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

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

#771

Post by shagie »

dirkc wrote: post #512
jstummbillig wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…

> 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…

> 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.

On the foolishness of "natural language programming". https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

    Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even if a moment's thought would have revealed that those instructions contained an obvious mistake. "But a moment is a long time, and thought is a painful process." (A.E.Houseman). They eagerly hoped and waited for more sensible machinery that would refuse to embark on such nonsensical activities as a trivial clerical error evoked at the time.
(and it continues for some many paragraphs)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8222017 2014 - 154 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35968148 2023 - 65 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43564386 2025 - 277 comments

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

#772

Post by shagie »

jfengel wrote: post #698
nradov wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lojban language already exists and allows for eliminating ambiguity. It's obviously not practical for general use, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

Lojban is syntactically unambitious. Semantically it's still just as vague as any natural language.

How about...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

> Ithkuil is an experimental constructed language created by John Quijada. It is designed to express more profound levels of human cognition briefly yet overtly and clearly, particularly about human categorization. It is a cross between an a priori philosophical and a logical language. It tries to minimize the vagueness and semantic ambiguity in natural human languages. Ithkuil is notable for its grammatical complexity and extensive phoneme inventory, the latter being simplified in an upcoming redesign.

> ...

> Meaningful phrases or sentences can usually be expressed in Ithkuil with fewer linguistic units than natural languages. For example, the two-word Ithkuil sentence "Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx" can be translated into English as "On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point."

Half as Interesting - How the World's Most Complicated Language Works https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k (length 6:28)

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

#774

Post by LasEspuelas »

degamad wrote: post #548
LasEspuelas wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would never ask a human this question. Right?

We have a long tradition of asking each other riddles. A classic one asks, "A plane crashes on the border between France and Germany. Where do they bury the survivors?" Riddles are such a big part of the human experience that we have whole books of collections of them, and even a Batman villain named after them.

Hmm... We ask riddles for fun and there is almost an expectation that a good riddle will yield a wrong answer.

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

#775

Post by laweijfmvo »

jarek83 wrote: post #769

Yup, LLMs are not "artificial intelligence" - they just generate most probable token, until their authors hardcode functionality for specific community tests.

Yes, in theory that’s what an LLM is / how an LLM works, but I think we’re a little bit past the “expensive auto-complete” analogy given all the layers of wrappers we’ve built on top of LLMs to package them into the applications being interacted with here, no?

Fundamentally though there is missing but implied information here that the LLM can’t seem to surface, no matter how many times it’s asked to check itself. I wonder what other questions like this could be asked with similar results.

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

#776

Post by drooby »

gen220 wrote: post #618
polarbearballs wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have paid versions of Chat-GPT and Anthropic and set them both to the best model and they both told me to walk. Claude told me: "Walk! At 25 meters, you'd barely get the car started before you arrived. It's faster and easier on foot — plus you avoid the awkwardness of driving a dirty car just a few seconds down the road."

I opened up a claude code session using opus-4.6 medium thinking. I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? Drive — you need the car at the car wash. but it's so close It is close, but you still need the car there to wash it! Drive it over, and enjoy the short 50-meter walk back if you want to stretch your legs while it's being cleaned. I tried the "upside-down" cup question broug…

Same. Claude nailed both questions, with the slightest hint of "... u serious?"

I pay for the $100 Opus 4.6 plan... maybe that makes a difference?

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

#777

Post by sebazzz »

jstummbillig wrote: post #147
prasoonds wrote: post #46

I'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…

> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…

> > so you need to tell them the specifics > That is the entire point, right?

Honestly it is a problem with using GPT as a coding agent. It would literally rewrite the language runtime to make a bad formula or specification work.

That's what I like with Factory.ai droid: making the spec with one agent and implementing it with another agent.

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

#778

Post by sfortis »

i really enjoy gemini funny answers.

3-fast:

"That is a classic "efficiency vs. logic" dilemma.

If you’re looking for a strictly practical answer: Drive. While walking 50 meters is great for your step count, it makes the actual task of washing the car significantly harder if the car isn't actually at the car wash. Unless you’ve mastered the art of long-distance pressure washing, the vehicle usually needs to be present for the scrubbing to commence."

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

#779

Post by twotwotwo »

For folks that like this kind of question, SimpleBench (https://simple-bench.com/ ) is sort of neat. From the sample questions (https://github.com/simple-bench/SimpleBench/blob/main/simple... ), a common pattern seems to be for the prompt to 'look like' a familiar/textbook problem (maybe with detail you'd need to solve a physics problem, etc.) but to get the actually-correct answer you have to ignore what the format appears to be hinting at and (sometimes) pull in some piece of human common sense.

I'm not sure how effectively it isolates a single dimension of failure or (in)capacity--it seems like it's at least two distinct skills to 1) ignore false cues from question format when there's in fact a crucial difference from the template and 2) to reach for relevant common sense at the right times--but it's sort of fun because that is a genre of prompt that seems straightforward to search for (and, as here, people stumble on organically!).

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

#780

Post by ssl-3 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #543
Gabrys1 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say, the proper response to this question is not "walk, blablablah" but rather "What do you mean? You need to drive your car to have it washed. Did I miss anything?"

Yes, this is what irks me about all the chatbots, and the chat interface as a whole. It is a chat-like UX without a chat-like experience. Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time. Just ask me a clarifying question before going into your huge pitch. Chats are a back & forth. You don’t need to give me a response 10x longer than my initial question. Etc

With ChatGPT, at least, you can tell the bot to work that way using [persistent] Custom Instructions, if that's what you want. These aren't obeyed perfectly (none of the instructions are, AFAICT), but they do influence behavior.

A person can even hammer out an unstructured list of behavioral gripes, tell the bot to organize them into instructional prose, have it ask clarifying questions and revise based on answers, and produce directions for integrating them as Custom Instructions.

From then on, it will invisibly read these instructions into context at the beginning of each new chat.

Mold it and steer it to be how you want it to be.

(My own bot tends to be very dry, terse, non-presumptuous, pragmatic, and profane. It's been years now since it has uttered an affirmation like "That's a great idea!" or "Wow! My circuits are positively buzzing with the genius I'm seeing here!" or produced a tangential dissertation in response to a simple question. But sometimes it does come back with functional questions, or phrasing like "That shit will never work. Here's why.")

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