Comment by twright

3 days ago

I think the title of this could be more precisely phrased “Stop Giving Me Background Information About My Question, Just Give Me the Answer.”

My go-to example for this is when I once searched for egg substitutes for a baking recipe. Lots of multi-paragraph results about how eggs are nutritious, why eggs are useful in baking, why you might want to substitute them out. Finally after many more paragraphs of non-answers and many ignored ads: my answer, but not in a brief list, a paragraph for each one further explaining what they are.

I go to an LLM for these sorts of questions now and ask it to be brief. The internet for basic questions of any sort lead to these same frustrating webpages otherwise.

I wonder if nerds looking for cooking info might not be better served by downloading a few hundred old cookbooks from shadow libraries and training an LLM on them. Then you can avoid the pathologies and potential fakeness of online content-mill texts entirely.