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I use the various chatbots when I want a tutorial (e.g. math or some programming library). I can (in fact, must) verify these myself. This is strictly better th
by timr 1y ago
I use the various chatbots when I want a tutorial (e.g. math or some programming library). I can (in fact, must) verify these myself. This is strictly better than doing a bunch of queries and reading a bunch of blogs.
I also use them for the class of queries where I don't even know how to begin: ("there is some expression in southern-US english involving animals, about being dumb, that sounds like '$blah', but isn't that. what might it be?") Chatbots are great for that stuff.
Chatbots are absolute trash when it comes to needing factual information that cannot be trivially verified. I include the various "deep research" tools -- they are useless, except maybe as a starting point. For every problem I've given them, they've just been wrong. Not even close. The people who rely on these tools, it seems to me, are the same sort of folks who read newspaper headlines and Gartner 'reasearch reports' and accept the conclusions at face value.
For anything else, it's just easier to write a search query. The internet is wrong too, but it's easier for me to cross-validate answers across 10 blue links than to figure it out via socratic method with a robot.