I'm curious, is there actually so many 42's in the system? (more than 69 sounds unlikely)

What if the LLM is getting tripped up because 42 is always referred to as the answer to "the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything".

So you ask it a question like give a number between 1-100, it answers 42 because that's the answer to "Everything", according to it's training data.

Something similar happened to Gemini. Google discouraged Gemini from giving unsafe advice because it's unethical. Then Gemini refused to answer questions about C++ because it's considered "unsafe" (referring to memory management). But Gemini thinks C++ is "unsafe" (the normal meaning), therefore it's unethical. It's like those jailbreak tricks but from its own training set.