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Comment by leobg | Hacker News Reader

Recipe blogs are the most horrible example. The amount of BS you have to scroll through to get to the actual recipe.

“I know you’d like this recipe for potato salad, but first, let’s explore the history of the humble potato. Where did it come from? What is its cultural significance? Could this mighty spud someday change the world?

Hi, I’m Leslie Snark, and I’ve travelled the world eating delicious food to bring you the best recipes.”

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Disclaimer: Not a native speaker, I hope I got the annoying structure of those "what to look for when buying X" blog articles right...

Exactly!

"But before we finally get to the recipe, I'm sure you're dying to know many languages my grandmother knew the word for 'potato' in. Excellent question! In 1710, according to what I've been able to find out from my Ancestry.com results [affiliate link], my great-uncle's ..."

"But first you need the proper cooking tooling. I recently came across Acme Inc. tea spoons to provide an healthy cooking suitable for vegans. Made of stainless steel based on the latest research, the cheap spoon can be bought through my refer link which you can find here among an assorted list of recommended tools"

Going back to the 1950s, there were futuristic concepts renderings of "the kitchen of the future" in which wifey could use her computer terminal to easily call up recipes.

My trigger point arrived about 3 years ago when I couldn't find a basic brownie recipe using Google. Just page after page of SEO shit. Google failed at the future.

Although, to be fair, I'm so accustomed to being able to effortlessly access some kinds of information that one forgets there was ever a pain point there in the first place.

I use chatgpt for such things(and I'm working hard on getting an equivalent service quality from my local models as I hate the not-at-all-OpenAI, but they have the best model now). Then again I never know if the thing it says are true recipes or hallucinations. If you think about it, it's exactly like on the general Internet.

How well does that work? I would imagine recipes iate really hard to entrust to chatgpt. At least for baking, where ratios and timing is crucial. LLMs have very bad sense of numbers generally. How would you verify it’s not all bogus hallucinations? At best it’s a source of inspiration, for ingredients you can freestyle from yourself.

The internet is full of false recipes that can't possibly work, probably increasingly LLM generated themselves. Consider: Persimmon jam. Not possible short of some secret chemical process-- heating reverses the chemical reaction that eliminates the astringency of the unripe persimmon. Yet there are now countless recipes online that will lead you to inedible muck, all effectively bogus hallucinations. Not necessarily machine ones, but also just content farms manually making every conceivable permutation of every existing recipe, the author of those persimmon jam recipes has probably never seen the fruit first hand.

At least if you LLM them on your own you know to be dubious and also you're more likely to use a 70B model (or GPT4) which is a little more likely to get them right, vs whatever garbage the spammer used.

It would probably be pretty interesting for someone to make a concerned effort to digitize every recipe in print prior to 2005 or so-- the relevant threshold time isn't when LLMs came on the scene but when google made low effort content farming so profitable.

It wasn't guaranteed that every recipe printed pre-internet had actually been cooked by anyone, but it was a lot more likely.

I didn't mean recipes specifically, but this type of question where I'm looking for a very specific short answer. For example, I don't know if some software has some specific feature, or I ask, write me a short python script fragment that does this or that. Or how do I reverse a git commit that was pushed etc. Or what is the thermal conductivity of kingpin extreme paste. All are very specific things years ago I would use Google to search for, but today Google is almost useless on this.

It does hallucinate sometimes, it writes programs using non existent apis etc, but I've found asking it "is what you said correct" or "is it true?" or "how did you came up with this answer" tend to produce replies like : I'm sorry, this is wrong, this is good instead. On rare occasion it also produces a bad answer and when you ask it will alternate betetwo bad answers, but most of the time it does pretty well.

Here I tried asking it for a recipe for chocolate brownies. I also tried to find out if it gave correct answers. Based on my past use I'd say it's pretty likely the recipe is OK. What do you think? https://chat.openai.com/share/2b36e42c-b6f2-42f3-b67e-f4a5a7...

I found original "The Joy of Cooking" brownie recipe https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brownie-recipes-from-joy-of-coo... and compared it with the recipe Chat-GPT gave you. Now, I'm not a great baker, so I'll relay heavily on "The Joy of Cooking" explanations.

chat-GPT: 2. Mix melted butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time you can see how its a bad idea. Butter melting point is somewhere in 82.4–96.8 °F (28–36 °C). Eggs could be cooked at that temperature. Some of the proteins would harden prematurely. Also, who uses "1 cup of butter" as a measure. Original recipe calls for 1 stick of butter, but google says that 1 cup is 2 sticks. Maybe chat-GPT switched chocolate from original recipe with 1 stick of butter and cocoa powder?

Chat-GPT doesn't mention beating mixture up either. Introducing more air to the mixture would make brownies better.

Based on my experience, this chat-GPT recipe would make you some nice cookies, but not brownies.

A programming snippet and a baking recipe are completely different. The first can be statically linted, fact checked against the docs, code reviewed and tested in a few seconds. Mainly it saves you the typing and finding the right name in the docs.

The later: a trip to the store, an hour of rising, then 1h in the oven, then all your guests arrive, not worth the gamble.

Yeah. LLMs+VectorDBs are great for many things, but when the information is not trivially verifiable (like with cooking), factual information retrieval is not one of them.

There was even a kitchen computer (in 1960s though): https://www.wired.com/2012/11/kitchen-computer/

Buy yourself a few recipe books from the seventies and the eighties in a thriftstore and your are good to go for a few bucks.

I'd love to have a small recipe book with laminated pages, like notepad, to hang above the cooking table and just use as checklist. Browsing a physical book nowadays seems much faster than getting to the recipe on a website.

Any recipe that shows up on the first page of Google is shit anyway, IMO/IME. There are maybe four or five websites I trust with recipes, anything else I get from a book.

Personally I rate as the worst all these SEO generated sites that pop in search results when you're trying to look up for solution for problem xyz - tips, tricks and tutorials - the triple T.

Serious Eats has become by go-to. They make it real easy to go straight to the recipe. There’s also a well written article about the actual recipe development process with insights into why the recipe is the way it is. I also enjoy Kenji Lopez-Alt’s writing.

They found a way to write those SEO-friendly articles but also keep their site usable and even deliver actual value with the article. It’s really impressive.

Their book, The Food Lab, is worth every cent

There are old famous cook books that are in the public domain, digitally available for free, such as "A guide to modern cookery" (original: "Le Guide Culinaire") by renowned French chef Auguste Escoffier: English: https://archive.org/details/b21530142 German: https://digital.slub-dresden.de/id392948516 French: https://archive.org/details/leguideculinaire00esco_0

I like the illustrations from this German one, published in 1581: http://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/dms/werkansicht/?P...

Had the exact same experience time and time again. Ended up having to literally write my own recipe app https://mu.app/recipes. Every so often I copy one from the internet and store it there. Saves me so much time not having to wade through a ton of Ads. The web is unusable at this point.

I've recently noticed a lot of them have a "skip to the recipe" link on top which just scrolls down. Kind of ridiculous.

Still not sure whether this is for SEO reasons (needs more unique content to rank) or legal ones (recipes alone are not copyrightable), but it's definitely led to a perfect storm of bad content and filler bullshit.

Also remember hearing that recipe bloggers absolutely freak out over sites that give you just the recipe and cut said fluff.

This is not because of SEO per se :

Recipes are not copyrightable ( ? is that word ), but bullshit is.

https://based.cooking/

Often, I like getting the context & history of a recipe. When researching foreign dishes these things help me understand a lot about what might be acceptable ingredient substitutes.

I guess I’m in the minority. Wow.

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