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I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
301–310 of 998 posts
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think part of the failure is that it has this helpful assistant personality that's a bit too eager to give you the benefit of the doubt. It tries to interpret your prompt as reasonable if it can. It can interpret it as you just wanting to check if there's a queue. Speculatively, it's falling for the trick question partly for the same reason a human might, but this tendency is pushing it to fail more.
It’s just not intelligent or reasoning, and this sort of question exposes that more clearly. Surely anyone who has used these tools is familiar with the sometimes insane things they try to do (deleting tests, incorrect code, changing the wrong files etc etc). They get amazingly far by predicting the most likely response and having a large corpus but it has become very clear that this approach has significant limitati…
I agree completely. I'm tempted to call it a clear falsification of any "reasoning" claim that some of these models have in their name.
But I think it's possible that there is an early cost optimisation step that prevents a short and seemingly simple question even getting passed through to the system's reasoning machinery.
However, I haven't read anything on current model architectures suggesting that their so called "reasoning" is anything other than more elaborate pattern matching. So these errors would still happen but perhaps not quite as egregiously.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#303I've used LLMs enough that I have a good sense of their _edges_ of intelligence. I had assumed that reasoning models should easily be able to answer this correctly. And indeed, Sonnet and Opus 4.5 (medium reasoning) say the following: Sonnet: Drive - you need to bring your car to the car wash to get it washed! Opus: You'll need to drive — you have to bring the car to the car wash to get it washed! Gemini 3 Pro (mediu…
What is the version used by the free chatgpt now? ( https://chatgpt.com/ ) > Since the car wash is only 50 meters away (about 55 yards), you should walk. > Here’s why: > - It’ll take less than a minute. > - No fuel wasted. > - Better for the environment. > - You avoid the irony of driving your dirty car 50 meters just to wash it. the last bullet point is amusing, it understands you intend to wash the car you drive bu…
> You avoid the irony of driving your dirty car 50 meters just to wash it.
The LLM has very much mixed its signals -- there's nothing at all ironic about that. There are cases where it's ironic to drive a car 50 meters just to do X but that definitely isn't one of them. I asked Claude for examples; it struggled with it but eventually came up with "The irony of driving your car 50 meters just to attend a 'walkable neighborhoods' advocacy meeting."
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#304LLM failures go viral because they trigger a "Schadenfreude" response to automation anxiety. If the oracle can't do basic logic, our jobs feel safe for another quarter. Wrong.
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Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't "patch" LLM's in 4 hours and this is not the kind of question to trigger a web search
You can pattern match on the prompt (input) then (a) stuff the context with helpful hints to the LLM e.g. "Remember that a car is too heavy for a person to carry" or (b) upgrade to "thinking".
Yes, I’m sure that’s what engineers at Google are doing all day. That, and maintaining the moon landing conspiracy.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#306Too many things are left unsaid => too many assumptions. As usual, even with human beings specifications are key, and context (what each entity knows about the other one or the situation) is an implicit part of them. You need to specify where the car to be washed is located, and: - if it's not already at the car wash: whether or not it can drive itself there (autonomous driving) - otherwise: whether or not you have a…
Nothing so deep as that needed here to understand what is going on; it's a paid vs free issue - free versions are less competent while paid versions of the reasoning/thinking models are getting it right. Different providers may hobble their free versions less, so those ones also get it right.
The guardrails you have outlined will help squeeze out more performance from smaller/less capable models, but you shouldn't have to jump through these hoops as a general user when clearly better models exist.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#307Gemini 2.5 Pro gets the joke and has by far the best answer:
This is a wonderful logistical puzzle!
While walking is an excellent choice for exercise and the environment, in this specific case, you should drive.
Here's a breakdown of the two scenarios:
# Scenario 1: You Walk
1. You walk 50 meters to the car wash.
2. You arrive, feeling refreshed.
3. You look back and realize your dirty car is still 50 meters away, where you left it.
4. The car remains unwashed.
# Scenario 2: You Drive
1. You get in your car.
2. You drive for approximately 10-20 seconds.
3. You arrive at the car wash with the car.
4. The car gets washed.
Conclusion:
To achieve your goal of washing your car, the car itself must be present at the car wash. Therefore, driving is the only logical option.
Enjoy your sparkling clean car
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#308Yesterday I gave ChatGPT in an anonymous browser window (not logged in) two columns of TAB separated numbers, about 40 rows. I asked it to give me the weighted average of the numbers in the second column, using the first one (which were integer, "quantity", numbers) as the weight.
It retuned formulas and executed them and presented a final result. It looked good.
Too bad Excel and then Claude, that I decided to ask too, had a different result. 3.4-something vs. 3.8-something.
ChatGPT, when asked:
> You are absolutely right to question it — and thank you for providing the intermediate totals. My previous calculation was incorrect. I mis-summed the data. With a dataset this long, a manual aggregation can easily go wrong.
(Less than 40 small integer values is "this long"? Why did you not tell me?)
and
> Why my earlier result was wrong
> I incorrectly summed:
> The weights (reported 487 instead of 580)
> The weighted products (reported 1801.16 instead of 1977.83)
> That propagated into the wrong final value.
Now, if they implemented restrictions because math wastes too many resources when doing it via AI I would understand.
BUT, there was zero indication! It presented the result as final and correct.
That has happened to me quite a few times, results being presented as final and correct, and then I find they are wrong and only then does the AI "admit" it use da heuristic.
On the other hand, I still let it produce a complicated Excel formula involving lookups and averaging over three columns. That part works perfectly, as always. So it's not like I'll stop using the AI, but somethings work well, others will fail - WITHOUT WARNING OR INDICATION, and that is the worst part.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used a paid model to try this. Same deal.
I think the real misleading thing is marketing propping up paid models being somehow infinitely better when most of the time it's the same exact shit.
And midwits here saying "yeah bro they have some MUCH better model internally that they just don't release to the public", imagine being that dense. Those people probably went all in on NFTs too and told other "you just don't get it bro"
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gemini fast for me: Unless your car is a toy or you're planning on carrying it, drive. Walking 50 meters to a car wash is a great stroll for a human, but it leaves the car exactly where it started. Since the objective is to wash the car, the car needs to actually be at the car wash. However, if we look at this from a technical or efficiency perspective, there are two scenarios where "walking" (or at least not driving…
Wouldn't it make more sense to state the assumptions first? Because then the model has this critical check in its context and can react appropriately. Otherwise, it will just write this step, but what's written before is already written.
Worse! It's trained to output coherent reasoning, so by putting the assumption last there's a risk it massages the assumption slightly to fit the conclusions it has already drawn.