What does this recipe spam really tell us? It’s a little harder to find a good recipe and it’s more of a hint generator than authoritative advice. But most reci

What does this recipe spam really tell us? It’s a little harder to find a good recipe and it’s more of a hint generator than authoritative advice. But most recipes don’t need to be followed all that precisely. Cooks will make their own adjustments based on local availability of ingredients, what equipment they have, and their own preferences. For an experienced cook, these hints are usually good enough. If you get a somewhat different dish, but it’s still tasty, so what? Authenticity is overrated. There has long been a similar situation for song lyrics. It doesn’t matter if you get a song’s lyrics exactly right. If you sing it in a little different way, that’s fine. I’m also reminded of the situation with folk music where there are many variations on any given tune, where the tune came from is lost in history, and it’s fine. This is how cultural evolution works. The remixes used to be done by people and now they’re increasingly done by machine. LLM’s are new, but Wikipedia is a remix, too, and so are social media and forums like this one. When you really care about getting it right, you need to go into research mode. Follow the citations and find the primary sources. Stack Overflow is a useful source of hints, but also read the documentation, the source code, and do your own testing. It’s more work. Most of the time we don’t need to do it because the hints are good enough, and when they aren’t, we can recognize that. Search engines are still quite useful for research when you find the right keywords. You might need to switch to a more specialized search engine, though? They’re still useful even if they don’t have the enormous cultural impact of the default choice.