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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?

#841

Post by robocat »

x3ro wrote: post #510
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit of a dishonest question because by giving it the option to walk then it's going to assume you are not going to wash your car there and you're just getting supplies or something.

It's a trick question, humans use these all the time. E.g. "A plane crashes right on the border between Austria and Switzerland. Where do you bury the survivors?" This is not dishonest, it just tests a specific skill.

Trick questions test the skill of recognizing that you're being asked a trick question. You can also usually find a trick answer.

A good answer is "underground" - because that is the implication of the word bury.

The story implies the survivors have been buried (it isn't clear whether they lived a short time or a lifetime after the crash). And lifetime is tautological.

Trick questions are all about the questioner trying to pretend they are smarter than you. That's often easy to detect and respond to - isn't it?

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

#842

Post by palmotea »

onionisafruit wrote: post #595
fireflash38 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counting and math makes sense to add special tools for because it’s handy. I agree with your point that patching individual questions like this is dishonest. Although I would say it’s pointless too. The only value from asking this question is to be entertained, and “fixing” this question makes the answer less entertaining.

> The only value from asking this question is to be entertained, and “fixing” this question makes the answer less entertaining.

You're thinking like a user. The people doing the patching are thinking like a founder trying to maintain the impression that this is a magical technology that CEOs can use to replace all their workers.

You don't have as much money to spend as the CEOs, so they don't care about your entertainment.

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

#843

Post by tantalor »

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/

"patched" = the answer is in search results

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

#844

Post by TheJoeMan »

contravariant wrote: post #671
FatherOfCurses wrote: post #666

All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" - this question is obviously an extreme example. People regularly ask questions that are structured poorly or have a lot of ambiguity. The point of the poster is that we should expect that all LLM's parse the question correctly and respond with "You need to drive your car to the car wash." People are putting trust in LLM's to provide…

> All the people responding saying "You would never ask a human a question like this" That's also something people seem to miss in the Turing Test thought experiment. I mean sure just deceiving someone is a thing, but the simplest chat bot can achieve that. The real interesting implications start to happen when there's genuinely no way to tell a chatbot apart.

But it isn't just a brain-teaser. If the LLM is supposed to control say Google Maps, then Maps is the one asking "walk or drive" with the API. So I voice-ask the assistant to take me to the car wash, it should realize it shouldn't show me walking directions.

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

#845

Post by barcadad »

Claude Code on Opus 4.6 - not terrible...

Walk. 50 meters is basically across a parking lot. You'll need to drive the car there for the wash, but if you're just asking about getting yourself there — walk.

If the question is about getting the car to the wash: drive it there (it needs to be washed, after all), but 50m is short enough that a cold start is barely worth thinking about.

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

#846

Post by ssl-3 »

drewbeck wrote: post #812
ssl-3 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, in human interaction: When the business logic goes wrong because it was described with a lack of specificity, then: Who gets blamed for this?

In my job the task of fully or appropriately specifying something is shared between PMs and the engineers. The engineers' job is to look carefully at what they received and highlight any areas that are ambiguous or under-specified. LLMs AFAIK cannot do this for novel areas of interest. (ie if it's some domain where there's a ton of "10 things people usually miss about X" blog posts they'll be able to regurgitate that…

They can, though. They just aren't always very good at it.

As an experiment, recently I've been using Codex CLI to configure some consumer networking gear in unusual ways to solve my unusual set of problems. Stuff that pros don't bother with (they don't have the same problems I face), and that consumers tend to shy away from futzing with. The hardware includes a cheap managed switch, an OpenWRT router, and a Mikrotik access point. It's definitely a rather niche area of interest.

And by "using," I mean: In this experiment, the bot gets right in there, plugging away with SSH directly.

It was awful with this at first, mostly consisting of a long-winded way to yet-again brick a device that lacks any OOB console port. It'd concoct these elaborate strings of shit and feed them in, and then I'd wander over and reset whatever box was borked again. Footgun city.

