Prompts

Phở gà, and a menu board spelled right

Phở gà, and a menu board spelled right

A street-food selfie written in Vietnamese: lavender camisole, a clear bag of phở gà held up over her head, and a menu board that has to be spelled correctly. Four pictures, but only the first one is this prompt.

The same woman in the lavender camisole at a night food stall under paper lanterns, the bag of greens on the table beside her
Second picture. Not this prompt — a night market.
Seen from behind walking down a narrow Hanoi lane in the lavender camisole and jeans, the bag of greens in one hand
Third. Walking away down a lane.
Seated at a pavement table under a big tree, smiling, the bag of greens on her lap and a coffee cup on the table
Fourth. A café table on the pavement.

The menu board is spelled right, accents and all. The prompt names four dishes — Phở Gà Đặc Biệt, Phở Gà Đùi, Phở Gà Lườn, Phở Gà Trộn — and asks for the Vietnamese to render chính xác không bị lỗi. All four came back with every diacritic in place, under a PHỞ GÀ header, with a photo of a bowl next to each line. A fifth line nobody asked for sits half-hidden behind her head. That makes this the second clean piece of requested text in the collection after the city poster, and again it is text the prompt named word for word.

The prompt contradicts itself, and the menu won. Its last sentence is Không có văn bản — no text — in the same prompt that orders a menu board. The specific request beat the blanket prohibition, the same way 481’s glass storefront beat its text negative.

Holds in the first picture: the bag held overhead with greens and food inside, the high selfie angle, the middle-aged woman prepping food behind her, deep focus with no bokeh, and 9:16.

The other three are not this prompt. A night market, a walk away down a lane, a pavement café under a tree — none of that is in the text. They are follow-up turns that weren’t saved. What carried across all four is the lavender camisole, the low-rise jeans, the tied-back hair and the clear bag of greens. The scene changed every time.

Nguyen

I write two things here: notes from a homelab that mostly runs Proxmox, and essays in Vietnamese about a country I left. The technical posts are whatever broke that week, written down so it costs you less time than it cost me.

All posts →

Leave a comment

Comments are reviewed before they appear. Your email is never published.