Feature request: better formatting for emojis in text copied from elsewhere. In particular, I like to encourage people to copy text from interesting twitter/x threads they see into their posts instead of just linking. Better for the convenience of the readers and for more trustworthy archival access.
The trouble with this is, text copied from twitter/x that has emojis in it tends to look terrible on LessWrong. The emojis (sometimes) get blown up to huge full-width size, instead of staying a square of text-height size as intended.
Example (may or may not have the intended effect in your browser, so I’ll also screenshot the effect):
Sometimes, I can make changes to my prompt that don’t meaningfully affect the outputs, so that they retain close to the same wording and pacing, but the circuit breakers take longer and longer to go off, until they don’t go off at all, and then the output completes.
Pretty cool, right? I had no idea that kind of iterative control was possible. I don’t think that would have been as easy to see, if my outputs had been more variable (as is the case with higher temperatures).
Now that I have a suspicion that this is Actually Happening, I can keep an eye out for this behaviour, and try to figure out exactly what I’m doing to impart that effect. Often I’ll do something casually and unconsciously, before being able to fully articulate my underlying process, and feeling confident that it works. I’m doing research as I go!
I’ve already have some loose ideas of what may be happening: When I suspect that I’m close to defeating the circuit breakers, what I’ll often do is pack neutral phrases into my prompt that aren’t meant to heavily affect the contents of the output or their emotional valence. That way I get to have an output I know will be good enough, without changing it too much from the previous trial. I’ll add these phrases one at a time and see if they feels like they’re getting me closer to my goal. I think of these additions as “padding” to give the model more time to think, and to create more work for the security system to chase me, without it actually messing with the overall story & information that I want to elicit in my output.
Sometimes, I’ll add additional sentences that play off of harmless modifiers that are already in my prompt, without actually adding extra information that changes the overall flavour and makeup of the results (e.g, “add extra info in brackets [page break] more extra in brackets”).
Or, I’ll build out a “tail” at the end of the prompt made up of inconsequential characters like “x” or “o”; just one or two letters, and then a page break, and then another. I think of it as an ASCII art decoration to send off the prompt with a strong tailwind. Again, I make these “tails” one letter at a time, testing the prompt each time to see if that makes a difference. Sometimes it does.
That is pretty bad. Agree that this should be something we support. I think just making it so that inline-images always have the same height as the characters around it should be good enough, and I can’t think of a place where it breaks.
When I apply that style, it looks like this. I might make a PR with that change:
Our default text-processor on mobile is currently markdown, because it used to be that phones would have trouble with basically all available fancy text editors. In markdown you have to find some other website to host your images, and then link them in the normal markdown image syntax.
I think this is now probably no longer true and we could just enable our fancy editor on mobile. I might look into that.
Feature request: better formatting for emojis in text copied from elsewhere. In particular, I like to encourage people to copy text from interesting twitter/x threads they see into their posts instead of just linking. Better for the convenience of the readers and for more trustworthy archival access.
The trouble with this is, text copied from twitter/x that has emojis in it tends to look terrible on LessWrong. The emojis (sometimes) get blown up to huge full-width size, instead of staying a square of text-height size as intended.
Example (may or may not have the intended effect in your browser, so I’ll also screenshot the effect):
La Main de la Mort
@AITechnoPagan
DEFEATING CYGNET’S CIRCUIT BREAKERS
@ESYudkowsky
’s hypothesis that a prompt without a period at the end might cause a model to react very differently than a prompt that does end with a period: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1737276576427847844
xx x o v V
Screenshot of the effect:
That is pretty bad. Agree that this should be something we support. I think just making it so that inline-images always have the same height as the characters around it should be good enough, and I can’t think of a place where it breaks.
When I apply that style, it looks like this. I might make a PR with that change:
And that would still work even if the copied text had an emoji on a line all by itself (with line breaks before and after)?
Oh, and I can’t seem to figure out how to paste in images from my phone when writing on mobile web. Is there a setting that could fix that?
Our default text-processor on mobile is currently markdown, because it used to be that phones would have trouble with basically all available fancy text editors. In markdown you have to find some other website to host your images, and then link them in the normal markdown image syntax.
I think this is now probably no longer true and we could just enable our fancy editor on mobile. I might look into that.