> But I feel that (perhaps due to one or more of your acknowledged biases) you're applying the wrong context to the situation at hand.

That's likely it. I know it might have looked like a joke, but I was serious about my biases, and wanted to say them up front, especially given that GP was curious about motivation and psychology (and honestly, I was curious too, in a self-reflective kind of way).

> You seem to be suggesting that it might be possible, even thinly so, that Chat-GPT somehow misapplied a strict standard of randomness in the formation of its response, instead of simply papering over a hole in its knowledge with a bit of improvised plausible-sounding guesswork, a well-documented behavior of both Chat-GPT and thinking entities worldwide. If not, then I humbly apologize for misunderstanding your point. Otherwise, I must politely agree to disagree.

You're pretty much on point here. I started with a vague intuition, and writing those comments was helpful in clarifying it; what I was suggesting is that, as GPT-4 was trained with a lot of code and coding-related discussions, it surely encountered many texts where readings and misreadings of language standards, good and bad implementations, were discussed. From my personal experience, this would definitely be the case if it ingested significant amount of material on C++ or Common Lisp - but this kind of "language lawyering" also shows up in context of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, POSIX, etc. So the general pattern of "not going beyond what is written" (in context of programming, though it applies in other domains too) is something I believe GPT-4 could've picked on.

Now, I understand and acknowledge the strong tendency for LLMs to "paper over a hole in its knowledge with a bit of improvised plausible-sounding guesswork". What I was thinking in writing those comments is that the "language lawyering" attitude, had GPT-4 picked it up, isn't competing with hallucinations, but rather modulating/complementing them. This would explain why its "plausibly-sounding guesswork" leaned towards denying PRNG-ness of %-operator, instead of the (more obvious to us) assumption that it is a proper PRNG.

This isn't a strong defense, I'm not going to die on that hill or anything. But it's something I think is at least possible, and I thought worth bringing up to counter the common assumption that GPT-4 is plain old getting confused and making plausibly-sounding shit up at random. I.e. I was suggesting that, while still wrong, it might be wrong for a deeper reason, perhaps more excusable one.

But also I wrote it because it was a knee-jerk counterpoint and I felt it hit a sweet spot of being deep enough, contrarian enough and reasonable enough to warrant posting - and, for some reason, I didn't manage to stop myself from hitting "submit".

> And I'm sorry that my essay rubbed you the wrong way. Perhaps one day you will find it better than you do now, but if not then I hope it passes from your memory quickly.

The more I think about it (in large part through writing this response), the more I realize it's me, not you. So don't be sorry - in fact, I apologize for a mostly knee-jerk reaction that was aimed in 1/3 at your text, in 1/3 at the HN commentary I saw for it, and 1/3 at things I saw in LLM-related threads in the past month. I didn't want to make you feel bad or annoyed, and I promise to give your text a more unbiased second read.

Thanks for replying and arguing your case so thoroughly!