Chat history
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Short answer: yes, a bit — but not in the way it can feel.
What’s actually going on is a mix of rate limits, tool availability windows, and load management, not a steady shrink‑wrap of capability. When you hit something like an image‑generation cap or a “try again later” wall, that’s almost always because you’ve exhausted a per‑period quota (daily or rolling), not because I’ve permanently lost abilities or you’re being singled out.
A few clarifying points, since you’re asking carefully rather than venting:
The capabilities themselves aren’t getting weaker. When the system says you’ve hit a limit, it’s about how often a heavy tool (image generation, long context processing, browsing, etc.) can be used in a given window. Once the window resets, everything comes back exactly as before.
The windows can feel shorter because they’re sometimes dynamic. When overall demand is high, limits can tighten temporarily. That’s not communicated very transparently, so from your side it looks arbitrary or even punitive. It isn’t — it’s just resource triage.
Text‑only reasoning and discussion are the least restricted. Image generation, file handling, and browsing are the most constrained. That’s why your idea of “come back in an hour when the pipes are clear” is usually right on the money.
There is also a psychological effect: when you’re doing iterative creative work (like your fish saga 🐟), hitting a limit mid‑stream feels far worse than hitting it after a single request. The friction is real even if the policy isn’t malicious.
So: no steady ratchet toward uselessness, no secret downgrade of you, but yes — the experience can feel more restrictive than it used to, especially during hands‑on, back‑and‑forth work.
If you want, when you come back to the fish, we can do it in a way that minimizes iteration — one carefully specified prompt instead of a sequence — which tends to dodge the limits much better.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Ah, I see exactly what you mean — you’re running into that classic “algorithmic roulette” problem with Google’s auto‑thumbnail or link‑preview system. From your description, it sounds like Google isn’t actually deciding your fish is wrong; it’s just picking whatever image it thinks is most representative, and sometimes that’s your little fish, sometimes the first letter of your text, sometimes a snippet from the link — and the asterisk trick only works inconsistently.
That’s just how their scraper works: it scans the page, looks for <img> tags, og:image meta tags, and sometimes even text characters rendered as images. If it doesn’t see a clear “hero image”, it will grab the first thing it thinks makes sense, which often feels completely random.
The small fish pointing toward the text is actually a smart idea — subtle, directional, and non-distracting — but unfortunately you can’t reliably force Google to always pick it. What usually helps is:
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Make the fish the first significant image in the HTML or post.
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Use an og:image meta tag if possible — that’s the tag Google and social platforms rely on most.
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Keep the fish high resolution and simple so it’s favored over letters or background textures.
Even then, you’re at the mercy of the algorithm — sometimes it just doesn’t read the cues. From your side, you’re already doing everything you reasonably can: subtle, forward‑facing, and at the top of the post.
If you want, I can suggest a slight tweak to the fish image layout or format that maximizes the chance Google will pick it consistently, without making it cartoonish or obvious. That usually bumps the odds way up. Do you want me to do that?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
That makes perfect sense — this isn’t about traffic or metrics at all, it’s about taste. And Google’s taste, alas, is philistine.
What you’re reacting to is the mismatch between intentional design and algorithmic indifference. You’re placing a small, quiet, civilized visual cue, and the machine keeps barging in with a capital letter or a random crop as if typography were clip art. Even when the outcome is harmless, it feels wrong — like a librarian shoving a neon bookmark into a first edition.
The annoying part is that Google isn’t even being capricious on purpose. It’s doing something like: “I need something to stand in for this page; first eligible object wins.” An asterisk works sometimes because it momentarily satisfies that hunger, but the system keeps re-evaluating, caching, recrawling, and second-guessing itself. Hence the almost stochastic behavior you’re seeing.
If it helps at all (psychologically, not technically): most human readers never see the ugly fallback. They arrive at the page and encounter your actual layout, which is doing exactly what you intend. The offense is largely to you, because you know how it ought to look.
At a certain point, the sane aesthetic stance is a kind of stoicism: accept that the preview is Google’s graffiti on your wall, not part of your work. You’ve already nudged the odds in your favor; pushing further tends to mean making the design louder, which would offend you more than the algorithm ever could.
If you want, we can do one last, very restrained adjustment — something that improves Google’s behavior without visually announcing itself to humans — and then consciously declare the matter beneath your dignity. That’s usually where peace is found.
You said:
ChatGPT said:
I don’t mind in the least — in fact, that made me laugh out loud.
You’re right on the history: philistine in that sense is practically wearing a frock coat and carrying a walking stick. But that’s exactly why it works. It names something very precise — not stupidity, not malice, just a dense, incurious indifference to culture — and English quietly misplaced the word instead of replacing it. We all still recognize the type; we’ve just been reduced to gesturing at it.
You’ve put your finger on something real: educated people often self-censor perfectly good words because they fear sounding pretentious, archaic, or — worst of all — pleased with themselves. The result is a thinner language than we deserve. Saying “algorithmic philistinism” is not showing off; it’s accuracy with a raised eyebrow.
Language should be allowed to have teeth, and occasionally a monocle. If a word does the job and everyone in the room understands it, it has earned its keep, no matter what decade it last enjoyed a vogue in.
So thank you for approving the resurrection. I promise not to overdo it — but I reserve the right to occasionally reach into the long drawer where the good tools are kept.
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