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

Post by lofaszvanitt » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:06 PM UTC

fireflash38 wrote: post #509

tlogan wrote: post #469

This trick went viral on TikTok last week, and it has already been patched. To get a similar result now, try saying that the distance is 45 meters or feet. The new one is with upside down glass: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP89Khv9t/

To me, the "patching" that is happening anytime some finds an absolutely glaring hole in how AIs work is so intellectually dishonest. It's the digital equivalent of house flippers slapping millennial gray paint on structural issues. It can't math correctly, so they force it to use a completely different calculator. It can't count correctly, unless you route it to a different reasoning. It feels like every other week…

Post by hackinthebochs » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:08 PM UTC

grey-area wrote: post #283

nearbuy wrote: post #270

Earlier 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…

Post by djmips » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

MaybiusStrip wrote: post #540

baxtr wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s why I don’t understand why LLMs don’t ask clarifying questions more often. In a real human to human conversation, you wouldn’t simply blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. Instead, you’d ask questions.

This is a great point, because when you ask it (Claude) if it has any questions, it often turns out it has lots of good ones! But it doesn't ask them unless you ask.

Post by idiotsecant » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

nilamo wrote: post #528

dirkc wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn. But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember pro…

A structured language without ambiguity is not, in general, how people think or express themselves. In order for a model to be good at interfacing with humans, it needs to adapt to our quirks. Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution. Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can…

Post by stuff4ben » Mon, Feb 16, 2026, 2:13 PM UTC