Comment by mmh0000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mmh0000 | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree. I personally consider these my biggest problems with the Web:

  - Bias, specifically commercial bias
  - Webpage formatting: every website looks different, hides the information I want in different places. Sure, it "looks pretty", but I don't want pretty; I want info
  - Scams/SEO/etc...

The LLMs are very good at reading from multiple sources, parsing, and presenting only the data in a consistent format. There are many examples of this, but if you want a good one to try for yourself:

Google "How to make ham fried rice"; you'll get 10,000 articles, most pretty good recipes. But they're all different; most of them are just bait for ads. And most of them, the 10-line recipe is hidden between 50 useless paragraphs about how serving food is life's most important goal.

Now, ask an LLM to search for it, find the best combination, and list only the recipes. You get a perfect, 10-line recipe that doesn't waste your time.

I personally prefer to read a couple of recipes to understand the context, what people have tried, what they thought of it. Only when I have a good general idea of the recipe I choose the best one I found based on difficulty and the ingredients I have. I then do the plate, often not following entirely the recipe I chose, and after that and eating it I write down the name of the plate, the recipe link, the date, and a comment about what I did and how it went. Cooking is a lot more than executing a list of steps like a robot.

LLMs are not unbiased. Nothing is unbiased.

Yeah I had to laugh at that. LLM's solve commercial bias? Coming from seemingly multiple the most valuable companies of all time?

And if you're lucky, it won't include rocks as an ingredient.

They're an important part of your diet if you happen to have a gizzard.

I've also been known to include some ground up rocks in my meals. I'm pretty picky though about them, I mostly just want a couple specific varieties.

Why even use a LLM, just buy a cookbook and you can even waste less time and know the information is valid. And again if your logic is consistent, google routes your search to an LLM automatically and renders the reply - that will save as much time and do the same thing since LLMs are so good at parsing and presenting information.

So why should I pick an LLM over google's inbuilt LLM or an actual cookbook on the desk? What wasted time is the LLM saving?

From Google's perspective you might as well be a bot because when you search there you don't see ads. If you don't have adblock installed, your parent comment applies because you get worse experience as LLMs don't serve ads.

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