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Comment by Jotalea | Hacker News Reader

> Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT. It was useless as usual.

This is so real.

I hold the belief that if you ask it something that nobody has documented before it just won't do it. This also and particularly applies to code.

Ask about Fibonacci? Great.

Ask about something tricky? Let's make up some APIs

It’s oddly good at converting imperative C to Haskell, though.

There are hundreds of resources for a Google search for "emoji flags Windows".

Worse, the statistically frequent fibonacci-type problems are attractors in the latest space. If you ever get near them then snap, they'll degrade whatever answer you get that's not actually related, and it'll start throwing in fibonacci concepts into your non-fibonacci code.

Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility.

Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.

> Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility.

Not everyone has the time or the inclination to keep a stable of local llms (and update them regularly, for example). Some people have other hobbies.

> Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.

What? It's been years since a regular search got you anything but spam from the usual tutorial farms.

Wait really? Are you saying this Google search[0] returns no useful results at all?

The prompt I used isn't a particularly good search query, and I got:

  * A Stack Overflow question about this issue with a proposed solution;
  * A Reddit thread offering a workaround to non-technical users;
  * This thread on HN (which OP of course couldn't have seen, but anyway);
  * OP's article;
  * A blog post about OP's article;
  * A blog post with an elegant solution using pyftsubset

What am I missing?

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=Why+would+flag+emojis+render...

You're picking on the 0.25% searches that still return something useful.

I think you're moving the goalposts. I didn't know this problem existed until OP's article taught me about it, but it seems pointless to continue this discussion.

fwiw, Claude gets this particular problem right https://gist.github.com/philpax/724633e106e3e3df4d5a83ba7bd2...

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