I don't think you have to know the answer. If the person you replied to knew the answer, there wouldn't have been a big, lengthy discussion.
But yes, being an expert in the problem domain helps. Or at least knowing enough to know what the right questions are and what plausible answers look like.
I just had a similar situation where an hour or two of conversation turned into a five-minute robot coding task. The problem required a solution and the number of possible solutions is vast, but that list can be refined, and then once the course of action is set, sometimes the course itself isn't all that complicated.
This is such an oddly fatalistic take, that humans cannot be influenced or educated to change how they see a thing and therefore how they act towards that thing.
The one counterpoint I'd offer is that it's very obvious that these companies are tuning LLMs to be more decisive to get stuff done autonomously.
If they wanted, they could be putting in similar efforts to be more cautious and stop at the right times to ask for help.
So yeah, of course we're ultimately responsible for how we use the tools. But I definitely think it's a two way street.
To attempt an analogy, it's like table saws and sawstops. The table saw is a dangerous tool that works really well most of the time but has some failure modes that can be catastrophic. So you should learn how to use it carefully. But there is tech out there that can stop the blade in an instant and turn a lost finger into barely a nick on the skin.
We could say "The table saw didn't cut off your finger, you did" and it'd be true. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to find ways to keep the saw from cutting off your finger!
LLMs stopping and asking more would make them less useful. I'd much rather let an agent run for 1 hour, than it wanting my input every 15 mins, even if results are somewhat worse.
The real solution for security is a proper sandbox.
In Spain, a similar length high speed train route would be Madrid-Barcelona, that's 400miles and takes 2h 30min.
If you offer me the same price for flying than for taking the high speed train, I'll take the train every time.
In practice it'll take less travel time, no security lines or theater (no problem bringing your water bottle or whatever), you can bring more luggage, you can stand up/walk/visit the bar during the trip, you go from city center to city center so you don't have to spend an extra in taxis... I just arrive there 20-30 minutes before the train leaves and that's all.
Oh I don't know — I travel the Boston-DC route a lot and fly only because it's significantly cheaper than taking the train. If prices were comparable I would take the train even without it being "high speed", I think there's a market for high speed rail if the prices were as low as flights!
Would love to hear anecdata from others but I'd say...not really? I was a kid in those days but there's no way I'd make a server round trip for /menu/ to open a menu.
It's not perfect, but it's been vastly improved in recent years. If you lost interest in 3D art because of Blender's bad UX in the past, I recommend you give it another shot.
Also, there might be other new 3D software with better UX. I am not a Blender fanboy, but I do love 3D art and graphics programming and want as many people as possible to get into it :^)
Yeah, I mean, I don't know where all of this is going, but I do think that the ancients cared WAY more about "embodied knowledge" than we do, and I suspect we're about to find out a lot more about what that is and why it matters.
There's a lot of definitions of bodies. Though I'm unconvinced one is needed. A brain in a box is capable of interacting with its environment far more than such a thing could even a decade ago. Is it the body or the interaction?
As we advance we always need to answer more nuanced questions. You're right that the nature of progress is... well... progress
Compare it to alfalfa and you’ll be laughing your ass off at how much water alfalfa consumes.
~340 acres of alfalfa in California growing year round uses as much water as Google’s data center in The Dalles uses in one year.
That data center used 550M gallons for evaporative cooling in 2025, which is 1687 acre-feet of water.
One acre of alfalfa in California uses ~5 acre-feet of water per acre of alfalfa per year. There are around a million acres of alfalfa grown in California, or 5 million acre-feet of water per year on alfalfa. Which is used to feed cows.
Feed cows in places without the water and sun to grow this stuff locally. Which is tantamount to exporting water from the American West which will eventually be turned into a desert. We effectively can't be trusted to govern our natural resources more than 5 years out.
I’d recommend you read the following report: Proximity to Golf Courses and Risk of Parkinson Disease
Individuals living within water service areas with a golf course had nearly double the odds of PD compared with individuals in water service areas without golf courses…
Did you read the paper carefully? It's about pesticide use. (It's not especially plausible as epidemiological studies go, though I'm unsurprised if a better study finds a firmer correlation between pesticides and PD.)
Did you not read that the effect was directly tied to “Individuals living within water service areas” in my original comment? Yeah no shit it’s pesticides. They’re seeping into the water supply from the golf course runoff.
That play works if you are in fact a PhD in a related field, but not if we're both reading the same study as laypersons and disputing its relevance and reliability.
What I suspect happened here is that you found this study by Googling for it, and forgot that it is in fact very easy to get a capsule summary of any published study posted on HN.
Yeah, for sure there are. And people will just ask ChatGPT as well.
The funny thing is that for people who are just trying to lose weight without managing any health issues precisely, this type of extreme variance doesn't really matter, because the mere act of consciously quantifying food consumption is, based on my experience counting calories, the single biggest factor in success with weight loss.
I actually think "just asking ChatGPT" is fine, because A) the data in these apps is suspect at best and B) the data behind calories is also pretty suspect (but we all play along because we can adjust other variables to make it all "work" well enough).
Once or twice a year I spend a few weeks meticulously measuring ingredients/cooked foods and recording calories and on complex recipes apps are next to useless at getting accurate data. You're trying to input five or ten relevant ingredients, and then weighing your cooked outcome to try and divide the ingredients by proportion. Frankly it's a mess and most people aren't doing it for home cooked meals, and are getting very lossy outcomes (weighing cooked chicken and marking it as raw chicken, etc)
With reasoning and tool calling (combined with me meticulously weighing before and after), it's producing fine data for my purposes.
I was complaining about AI generated clothes being misleading marketing, deceiving customers as to whether the garment even exists.
And then I learned that the pre-AI norms weren't any less fictional: they made an exemplar garment and did photoshoots, sure, but then they send the pictures and patterns to the lowest bidder factories with permission to make whatever edits are necessary to make it cheap and manufactureable. The whole thing was already a simulacrum.
I honestly think that, given the sorry state of the pre-GenAI internet, with all the SEO optimization nonsense, clickbait, and supplement peddling everywhere, LLMs are for now actually better than Google for “doing your own research” on many things.
At least at the entry level. Once you want to go in depth, the outcome in my experience is the same as with LLM use on any topic depends heavily on the domain knowledge of the prompter and their ability to steer it.
But yes, being an expert in the problem domain helps. Or at least knowing enough to know what the right questions are and what plausible answers look like.
I just had a similar situation where an hour or two of conversation turned into a five-minute robot coding task. The problem required a solution and the number of possible solutions is vast, but that list can be refined, and then once the course of action is set, sometimes the course itself isn't all that complicated.
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