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Comment by mrdependable | Hacker News Reader

They want to capture more of the value that was previously going to others. That's basically what this has all been leading to. Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own? Now they are going to do the same to e-commerce. Either they are going to let customers buy their products through Google's interface, or they won't be discovered. No more ownership of the customer relationship. Stores will be a backend warehouse and manufacturer now with Google taking a percentage of all profits.

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> Why let a cooking website get visitors and ad revenue when they are free to take the content and show it as their own?

I think this is a step beyond that - why should people be creating cooking websites when you can ask LLM how to cook given thing, while indeed, serving their own ads. It's the continuation of "we own content other people produce" policy

You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes. It’s just a better experience, 2026 is rough for a recipe site.

> You can also tell the LLM exactly what you have in the fridge or what allergies you have and get customized recipes.

Can you really though? Are the results delicious? I've never tried that.

It's worse than you think, many recipe sites do not taste test their stuff at all, and often have very stupid instructions.

That being said, an LLM can give creative ideas, mix and match components, but you should not trust the details at all.

Case in point, when "minced meat" and "mincemeat" were mixed up: https://metro.co.uk/2019/12/09/american-website-includes-act...

Damn, TIL. Now “Operation Mincemeat” seems less macabre.

It is pretty good yeah. I usually ask what traditional recipes (with some time/difficulty limits depending on time availability) might fit with the ingredients i have and let it suggest substitutions.

I wouldn't just ask it to make me a "novel and interesting recipe" giving it a bunch of weird ingredients that don't fit together. It would probably try its best but garbage in garbage out also work for food! At that point i ask it what should i get from the shop to make a recipe with x ingredient that i have in the fridge and i want to finish.

It's also pretty good with meal planning if you do that, it can estimate portions with calories breakdowns etc...

This video tells me otherwise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDQds7VZkfg ( Cold Ones - We Drank AI's Horrible Cocktail Ideas). This is a tongue in cheek response though, as LLMs improved significantly since then.

Is this mushroom edible.jpg

Would you trust the tool that recommended putting glue on pizza to give you a good recipe?

If the user puts glue on their pizza because a computer said so, that's a human problem.

The computer generated recipes can be useful as inspiration, but of course common sense is required.

This "common sense" you refer to, is it the same common sense Babbage was subject to?

"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

~ Charles Babbage

If you freely follow a recipe telling you to put glue on your food, I also don't trust you cooking anything and I definitively don't trust you coming up with your own recipes.

I have/make rice starch glue. Can you put it on food? How are you supposed to know whether it's food safe?

Okay, so you don't trust LLM, so you go to a website instead. And... LLM-generated pages are SEO'd to get the top links. So you can't trust any website now (shoot, so much nonsense even before LLM, just more obvious to some of us). So basically everything on a computer is untrustworthy, directly from an LLM or not, unless you got yourself a copy of Encarta '97.

So you pick up a book at the local library. Librarians picked some books to order in subject matters they aren't expert in. How do you know those are accurate and safe? If the book says to use rice starch glue, how do you know the author didn't just copy that from an LLM? Or make it up?

Trust is fading entirely.

Presumably you test some things and use common sense for others. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over) then you'll get people telling you variously to buy this grain filler compound that worked on their particular project, or you get people telling you to use drywall patch compound, or watered down wood filler.

The thing is, these things do produce some kind of result that looks like what you want. But it is still up to you to test these things on a project before you rely on them for whatever it is you really wanted them for, and that requirement doesn't go away just because you sourced the information from some LLM, or a book at the library, or Nick Offerman, or whoever else.

Got anything from 2025 or 2026?

AI got better over the last couple of years, and you didn't keep up, and because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.

The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.

> because that's not going to stop, it will eventually become a problem for you.

How? Will it stop being possible to cook without AI?

The fundamental technology is still the same, just with more fossil fuel burning.

That's like saying the fundamental technology behind an Egger-Lohner Hybrid and a Prius are the same. Technically true, but if you use that truth as a basis for decisionmaking, you're doomed. A modern AI model wouldn't make such a foolish mistake, so you'd better not make it yourself.

Current AI models still make mistaKes all the time.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:allu5vs...

(Shrug) Ask a free chatbot model and get what you paid for.

Aside from that, please let me know when you find a machine or a human that never makes mistakes. I'd like to invest.

Yes.

There isn't a robot straight up putting glue on my pizza. I will be following the recipe myself and since i trust myself to accurately detect that glue shouldn't belong on food i have zero issues with doing this.

> You can also tell the LLM exactly what

You can - but it's not advisable, not in the least.

recall the pizza sauce glue trick, to stop cheese from sliding off.

there are other such goodies like mashed potatoes with broken lightbulb gravy, or fiberglass omelette, enjoyed by beldar conehead.

i wouldnt trust an AI for any recipe that i dont have personal experience with.

the safety rails are not very strong yet.

I agree and this response was following OPs example. But the point still stands - the goal is to outsource, in a weird way, the results being served = Google as such wouldn't need to pay for content. Now, if accuracy of such sources doesn't matter (or is good enough) for casual user...

There are virtually no combinations of food which are toxic, you can mix any food with any food and, while it might not be good, it will still be food. (The only exception I know of is alcohol and mushrooms containing coprine, e.g. inky caps)

Point is, unless you're stupid enough to add glue or broken glass to your meal just because a recipe told you to, it's perfectly safe. More than just safe, LLM recipes these days are utterly boring in their normalacy, and, unlike cookbook recipes, can dynamically adapt to what you actually have in your pantry.

