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Comment by bradly | Hacker News Reader

Here is what I have asked it the past few days with great results:

  - What is the trim stop attachment that comes with the Festool DF 500 used for?

  - What are some options for water for a home with no municiple water or well access?

  - What dimensions drawer should I make when using 18" Blum Blumotion full extension drawer slides if the drawer opening is 20 inches wide, 18 inches deep and seven inches tall?

  - Can the smaller Laguna 14 bandsaw motor be replaced with the 3HP version?

  - What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official support page is not working?

  - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.

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There's a ditch by my house that the city put in. I roughly knew what it was, a big pit where rain collects and soaks into the groundwater. But I wanted to know the name of it and no amount of Googling could get me to the right answer. My query was too vague.

The day that ChatGPT launched, I described the what it was and it came back with, "that's called an infiltration basin."

That's when I knew Google was in trouble.

You have touched on something I am incredibly excited about. ChatGPT is going to do away with a lot of the intro level questions you ask researching certain sorts of technical problems, especially as it becomes better able to understand images. ChatGPT removes the need for you to ever open a manual (unless you want a deep understanding).

How do I turn off this feature in my car?

How do I replace the fan in my fridge’s compressor?

Why is windows repair not working in this scenario with this PC?

This tool is going to be incredibly deflationary in many services geared around repair when now it can tell you almost exactly what to do and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand.

> and soon it’ll be able to produce videos or images of each step on demand

As long as they're not hallucinated media...

Most of the Googles SERP results already are delusional or hallucinating spam, so the bar is low and for me at least ChatGTP is less bullshit.

Yeah, when the “site:” search hack doesn’t get me an answer and I fall back on the normal SERPs, most of the time the top several results are all:

“Authoritative title that references my exact search” -> page body restates my question, gives an oddly reworded summary of Thing in Question #1 -> “some people online have said” followed by snippets lifted from the ether -> repeat for Things 2,3,etc -> “our suggestion is to look at the features and decide based on what other customers/users are saying”

It’s perfected vapidity wearing the skin of an editorial review site and takes a LOT more cognitive load to suss out the phoneyness compared to the last time the SERPs were packed with spam (~10 years back).

hallucinations don't invalidate the product itself. I really hate to see this constant lazy refrain on here.

Its just like anything else. Trust but verify. Some will just trust, others never will... People probably over-trust the tech now, but just like wikipedia it will be approached a little more carefully as people learn its shortcomings.

Unless you're trying to perform open heart surgery or doing something intrinsically dangerous, its probably going to be additive. I wouldn't trust it to help me assemble a warp engine, but it may be able to give me some decent pointers for guitar technique or how to change my oil.

It’s not a lazy refrain, it’s a serious downside of the technology. It’s tiring and stressful to supervise the work product of an assistant that is extremely capable sometimes, but a compulsive bullshitter at other times. Just as it’s tiring to supervise an “autonomous” car that often deftly navigates the road, but sometimes wants to plow into a school bus.

I think that the concern about LLMs making up information are absolutely valid, and a serious concern. At the same time, I think most people focusing on those concerns aren't thinking much about the alternatives, namely Google.

For many people, Google results have gone from being an absolutely amazing demonstration of what could be done if one had the resources to crawl and process the entire internet to a complete waste of time at best, clogged with spam and nonsense and misinformation. I've been using Duck Duck Go for years now, and recently my middle-schooler switched to Duck Duck Go because I got answer to a question she had already asked Google before checking with me. Some people even pay for Kagi search, because Google is just that bad.

So LLMs don't have to be perfect to be better than the alternatives, not even close.

> Some people even pay for Kagi search, because Google is just that bad.

Small correction - from what I have heard in our community, most of our users pay for Kagi search, not becuase Google is just that bad, but because Kagi is just so good. In other words we are making the value proposition be "best search in the world", one worth paying for.

(Kagi founder here)

> - I'm trying to remember a 90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience.

I love that movie! I had the same experience a few years ago of trying to remember its name.

This is a great example of something ChatGPT does amazingly well at. I did almost the same thing myself recently, trying to find the name of a show featuring an actor in a different show or something. A straight-up search returns nothing for it; you have to look up the actor's name, then look at his shows, then try to remember the name. But a search with ChatGPT found the result easily.

I tried a "similar" thing now. I was thinking of the movie Gifted, and wanted to see if I could get ChatGPT to pick it up, here's my query:

> I'm trying to remember the name of a movie about a child, featuring an actor that was in a marvel movie.

And the result:

> There are many movies featuring actors who have appeared in Marvel films, so it's a bit difficult to pinpoint the exact movie you're thinking of without more information. However, one possibility could be "Gifted" (2017), starring Chris Evans, who is well-known for playing Captain America in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In "Gifted," Evans plays the role of a man raising his young niece, who turns out to be a child prodigy. If you could provide more details about the plot or other actors, I'd be happy to help narrow down the list further.

This is obviously a tiny use case, and really not worth thinking about. Who cares, right? I thought the same thing about search in general 20 years ago, and that turned into one of the biggest businesses of all time.

This is the search that I did that made me the most afraid for Google.

This is hilarious- now when I google "90s movie about a boy prodigy that goes to an event with other prodigies and then shouts out an answer to a math question from the audience" the top result is the IMDb page for Gifted!!

The actual movie is Little Man Tate, yes? I've never seen it but that's what ChatGPT tells me. Zero Google results point there, but it is the #5 result for "related searches." I hate Google and even I am shocked how bad this is.

Do you mind providing correct answers for those? (and did GPT get them right?)

What's the best way to get ChatGPT support if the official support page is not working?

Ooh! What was the answer to this one?

I tried to sign up for ChatGPT, but the verification text never arrives.

(No, it's not a soft phone. I've had the same phone number on the same cell carrier for over 20 years.)

It said to email support@openai.com

To be fair, Google is usually pretty good about answering movie questions. It guessed Gifted in your case, is that right?

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