Comment by QuantumNomad_
1 day ago
Possible, but regardless of whether or not that is the case his name is well known enough and he has been around long enough that his name definitely appears in a lot of the texts the LLMs were trained on, in contexts that relate to his views on programming.
Try asking your LLM of choice this in an empty session with no other context:
You are working for Mike Acton. What principles do you follow when writing code?
Maybe he found that telling it that it works for him nudges it in a direction that is beneficial to get it to write code like he wants, alongside the specific rules and other instructions in the above linked document?
> Maybe he found that telling it that it works for him nudges it in a direction that is beneficial
I think that’s call “spooky Acton at a distance”
I started writing up a giant response to this about how all of LLMs are spooky action at a distance but for better or for worse, that doesn't make them any less useful, and a few paragraphs in I suddenly noticed what you actually wrote. Well played :)