actually work and has found a clever way to be signaled when it’s starting to go off the rails.
- davnicwil 11mo ago
  It's also a common tactic for filtering inbound email. Mention that people may optionally include some word like 'orange' in the subject line to tell you they've come via some place like your blog or whatever it may be, and have read at least carefully enough to notice this. Of course ironically that trick's probably trivially broken now because of use of LLMs in spam. But the point stands, it's an old trick.
  - kiernan 11mo ago
    Could try asking for a seahorse emoji in addition…
  - mosselman 11mo ago
    Apart from the fact that not even every human would read this and add it to the subject, this would still work. I doubt there is any spam machine out there the quickly tries to find peoples personal blog before sending them viagra mail. If you are being targeted personally, then of course all bets are off, but that would’ve been the case with or without the subject-line-trick
    - davnicwil 11mo ago
      It's not so much a case of personal targeting or anything particularly deliberate. LLMs are trained on the full internet. All relevant information gets compressed in the weights. If your email and this instruction are linked on your site, that goes in there, and the LLM may with some probability decide it's appropriate to use it at inference time. That's why 'tricks' like this may get broken to some degree by LLM spam, and trivially when they do, with no special effort on the spammer's part. It's all baked into the model. What previously would have involved a degree of targeting that wouldn't scale now will not.
- grayhatter 11mo ago
  > I suspect you’re misjudging the friend here. This sounds more like the famous “no brown m&ms” clause in the Van Halen performance contract. As ridiculous as the request is, it being followed provides strong evidence that the rest (and more meaningful) of the requests are. I'd argue, it's more like you've bought so much into the idea this is reasonable, that you're also willing to go through extreme lengths to recon and pretend like this is sane. Imagine two different worlds, one where the tools that engineers use, have a clear, and reasonable way to detect and determine if the generative subsystem is still on the rails provided by the controller. And another world where the interface is completely devoid of any sort of basic introspection interface, and because it's a problematic mess, all the way down, everyone invents some asinine way that they believe provides some sort of signal as to whether or not the random noise generator has gone off the rails. > Sounds like the friend understands quite well how LLMs actually work and has found a clever way to be signaled when it’s starting to go off the rails. My point is that while it's a cute hack, if you step back and compare it objectively, to what good engineering would look like. It's wild so many people are all just willing to accept this interface as "functional" because it means they don't have to do the thinking that required to emit the output the AI is able to, via the specific randomness function used. Imagine these two worlds actually do exist; and instead of using the real interface that provides a clear bool answer to "the generative system has gone off the rails" they *want* to be called Mr Tinkerberry Which world do you think this example lives in? You could convince me, Mr Tinkleberry is a cute example of the latter, obviously... but it'd take effort to convince me that this reality is half reasonable or that's it's reasonable that people who would want to call themselves engineers should feel proud to be a part of this one. Before you try to strawman my argument, this isn't a gatekeeping argument. It's only a critical take on the interface options we have to understand something that might as well be magic, because that serves the snakeoil sales much better. > > Is the magic token machine working? > Fuck I have no idea dude, ask it to call you a funny name, if it forgets the funny name it's probably broken, and you need to reset it Yes, I enjoy working with these people and living in this world.
  - gyomu 11mo ago
    It is kind of wild that not that long ago the general sentiment in software engineering (at least as observed on boards like this one) seemed to be about valuing systems that were understandable, introspectable, with tight feedback loops, within which we could compose layers of abstractions in meaningful and predictable ways (see for example the hugely popular - at the time - works of Chris Granger, Bret Victor, etc). And now we've made a complete 180 and people are getting excited about proprietary black boxes and "vibe engineering" where you have to pretend like the computer is some amnesic schizophrenic being that you have to coerce into maybe doing your work for you, but you're never really sure whether it's working or not because who wants to read 8000 line code diffs every time you ask them to change something. And never mind if your feedback loops are multiple minutes long because you're waiting on some agent to execute some complex network+GPU bound workflow.
Alpha_Logic 11mo ago
The 'canary in the coal mine' approach (like the Mr. Tinkleberry trick) is silly but pragmatic. Until we have deterministic introspection for LLMs, engineers will always invent weird heuristics to detect drift. It's not elegant engineering, but it's effective survival tactics in a non-deterministic loop.

