Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

teodordyakov.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 97 posts

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#51

Post by rjh29 »

martin-t wrote: post #20
rjh29 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trend of self-censoring words like 'dead' and 'kill' appears to be relatively new, motivated by TikTok and YouTube algorithms, but spilling over into the general internet.

Correlation is not causation but I challenge anyone to come up with a different cause: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=tiktok,u... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=unalive&...

I agree, although I was referring to asterisks like de*d and k*ll (or censoring with black bars, or using emojis) - euphemisms of course have always been part of language evolution.

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#53

Post by j_maffe »

TeodorDyakov wrote: post #11
j_maffe wrote: post #8

Why would anyone feel compelled to use AI to write such a short blog post? Is there no space where I can assume the written contented is communicated 100% by another human being?

I am sorry if it appears that it was written by AI - I wrote a draft and used AI to assist me since English, is not my first language. I asked it only to format but it has seemed to change the tone and the expressions too '.'

English is also not my first language. I understand the challenge, but I'd recommend to write it in English and then ask AI to suggest rephrasing in wrong or poorly phrased sentences. Right now it looks almost entirely AI-generated unfortunately and does not show the thought you had when writing it. Cheers.

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#54

Post by librasteve »

boerseth wrote: post #23

> Brainf*ck is the antithesis of modern software engineering. There are no comments, no meaningful variable names, and no structure That's not true. From the little time I've spent trying to read and write some simple programs in BF, I recall good examples being pretty legible. In fact, because the language only relies on those few characters, anything else you type becomes a comment. Linebreaks, whitespace, alphanum…

I also wonder whether brainfuck (ie turing machine like) coding would be a more efficient interface to LLMs

For those who want to try it, there’s always the https://raku.org module…

  use Polyglot::Brainfuck;
    
    bf hi { 
        ++++++++[>++++[>++>+++>+++>+
        +>+>->>+[>.>---.+++++++..+++.
        >>.>+.>++. 
    }
    
    say hi.decode; # Hello World!
    
    bf plus-two {
        ,++.
    }
    
    say plus-two(buf8.new: 40).head; # 42

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#55

Post by lawn »

drstewart wrote: post #24
hdgvhicv wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chilling effects. Western culture is taken over by American Puritian values thanks to the globlaisation of the media.

Puritans were English protestants. I think you mean to say it's being taken over by European values.

Censoring shit or fuck is very much not a European thing.

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#57

Post by DonHopkins »

nubinetwork wrote: post #6

Too bad it can't explain why it does the same thing with actual English.actual English.actual English.actual English.actual English.actual English.

It overruns the max headroom of the context window.

https://youtu.be/cYdpOjletnc?t=6

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#58

Post by martin-t »

rjh29 wrote: post #51
martin-t wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correlation is not causation but I challenge anyone to come up with a different cause: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=tiktok,u... https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=unalive&...

I agree, although I was referring to asterisks like de*d and k*ll (or censoring with black bars, or using emojis) - euphemisms of course have always been part of language evolution.

I chose unalive because i didn't know google trends allowed searching for asterisks. Appears it does. k*ll was apparently used even before tiktok but usage increased markedly around the same time as unalive appeared. Interestingly d*ad and r*pe don't follow this pattern. I am not sure it treats asterisks correctly, nor that google trends is the right tool to research this, given people searching for the word is only a poor indicator of its usage.

Sidenote, I wish all websites supported markdown properly and not a custom weird subset they found convenient.

Re: Asking Gemini 3 to generate Brainfuck code results in an infinite loop

#59

Post by tessierashpool9 »

Asked for a solution of a photographed Ubongo puzzle: https://gemini.google.com/share/f2619eb3eaa1

Gemini Pro neither as is nor in Deep Research mode even got the number of pieces or relevant squares right. I didn't expect it to actually solve it. But I would have expected it to get the basics right and maybe hint that this is too difficult. Or pull up some solutions PDF, or some Python code to brute force search ... but just straight giving a totally wrong answer is like ... 2024 called, it wants its language model back.

Instead in Pro Simple it just gave a wrong solution and Deep Research wrote a whole lecture about it starting with "The Geometric and Cognitive Dynamics of Polyomino Systems: An Exhaustive Analysis of Ubongo Puzzle 151" ... that's just bullshit bingo. My prompt was a photo of the puzzle and "solve ubongo puzzle 151"; in my opinion you can't even argue that this lecture was to be expected given my very clear and simple task description.

My mental model for language models is: overconfident, eloquent assistant who talks a lot of bullshit but has some interesting ideas every now and then. For simple tasks it simply a summary of what I could google myself but asking an LLM saves some time. In that sense it's Google 2.0 (or 3.0 if you will)

Post reply on HN