Thread · HN Continuity

Based on the votes, I can only assume people are still deluding themselves on LLMs capabilities. Is it doing amazing stuff? Yes. But it seems like people still think coding is the ultimate and hardest possible job and so if it can do that it must surely be able to do everything else. My personal experience has show that it still regularly makes up garbage and throws in nonsense sources that do not back up its claims.

Yeah maybe if your topic has 2 decades worth of text material to absorb it will get it mostly right like with coding, but anything that is less common? Complete crap shoot.

Just today I wanted to know if platinum cure silicone will be inhibited by plaster. The first 20 results are all AI spam with 30 pages of fluff and thus unreliable at best, so I asked AI directly. At first it says sulfur and calcium will inhibit the reaction, which is bad because plaster contains those elements. Then it says it will be fine according to X sources. Check the sources, none of them have anything at all to do with curing silicone on plaster, the articles are about using silicone molds to cast plaster. Failure.

Eventually I just had to search youtube videos until I found someone doing it in real life.

I see the same bad, and sometimes catastrophic, takes on things I have a lot of experience in, like agriculture, construction, and mechanics. It is completely worthless for anything mechanical unless you are trying to start something extremely simple from the 40s or earlier, and even then it will still tell you stuff like "clean the carburetor" on an old hot bulb diesel.