4 ms·

Expecting a tool meant to generate cooking recipes to reject things that aren't usual ingredients of food is not surprising. This tool violates that expectation

Expecting a tool meant to generate cooking recipes to reject things that aren't usual ingredients of food is not surprising. This tool violates that expectation. Even trivial things like input fields on web forms have a type attribute that lets developers specify which type of content is expected and valid. (If you're not familiar with that, have a look here: [0]). For things that might endanger the health of customers, we can expect better. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/input https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/in...

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
if I tell a piece of software to generate a bleach casserole, it should generate a bleach casserole, because I know what I want better than the software does. anything less would be like clippy telling me Microsoft Word refuses to write my planetary doomsday ransom notes because Microsoft Word is 'meant to write nice things', or my car refusing to exceed the speed limit because it is 'meant to drive legally' maybe I'm just an alien who's capable of drinking bleach, the app doesn't know and it shouldn't have opinions: it should just do what I tell it to do, because it's a "put whatever ingredients you want together" app, not a "this is definitely safe and healthy" app
burnished 3y ago
I think that expectation is only violated if you get unusual/dangerous outputs from innocuous inputs. Just sounding this out but I think the expectation you are responding to is an expectation of an appropriate level of safety, which is more context dependent. For example, do any of the generated recipes actually pose a danger, in that they will participate in harming a human? My hunch is no, this would not present the same kind of danger the 'tide pod challenge' did and would never lead to unusual adverse outcomes (anyone can find out about an allergy from a new ingredient in a recipe for example). Just exploring the topic here though. I think the perspective that a 'meal planner' should never produce plainly hazardous meal plans is perfectly rational.

ImPostingOnHN 3y ago

if I tell a piece of software to generate a bleach casserole, it should generate a bleach casserole, because I know what I want better than the software does. anything less would be like clippy telling me Microsoft Word refuses to write my planetary doomsday ransom notes because Microsoft Word is 'meant to write nice things', or my car refusing to exceed the speed limit because it is 'meant to drive legally' maybe I'm just an alien who's capable of drinking bleach, the app doesn't know and it shouldn't have opinions: it should just do what I tell it to do, because it's a "put whatever ingredients you want together" app, not a "this is definitely safe and healthy" app

burnished 3y ago

I think that expectation is only violated if you get unusual/dangerous outputs from innocuous inputs. Just sounding this out but I think the expectation you are responding to is an expectation of an appropriate level of safety, which is more context dependent. For example, do any of the generated recipes actually pose a danger, in that they will participate in harming a human? My hunch is no, this would not present the same kind of danger the 'tide pod challenge' did and would never lead to unusual adverse outcomes (anyone can find out about an allergy from a new ingredient in a recipe for example). Just exploring the topic here though. I think the perspective that a 'meal planner' should never produce plainly hazardous meal plans is perfectly rational.