https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2502.16705/Collected HN comments and submissions linking this paper.enMon, 02 Nov 2026 11:16:22 GMThttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45821261urn:hackerpapers:mention:2502.16705:45821261Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:00:43 GMT<p>LLMs were not designed to count letters[0] since they work with tokens, so whatever trick they are now doing behind the scenes to handle this case, can probably only handle this particular case. I wonder if it&#x27;s now included in the system prompt. I asked ChatGPT and it said it&#x27;s now using len(str) and some other python scripts to do the counting, but who knows what&#x27;s actually happening behind the scenes. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16705</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2502.16705/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cs.CLhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45816161urn:hackerpapers:mention:2502.16705:45816161Tue, 04 Nov 2025 21:36:25 GMT<p>LLMs were not designed to count letters[0] since they work with tokens, so whatever trick they are now doing behind the scenes to handle this case, can probably only handle this particular case. I wonder if it&#x27;s now included in the system prompt. I asked ChatGPT and it said it&#x27;s now using len(str) and some other python scripts to do the counting, but who knows what&#x27;s actually happening behind the scenes. [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.16705</p><p><a href="https://hackerpaper.kaipfister.de/p/2502.16705/">Paper and discussion history</a>. A mention is not an endorsement.</p>cs.CL