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Comment by liendolucas | Hacker News Reader

I love these stories to be shared here on HN. There was one also submitted some time ago about a cyclist who wouldn't make it into the olympics (or something like that) and started to rob banks and used his cyclist skills to escape. If I recalled correctly this was in the 80' or 90' and he used to give away the stolen money. Shame I don't have link.

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I remember this story being released by Epic Magazine and Chicago Magazine.

The Bicycle Thief: https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/february-2019/bi...

On a sidenote: Epic Magazine is a treasure trove of these strange, little, Coen-brothers-movie-like stories: https://epicmagazine.com/

One of the best uses of Perplexity.ai! Pasted your text

https://www.bicycling.com/news/a26081001/cyclist-turned-bank...

You can just Google for “cyclist who robbed banks”, AI isn’t really necessary for this.

You can just use Gopher, you don’t need Google for this.

I’m being flippant, obviously but my point is that every now and then a new technology comes along that supplants and older one because it offers a meaningful improvement over the last. AI search vs traditional web search is definitely one of those.

It's just as easy or easier to google "cyclist who robbed banks."

You’re not thinking through the whole experience. The search itself is just as easy, sure. You can type the same query into both systems. The difference is in the results. Traditional web search will then return a set of links which may or may not answer you query, it’s up you you to parse them and figure out if they have the content you need or if you need to rephrase your query and try again. AI on the other hand will parse the results for you and return the answer to your prompt directly. That’s a meaningful improvement.

If it is not 100% based in reality then no, it isn't.

> AI on the other hand will parse the results for you and return the answer to your prompt directly.

Yep! And that's going to save you _one whole step_ when you're posting meaningless follow ups in forums filled with technical users who would have had no problem getting the information themselves.

> That’s a meaningful improvement.

It's a marginal improvement to the least meaningful activity that occurs on a daily basis. So, it's totally worth the trillions that have been invested in it. :|

Even if that's true, the example definitely isn't proof of that given that the old technology seems to handle the problem just fine.

If they each give the correct answer in the same number of steps then there’s no reason to prefer one over the other.

My multiple experiences with ChatGPT hallucination, even at minimum temperature, leaves me preferring a web search answer. Just last week, jq hallucinated three different jq syntaxes that failed to parse.

That being said, I had been using web search for several years looking for the Get Smart episode I had seen as a kid in the 1980s where the enemy agent explains that he can't give up his suicide ring because "That's how it works, if I take it off, my wife will kill me." Google Bard found the episode on the first try.

So, I tend to fall back to LLMs only when search engines fail me.

Mental inertia is the phrase I use for preferring the one you learned first

Power usage, latency, ethical concerns.

Which is not the case here -- just simply "googling" would provide the right answer.

which is exactly what Perplexity did. I am saying this out loud because it'll be a few years before people wrap their mind around the circus over there. not because its awesome.

1) pay google scraper api (~1000 searches/$1)

2) run the crappiest llm people won't notice is crap

3) vc dollars

4) buy users by any means necessary

5) rope some earnest people into $40/month

rinse, lather, repeat

Hilarious career path: social work > Catholic priesthood > underwater welding > robbing banks

That story seems to be a brief summary, which points to a fuller article here: https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/February-2019/Bi...

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29037860 (excellent article).

People might not like the AI plug, but personally this is the one use-case I find AI the most helpful to me. The ability to query general knowledge, with natural language, often not knowing what the hell I'm talking about. And the results don't have advertisements, which I also really appreciate.

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