What really sucks is that Google pushed actual content creators out of the way in the first place. That is horrible. I think they should be challenged on this. Food bloggers, recipe writers, and creators have helped shape a huge amount of food culture, and they deserve to be protected rather than erased. If this kind of theft continues from the AI industry Im not sure what type of culture is is going to be left or what it is going to replace it to. I hope humanity is going to find a creative way around it, but I’m also aware how easy to manipulated the masses are.

Their assumption is that all relevant culture has already been invented and capturing the status quo is enough to get 80% of the benefits.

Evidently you're not familiar with Swedish Lemon Angels.

If you are half decent at cooking it is actually pretty helpful to explore cooking something new. Just like coding it is nice to get specific answers to your specific question and it is pretty easy to reason about the quality using your own experience.

I would be interested in an example of this. LLMs will often combine recipes from random sites. If you're experienced enough at cooking to reason about the quality _for something new to you_, what value is there in an LLM here? I don't see any similarities to coding here.

To me the similarity is I know exactly what I want to do but cannot really remember syntax (coding) or key variables (cooking) like temp and time. But I have enough experience to know if the output makes sense. Either one I can ask an llm a specific question and get a somewhat reliable specific answer that I feel comfortable parsing… this is actually one of the reasons I think I am eventually going to be on the local inference bandwagon. It is not far from being good enough for my use cases. And I will be able to skip the inevitable enshittification.

In terms of temp and time surely if you know enough to judge it's correctness, you would not need it in the first place? Code correctness is rather objective and easily testable. Cooking is rather subjective and only testable with great effort and time. I just checked 4 models on a 4lb pork shoulder in an oven. Flash was super off, suggesting you could pull at 145-150F for a sliced roast. Yeah, you could and it would fucking suck. The per lb time and total time also didn't add up. The others were better but varied. Only one (opus) thought to ask if it was bone-in. If you're very specific you could certainly have it aggregate a bunch of recipes to get a sense of what's close to a good answer, but ultimately it depends on what sources it chooses.

I could see LLMs being helpful to explore what's out there, like finding similar dishes or dishes involving a specific set of ingredients or dishes involving a particular technique, but a pretty poor tool for the actual technicalities of cooking or more importantly the uniquely personal aspects of food culture.

I dunno. I'd just buy larousse and on food and cooking.

I recently roasted a 5lb leg of lamb. Temp was pretty obvious but I had never cooked meat this way so an idea on time is really useful. Google search is a disaster for this kind of question. And I guess I have never encountered a good general cook book that I feel comfortable building off of.

I think all the science of cooking ones are a good bet for generalist knowledge. Some of the more textbook like ones as well. The food lab and on food and cooking stand out, but there are many others. I'm not sure I'd classify them as cookbooks.

Food lab, for example, covers buying storing and cooking lamb + a guide for a 5-7lb boneless leg across 5 or so pages. Kenji goes through great lengths to build intuition. I'm sure larousse, which is more of an encyclopedia, covers lamb quite extensively but it's probably more terse.

The internet can be an excellent source, but like most things it depends on who is writing it down.

Given most cooking or recipe websites have been AI slop for a few years now......

I'll stick with my mom's handwritten recipe book.

Google already killed cooking websites - when it refused to show them in search unless they added long slop content to it. And it killed blogosphere when it decided blogs wont be found if they just contain content without deliberate SEO play.

And I think the rest of it will end the same way. People will be significantly less eager to do all that free work when no one will be able to find it.

It is the same thing as when they pushed for AMP. They wanted to prevent traffic from leaving google.com then too.

In that case at least they could point out that end users got better results with AMP than they do with news sites w/o ad blockers. The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it.

The results are not wrong, they are AI. Google wants that to become a distinct thing that is neither. What's a better answer for Google than one that generates more usage? If we all push in the same direction we can make AI work, we just need to accept we will need to hold its hand for a while.

I think this is sarcastic but man some people really do have some wild defenses for LLM’s so I can’t be sure lol

> The AI results are just wrong so often I don't really get it

They believe they won’t be wrong for long.

Maybe it's high time to burn it all down.

Block Googlebot from your sites.

Let's go back to webrings.

It's certainly long been clear that Google is phasing out even the idea that they serve end-users "links" to other websites. They're just refining the idea and making it more and more explicit. It absolutely places them in an obviously adversarial position to every single other website on the Internet, and anyone who continues to cooperate with Google today is probably handing Google the tools to put them out of business. Unfortunately, whole generations of people have grown up learning that the safest and easiest way to navigate to a website is to type some version of the brand into their browser (which Google likely owns outright) and click the first thing Google spits back, so Google enters this battle holding most of the cards :(

Exactly! They also have been letting the results of google search get seriously degraded by ads. Would many people prefer AI over google search circa 2010?

They killed their competition and now they will give you the product that gives them the most money.

Also — it's objectively a better search product to give users what they're looking for right away.

Though that's not to say they're acting altruisticly here.

Google seems to be racing toward a new dark pattern where users learn to trust rely on the AI for neutral, smart objectively correct answers — which boosts trust in its sponsored product recommendations. Super gross.

Why would anyone go to google anymore tho? If it doesn't furnish results it's just a chatbot

I would assume that they've A/B-tested any such important change extensively and basically know that it won't affect their numbers for the worse.

Given my own time at google, I highly doubt these a/b tests are constructed to actually yield a better product rather than push pet products

Then we should take your word over mine. My assumption was that those A/B tests will lead to products that do increase the numbers they were measuring (retention, conversion,...) at the expense of enshittified UX (up to the point of things feeling objectively broken, like notification badges re-appearing for the same items, settings that reset after user changes, search results missing,...). At least that was my explanation for how products by major tech giants like LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook,... could end up being shipped with such flaws. What would you say?

This has been their MO with their search for a decade+ now. "Native" results hiding actual search results below the fold killed many 2010s era websites that relied on search traffic.

"Greed is bad"

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