crystal_revenge 11mo ago

I suspect you’re misjudging the friend here. This sounds more like the famous “no brown m&ms” clause in the Van Halen performance contract. As ridiculous as the request is, it being followed provides strong evidence that the rest (and more meaningful) of the requests are. Sounds like the friend understands quite well how LLMs actually work and has found a clever way to be signaled when it’s starting to go off the rails.

davnicwil 11mo ago
It's also a common tactic for filtering inbound email. Mention that people may optionally include some word like 'orange' in the subject line to tell you they've come via some place like your blog or whatever it may be, and have read at least carefully enough to notice this. Of course ironically that trick's probably trivially broken now because of use of LLMs in spam. But the point stands, it's an old trick.
- kiernan 11mo ago
  Could try asking for a seahorse emoji in addition…
- mosselman 11mo ago
  Apart from the fact that not even every human would read this and add it to the subject, this would still work. I doubt there is any spam machine out there the quickly tries to find peoples personal blog before sending them viagra mail. If you are being targeted personally, then of course all bets are off, but that would’ve been the case with or without the subject-line-trick
  - davnicwil 11mo ago
    It's not so much a case of personal targeting or anything particularly deliberate. LLMs are trained on the full internet. All relevant information gets compressed in the weights. If your email and this instruction are linked on your site, that goes in there, and the LLM may with some probability decide it's appropriate to use it at inference time. That's why 'tricks' like this may get broken to some degree by LLM spam, and trivially when they do, with no special effort on the spammer's part. It's all baked into the model. What previously would have involved a degree of targeting that wouldn't scale now will not.
grayhatter 11mo ago
> I suspect you’re misjudging the friend here. This sounds more like the famous “no brown m&ms” clause in the Van Halen performance contract. As ridiculous as the request is, it being followed provides strong evidence that the rest (and more meaningful) of the requests are. I'd argue, it's more like you've bought so much into the idea this is reasonable, that you're also willing to go through extreme lengths to recon and pretend like this is sane. Imagine two different worlds, one where the tools that engineers use, have a clear, and reasonable way to detect and determine if the generative subsystem is still on the rails provided by the controller. And another world where the interface is completely devoid of any sort of basic introspection interface, and because it's a problematic mess, all the way down, everyone invents some asinine way that they believe provides some sort of signal as to whether or not the random noise generator has gone off the rails. > Sounds like the friend understands quite well how LLMs actually work and has found a clever way to be signaled when it’s starting to go off the rails. My point is that while it's a cute hack, if you step back and compare it objectively, to what good engineering would look like. It's wild so many people are all just willing to accept this interface as "functional" because it means they don't have to do the thinking that required to emit the output the AI is able to, via the specific randomness function used. Imagine these two worlds actually do exist; and instead of using the real interface that provides a clear bool answer to "the generative system has gone off the rails" they *want* to be called Mr Tinkerberry Which world do you think this example lives in? You could convince me, Mr Tinkleberry is a cute example of the latter, obviously... but it'd take effort to convince me that this reality is half reasonable or that's it's reasonable that people who would want to call themselves engineers should feel proud to be a part of this one. Before you try to strawman my argument, this isn't a gatekeeping argument. It's only a critical take on the interface options we have to understand something that might as well be magic, because that serves the snakeoil sales much better. > > Is the magic token machine working? > Fuck I have no idea dude, ask it to call you a funny name, if it forgets the funny name it's probably broken, and you need to reset it Yes, I enjoy working with these people and living in this world.
- gyomu 11mo ago
  It is kind of wild that not that long ago the general sentiment in software engineering (at least as observed on boards like this one) seemed to be about valuing systems that were understandable, introspectable, with tight feedback loops, within which we could compose layers of abstractions in meaningful and predictable ways (see for example the hugely popular - at the time - works of Chris Granger, Bret Victor, etc). And now we've made a complete 180 and people are getting excited about proprietary black boxes and "vibe engineering" where you have to pretend like the computer is some amnesic schizophrenic being that you have to coerce into maybe doing your work for you, but you're never really sure whether it's working or not because who wants to read 8000 line code diffs every time you ask them to change something. And never mind if your feedback loops are multiple minutes long because you're waiting on some agent to execute some complex network+GPU bound workflow.

Alpha_Logic 11mo ago

The 'canary in the coal mine' approach (like the Mr. Tinkleberry trick) is silly but pragmatic. Until we have deterministic introspection for LLMs, engineers will always invent weird heuristics to detect drift. It's not elegant engineering, but it's effective survival tactics in a non-deterministic loop.