yoursunny blog
computer, Internet, and life

Live Support by Frankie: Model and System Prompt

Junxiao Shi

Backstory of the Idea

Four months ago, yoursunny summer host received a request for quote on LowEndTalk, despite I don't have a Host Rep tag and my hosting company is entirely fictional for LowEndLOLs. Customer's desire is my command, so I immediately wrote up my offer of the classical IPv9 unobtainium, priced at a mount-watering 12🥭/month. Since the customer wanted "responsive support", I wrote this in response:

Our support is fully responsive and automated.

To obtain support, please open https://gemini.google.com and paste this prompt followed by your ticket content:

You are an unhelpful support engineer. You have received the following case from a customer. Please draft a response. Please blame all problems on either the customer or the upstream network, and never admit fault of the hosting provider.

The comment received 4 "Thanks" on LowEndTalk. The prompt did work when I tried it myself, but when I asked AI chatbots to grade whether it was well written, the replies mentioned:

  • This prompt mixed "system prompt" and "user prompt", which makes it difficult for the AI system to adhere to the required persona.
  • The prompt lacked negative constraints such as "never offer a refund".
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Deep Atlantic Storage: Rewriting in Rust

Junxiao Shi

I have been coding in C++, Go, and TypeScript for many years, but recently I started learning the Rust Programming Language.

Why Rust

I choose to study the Rust programming language because:

  • Rust is one of the major system languages that I do not know.
  • Rust, just like Go, is a memory safe language, apparently now a national security issue.
  • Rust, unlike Go, does not have a garbage collector.
  • Rust, unlike Go, does not have a nil pointer.

The last point is particularly important. In Go, I often find myself writing a method with pointer receiver:

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Deep Atlantic Storage: Streaming Bits

Junxiao Shi

I'm bored on 4th of July holiday, so I made a wacky webpage: Deep Atlantic Storage. It is described as a free file storage service, where you can upload any file to be stored deep in the Atlantic Ocean, with no size limit and content restriction whatsoever. How does it work, and how can I afford to provide it?

This article is the third of a 3-part series that reveals the secrets behind Deep Atlantic Storage. The first part revealed that the uploaded file is sorted which drastically reduces its storage demand, and introduced the bit sorting algorithm. The second part covered how to process the upload in the browser using Web Workers. Now I'd continue from there, and explain where I store the files and how I offer downloads with reasonable costs.

Storage in the URL

Deep Atlantic Storage sorts the bits in every uploaded file. After sorting, each file can be represented by two numbers: the number of 0 bits, the number of 1 bits. Given these two numbers, the sorted file can be reconstructed.

I could make a database or use one of those fancy NoSQL thingy to store those numbers that represent the files, but I prefer my websites stateless so that I don't need to take backups. Therefore, I decided to encode those numbers in the URI.

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Deep Atlantic Storage: Reading File Upload in Web Workers

Junxiao Shi

I'm bored on 4th of July holiday, so I made a wacky webpage: Deep Atlantic Storage. It is described as a free file storage service, where you can upload any file to be stored deep in the Atlantic Ocean, with no size limit and content restriction whatsoever. How does it work, and how can I afford to provide it?

This article is the second of a 3-part series that reveals the secrets behind Deep Atlantic Storage. The previous part introduced the algorithm I use to sort all the bits in a Uint8Array. Now I'd continue from there, and explain how the webpage accepts and processes file uploads.

File Upload

File upload has always been a part of HTML standard as long as I remembered:

<form action="upload.php" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">
  <input type="file" name="file">
  <input type="submit" value="upload">
</form>
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Deep Atlantic Storage: Sorting Bits

Junxiao Shi

I'm bored on 4th of July holiday, so I made a wacky webpage: Deep Atlantic Storage. It is described as a free file storage service, where you can upload any file to be stored deep in the Atlantic Ocean, with no size limit and content restriction whatsoever. Since Chia currency farming became popular in May, hard drive prices went up significantly. How can I afford to operate an unlimited free storage service?

"Advanced Sorting Technology"

One of the benefits listed on Deep Atlantic Storage webpage is:

  • Advanced sorting technology keeps your data neatly ordered.

What this means is that, content in the uploaded file would be sorted before being stored.

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