Oct 9, 2026, 2:32 PMI recently discovered a marvelous thing: instead of prompting an LLM, you can also prompt... yourself? Like, you express a desire for a drawing of a cat and then... an appendage of your choice picks up a pencil? And a cat is drawn? I'm still not quite sure how this works
Oct 9, 2026, 2:41 PM@lcamtuf it’s a mystery
@lcamtuf have you considered upgrading your humunculi to one that supports opentelemtry?
Oct 9, 2026, 2:50 PM@lcamtuf Yeah, pull the other one, it's got bells on.
@lcamtuf this seems too dangerous. Aren't you worried that you will escape containment and kill us all?
Oct 9, 2026, 2:56 PM@mathieui too much work
@lcamtuf watch me put on my harness
Oct 9, 2026, 2:56 PM@slothrop it's called underpants and it's optional
Oct 9, 2026, 2:59 PM@lcamtuf It's probably a conspiracy theory but I hear some advanced versions of homo sapiens come with an embedded NPU.
Oct 9, 2026, 3:12 PM@lcamtuf
Magic
@lcamtuf
This happened to me just last week. And no one accused my scribble cat of being AI either.
Oct 9, 2026, 3:28 PM@lcamtuf so avant-garde :SirBlobStern:
@lcamtuf The power and effectiveness of the so-called “free will” has been disputed by cognitive sciences. 🙃
Oct 9, 2026, 4:37 PM@lcamtuf Sadly, I was not able to reproduce your results...
@lcamtuf omg it works you have a million - nay TRILLION - dollar idea!!!
@lcamtuf kind of like this... not good but quick and fun
@lcamtuf Redditors one step ahead as usual
https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1tvpeoy/does_anyone_else_use_chatgpt_in_their_head/
More seriously I think search engines kinda ruined that, want a cat image? ask google. Or likely even the world of clip art and the horrors of desktop publishing.
@lcamtuf "But I can't draw!"
Oct 9, 2026, 6:42 PM@lcamtuf I have often wondered what it’s like to not have ADHD. I think I sort of understand now.
Oct 9, 2026, 7:21 PM@lcamtuf SelfGPT
@Urban_Hermit So say we all.
@lcamtuf Right arm up.... reach behind... SCRATCH!
Unless you are old.... then you need some hardware assistance.
@lcamtuf electric signals, training, and ice cream and cookies. The next big thing.
@lcamtuf I actually started to make a platform that would let AI bros do this, get their agent to ask for art from humans that had signed up to respond to prompts. But then I felt it was kind of dehumanising and stopped.
@lcamtuf you can also prompt yourself to debug and code-review:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
@adamhotep @lcamtuf
"Rubber ducking" is now a verb.
Spread it amongst your friends, if you have the spoons.
@Urban_Hermit @adamhotep @lcamtuf Always rubber duck before you dog food.
@lcamtuf I've been needing a way to draw maps that can be changed over time more easily than erasing pencil on paper. A friend suggested lamination, and that resulted in this today: four laminated pages taped with clear tape* as a portable whiteboard. No problems so far, I can't believe I've gone so long without this. Unlimited image generation tokens.
* Leaving one pair untaped, so I can fold it and it fits in my backpack
@lcamtuf okay but how would I know what to think or do then?
@lcamtuf I was with you up to "a cat was drawn".
@lcamtuf Turns out the legacy human rendering pipeline has an unexpected advantage: precise edits. I make an AI-assisted comic, and for tiny defects I've found a graphics editor faster than another round of prompts. The self-prompting API is terrible, though.
@lcamtuf I am immensely enjoying everyone’s “I am definitely *not* an artist and I’m not even *sure* I can draw a cat” cats today.
Here’s mine.
Oct 9, 2026, 9:50 PM@lcamtuf I confirm that you can prompt yourself, also when have an issue.
It's called Rubber Duck Debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
You explain your problem to a Rubber Duck and then you see the solution. The Rubber Duck is more intelligent then an AI at my opinion !
@lcamtuf That's exactly what Elon Musk did when he decided to design a cybertruck.
Oct 10, 2026, 1:14 AM
Oct 10, 2026, 11:17 AMAgreed, same for looking something up in a book or magazine,
Or just searching using a non-corporate search engine.
Oct 10, 2026, 2:36 PM
Oct 10, 2026, 8:05 PM
Oct 10, 2026, 8:22 PM@lcamtuf Human slop?
Oct 10, 2026, 9:45 PM
@lcamtuf huge if true.
@lcamtuf The Surrealists used to pass around a box full of random words and phrases written on small pieces of paper, to act as a trigger for creating poetry and art.
This is the lesser known visible hand theory, an antidote to magical thinking.
@lcamtuf do you pay yourself $200 a month for this?
Oct 11, 2026, 12:09 PM
