Comment by opan
8 hours ago
It's pretty similar to looking something up with a search engine, mashing together some top results + hallucinating a bit, isn't it? The psychological effects of the chat-like interface + the lower friction of posting in said chat again vs reading 6 tabs and redoing your search, seems to be the big killer feature. The main "new" info is often incorrect info.
If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations. (I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.)
It has no human counterpart in the same sense that humans still go to the library (or a search engine) when they don't know something, and we don't have the contents of all the books (or articles/websites) stored in our head.
> I'm guessing someone is gonna compare this to the old Dropbox post, but whatever.
If they do, you’ll be in good company. That post is about the exact opposite of what people usually link it for. I’ll let Dan explain:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
Dan makes a case for being charitable to the commenter and how lame it is to neener-neener into the past, not that it has some opposite meaning everyone is missing out on.
Dan clearly references how people misunderstand not only the comment (“he didn't mean the software. He meant their YC application”) but also the whole interaction (“He wasn't being a petty nitpicker—he was earnestly trying to help, and you can see in how sweetly he replied to Drew there that he genuinely wanted them to succeed”).
So yes, it is the opposite of why people link to it (which is a judgement I’m making, I’m not arguing Dan has that exact sentiment), which is to mock an attitude (which wasn’t there) of hubris and lack of understanding of what makes a good product.
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> If you could get the full page text of every url on the first page of ddg results and dump it into vim/emacs where you can move/search around quickly, that would probably be similarly as good, and without the hallucinations.
Curiously, literally nobody on earth uses this workflow.
People must be in complete denial to pretend that LLM (re)search engines can’t be used to trivially save hours or days of work. The accuracy isn’t perfect, but entirely sufficient for very many use cases, and will arguably continue to improve in the near future.
> The accuracy isn’t perfect
The reason why people don't use LLMs to "trivially save hours or days of work" is because LLMs don't do that. People would use a tool that works. This should be evidence that the tools provide no exceptional benefit, why do you think that is not true?
> People must be in complete denial
That seems to be a big part of it, yes. I think in part it’s a reaction to perceived competition.
The only way LLM search engines save time is if you take what it says at face value as truth. Otherwise you still have to fact check whatever it spews out which is the actual time consuming part of doing proper research.
Frankly I've seen enough dangerous hallucinations from LLM search engines to immediately discard anything it says.
Of course you have to fact check - but verification is much faster and easier than searching from scratch.
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