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Wellness Wednesday for April 29, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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How do I get ChatGPT to stop bringing up goblins and gremlins in every chat?

Using 5.5? This is literally a meme rn

That was the proximate cause of me writing this post, but I had already noticed ChatGPT acting weird.

This is one example from a few days ago. Just completely unhinged.

Also, I'm still having the Safari problem. If any of the tech geniuses here have non goblin-related solutions I'd love to hear them.

Funny bc they have "dont mention goblins" in the sytem prompt twice. Either 5.3 or 5.4 loved to call every bug "a gremlin" , etc.

That's why I asked if you were using 5.5/an older model. Mine doesn't talk about goblins anymore.

I'm still having the Safari problem

?

AI can suffer from target fixation. By saying don't mention goblins twice you're putting goblins in the context window twice.

There was a great example from a while back along the lines of "show me a room with absolutely no elephants"