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Comment by skyberrys | Hacker News Reader

It also ruins the ability to use AI to help decide between products. Right now I can use AI chat to decide which two products best meet my specific needs. Once ads are present in all of them I'll be haunted by any queries made about specific products.

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I'm curious how often you find factual inaccuracies in the LLM responses when doing that.

I've found that more often than not, it gets at least one key feature/option/etc. outright wrong whenever I've tried that, making it effectively useless for me. Since I need to verify the exact information myself anyways, I'm 90% the easy to just having the different items in comparing up in side-by-side browser tabs, anyways.

I usually use it for sub $10 things (mostly groceries) and I'm actively grocery shopping when I do it. So say I'm standing in the store trying to decide between 8 different yogurts all of which have different sales going on and different servings sizes, so instead of having to flip over and read all the 8 brands and do math to equalize everything myself I take a photo of the shelf and ask Gemini which one has the most protein per dollar. It usually gets it pretty accurate, I'm doing the math to check in my head but it's just a time saver to not have to fuss every single time there's a sale. But it's not just yogurt it's lots of things, like debating chicken vs beef meatballs or which of the breakfast cereal is closest to the current favorite because I don't want to have to go to an extra store because this one doesn't have it. When I first got Claude I was determined to save $200 having spent the $200 on Claude and I would say it did manage to assist in grocery shopping sufficiently to make it worthwhile. It also helps keep a running memory for me about prices of certain things, did you know the prices for Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread have been fluctuating by $4 it goes from $4.50 to $8.50. I take photos of the eggs section and ask what's the best hen care to price this week. Probably the biggest oops I've had doing this was asking it how to replace my bicycle freewheel, and it told me to watch a video, order the part, only to discover I'm not strong enough by far and the real solution was to pay the guy at the bike shop 10 dollars to do it with his giant vise grip + special freewheel tool. I did have to pay bike shop guy an extra 10 dollars too for him to fix my own attempt that almost ruined the whole wheel.

I guess the Bonne Maman chocolate hazelnut spread trade is over then. Cats outta the bag.

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