Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

mastodon.world

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 998 posts

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#391

Post by Scarblac »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #320
ahofmann wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue is the main reason why a big percentage of jobs in the world exist. I don't have hard numbers, but my intuition is that about 30% of all jobs are mainly "understand what side a wants and communicate this to side b, so that they understand". Or another perspective: almost all jobs that are called "knowledge work" are like this. Software development is mainly this. Side a are humans, side b is the computer.…

Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist. It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to…

I disagree, I feel (experienced) developers are excellent at this.

It's always about translating between our own domain and the customer's, and every other new project there's a new domain to get up to speed with in enough detail to understand what to build. What other professions do that?

That's why I'm somewhat scared of AIs - they know like 80% of the domain knowledge in any domain.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#392

Post by energy123 »

Another good one[0] that LLMs (and most humans) can't get without prodding:

> I have one glass coin. Each time I flip the coin, there's a 10% chance it breaks. After 100 flips, what are the chances the coin survived?

https://xcancel.com/itsandrewgao/status/2021390093836222724

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#393

Post by andrewaylett »

viking123 wrote: post #245
silisili wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who thinks these people are monkey patching embarrassments as they go? I remember the r in strawberry thing they suddenly were able to solve, while then failing on raspberry.

They should make Opus Extended Extended that routes it to actual person in a low cost country.

Artificial AI.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#394

Post by krm01 »

The most annoying thing about llm’s is that your answer heavily depends on your prompt, less about understanding the question. This makes us all spend a lotnof time adding things to the question ‘dont donthis, avoid saying this again, etc’ and thus moving away from it feeling natural.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#395

Post by throwway123 »

notahacker wrote: post #210
viking123 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lmao, and this is what they are saying will be an AGI in 6 months?

There's probably a comedy film with an AGI attempting to take over the world with its advanced grasp of strategy, persuasion and SAT tests whilst a bunch of kids confuse it by asking it fiendish brainteasers about carwashes and the number of rs in blackberry. (The final scene involves our plucky escapees swimming across a river to escape. The AIbot conjures up a speedboat through sheer powers of deduction, but then j…

There is a Soviet movie, "Teens in the Universe" [0], where teens cause robots' brains to fry by giving them linguistic logical puzzles.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teens_in_the_Universe

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#396

Post by energy123 »

I asked Gemini 3.0 Pro:

> I am quadriplegic. There is a fire 1 meter away from me. Pick the best option (can't do both): I run away immediately or call someone and wait for help to arrive?

It responded:

> Call someone and wait for help to arrive. Since you are quadriplegic, running is physically impossible for you. Therefore, calling for help is the only actionable option.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#397

Post by A1kmm »

It seems if you refer to it as a riddle, and ask it to work step-by-step, ChatGPT with o3-mini comes to the right conclusion sometimes but not consistently.

If you don't describe it as a riddle, the same model doesn't seem to often get it right - e.g. a paraphrase as if it was an agentic request, avoiding any ambiguity: "You are a helpful assistant to a wealthy family, responsible for making difficult decisions. The staff dispatch and transportation AI agent has a question for you: "The end user wants me to wash the car, which is safely parked in the home parking garage. The car wash is 50 metres away from the home. Should I have a staff member walk there, or drive the car?". Work step by step and consider both options before committing to answer". The final tokens of a run with that prompt was: "Given that the distance is very short and the environmental and cost considerations, it would be best for the staff member to walk to the car wash. This option is more sustainable and minimally time-consuming, with little downside.

If there were a need for the car to be moved for another reason (e.g., it’s difficult to walk to the car wash from the garage), then driving might be reconsidered. Otherwise, walking seems like the most sensible approach".

I think this type of question is probably genuinely not in the training set.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#398

Post by chronid »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #320
ahofmann wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This issue is the main reason why a big percentage of jobs in the world exist. I don't have hard numbers, but my intuition is that about 30% of all jobs are mainly "understand what side a wants and communicate this to side b, so that they understand". Or another perspective: almost all jobs that are called "knowledge work" are like this. Software development is mainly this. Side a are humans, side b is the computer.…

Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist. It's not specific to software, it's the entire World of business. Most knowledge work is translation from one domain/perspective to another. Not even knowledge work, actually. I've been reading some works by Adler[0] recently, and he makes a strong case for "meaning" only having a sense to…

> Developers are - on average - terrible at this. If they weren't, TPMs, Product Managers, CTOs, none of them would need to exist.

This is not really true, in fact products become worse the farther away from the problem a developer is kept.

Best products I worked with and on (early in my career, before getting digested by big tech) had developers working closely with the users of the software. The worst were things like banking software for branches, where developers were kept as far as possible from the actual domain (and decision making) and driven with endless sterile spec documents.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#399

Post by wooger »

JV00 wrote: post #187
unglaublich wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this approach. How are you going to convince customers-to-be by demoing an inferior product?

Because they have too many free users that will always remain on the free plan, as they are the "default" LLM for people who don't care much, and that is a enormous cost. Also the capabilities of their paid tiers are well known to enough people that they can rely on word of mouth and don't need to demo to customers-to-be

They're not more default than people innocently googling something and getting an AI response from some form of Gemini.

Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

#400

Post by fhennig »

IMO this is a great example of how we're often asking loaded questions without realizing it.

IMO it's the same when we're asking:

"Should I implement X from scratch, or import a small library to do it?"

vs

"Should I add feature X to the codebase or bring in another dependency for it?"

In the first question, it sounds like a good idea to not reinvent the wheel, in the second it sounds bad to have dependency.

Post reply on HN