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Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who double checks all of the information presented to me, from any source?

No you don't. If you were doing that you wouldn't have time to eat, let alone sleep.

You check the information you decide should be verified.

Unless someone's life is on the line, usually eyeballing the source URL is enough for me. If I'm looking for API documentation, there are a few well-known URLs I trust as authoritative. If I'm looking for product information, same thing. If the search engine points me to totallyawesomeproductleadgen19995.biz, I'm probably not getting reliable information.

An LLM response without explicit mention of its provenance... There's no way to even guess whether it is authoritative.

If what you say is literally true: yes, I think you probably are the only one!

Yeah, I need more coffee to decide for myself if double checking all sources is linear or exponential as it progresses to check the checks.

It might even be factorial since you also need to check the checks of the checks!

Actually, it might be fully unbounded even for an n of 1.

Everything reminds me of her… and she’s called Factorio. We’re on a break. She’s not good for me, but oh my do I love her.

Information cannot be destroyed, so for an n of 1 the bounds are that of the universe.

The sources will start to be redundant eventually. It's actually O(1) once you have looked at all the sources... that there are... in the world. Trivial!

I'm not sure. In this context, sources are utterances rather than speakers. So they're only finite if we limit ourselves to a snapshot of past utterances while doing our checking.

Wait, so if you go to python.org and the doc page says, "Added in version 3.11", you double-check this?

What do you even use for double-check? Some random low-quality content farm? A glitchy LLM? An dodgy mirror of official docs full of ads? Or do you actually dig the source code for this?

And do you keep double-checking with all other information on the page... "A TOMLDecodeError will be raised on an invalid TOML document." - are you going to start an interactive session and check which error will be raised?

How deep do you go? Where do you stop?

Just because you can find multiple independent sources saying the same thing doesn't mean it's correct.

You evaluate the credentials and authenticity of the sources you're reading and judge accordingly.

It's done on a case by case basis.

In all honesty doing this for news and such brings me comfort. Because the truth is usually pretty vanilla.

Nothing means anything then.

Are you sure? If you only say it once...

"What I tell you three times is true"

No.

Part of why I prefer to use a search engine is that I can see who is saying it, in what context. It might be Wikipedia, but also CIA world fact book. Or some blog but also python.org.

Or (lately) it might be AI SEO slop, reworded across 10 sites but nothing definitive. Which means I need to change my search strategy.

I find it easier (and quicker) to get to a believable result via a search engine than going via ChatGPT and then having to check what it claims.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com