But after I tired of that, I had it define some rules for engaging with hardware, validation, constraints, and for order of execution, and commit those rules to AGENTS.md. It got pretty decent at following high-level instructions to get things done in the manner that I specified, and the footguns ceased.

I didn't save any time by doing this. But I also didn't have to think about it much: I never got bogged down in wildly-differing CLI syntax of the weirdo switch, the router (whose documentation is locked behind a bot firewall), and access point's bespoke userland. I didn't touch those bits myself at all.

My time was instead spent observing the fuckups and creating a rather generic framework that manages the bot, and just telling it what to do -- sometimes, with some questions. I did that using plain English.

Now that this is done, I get to re-use this framework for as many projects as I dare, revising it where that seems useful.

(That cheap switch, by the way? It's broken. It has bizarro-world hardware failure modes that are unrelated to software configuration or firmware rev. Today, a very different cheap switch showed up to replace it. When I get around to it, I'll have the bot sort that transition out. I expect that to involve a bit of Q&A, and I also expect it to go fine.)

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

#847

Post by mikkupikku »

steveBK123 wrote: post #755
mikkupikku wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like you are talking to a loquacious autist about their favorite topic every time That's the best part.

People need to touch grass

People need to smoke grass and chill out.

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

#848

Post by TZubiri »

gf000 wrote: post #269
TZubiri wrote: post #236

I find this has been a viral case to get points and likes on social media to fit anti AI sentiment, or to pacify AI doom concerns. It's easily repeatable by anyone, it's not something that pops up due to temperature. Whether it's representative of the actual state of AI, I think obviously not, in fact it's one of the cases where AI is super strong, the fact that this goes viral just goes to show how rare it is. This…

> the fact that this goes viral just goes to show how rare it is No, it shows that it is trivial to reproduce and people get a nice, easy to process reminder that LLMs are not omnipotent. Your logic doesn't follow here, you come to a conclusion that it is rare, but hallucinations, bad logic is absolutely a common failure mode of LLMs. It's no accident that many use cases try to get the LLM to output something machine…

If I tasked you to find a novel hallucination in a leading LLM, how long would it take you? I used to be able to find these and run into them often, but right now I can't generate new failure modes, I just have my list of known failures and run into them organically once every couple of weeks.

I don't think anyone at this stage believes that they don't make mistakes, but we prefer to use them for the times they are useful.

It can do very difficult things, and fail at very basic things. If you look at either of those and try to extrapolate, you can generate a hot take that it's super smart, or super dumb, sure. But it's a reductionist take that fails to see the bigger picture either way.

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

#849

Post by dataflow »

halJordan wrote: post #730
dataflow wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My first instinct was, I had underspecified the location of the car. The model seems to assume the car is already at the car wash from the wording. If the car is already at the car wash then you can't possibly drive it there. So how else could you possibly drive there? Drive a different car to the car wash? And then return with two cars how, exactly? By calling your wife? Driving it back 50m and walking there and d…

What actually insane is what assumptions you allow to be assumed. These non sequitors that no human would ever assume are the point. People love to cherry pick ones that make the model stupid but refuse to allow the ones that make it smart. In compete science we call these scenarios trivially false, and they're treated like the nonsense they are. But if you're trying to push ant anti ai agenda they're the best thing…

> People love to cherry pick ones that make the model stupid but refuse to allow the ones that make it smart.

I haven't seen anybody refuse to allow anything. People are just commenting on what they see. The more frequently they see something, the more they comment on it. I'm sure there are plenty of us interested in seeing where an AI model makes assumptions different from that of most humans and it actually turns out the AI is correct. You know, the opposite of this situation. If you run into such cases, please do share them. I certainly don't see them coming up often, and I'm not aware of others that do either.

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

#850

Post by MagicMoonlight »

mpalmer wrote: post #657
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/

By "patched", you can't mean they added something to the internal prompt to show it how to answer this one specific question?!

Why do you think they’re on GPT 5.2 now?
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