7 ms·

Today I had a dentist appointment and the dentist suggested I switch toothpaste lines to see if something else works for my sensitivity better. I am predispose

Today I had a dentist appointment and the dentist suggested I switch toothpaste lines to see if something else works for my sensitivity better. I am predisposed to canker sores and if I use a toothpaste with SLS in it I'll get them. But a lot of the SLS free toothpastes are new age hippy stuff and is also fluoride free. I went to chatgpt and asked it to suggest a toothpaste that was both SLS free and had fluoride. Pretty simple ask right? It came back with two suggestions. It's top suggestion had SLS, it's backup suggestion lacked fluoride. Yes, it is mind blowing the world we live in. Executives want to turn our code bases over to these tools

sneak 1y ago
“an LLM made a mistake once, that’s why I don’t use it to code” is exactly the kind of irrelevant FUD that TFA is railing against. Anyone not learning to use these tools well (and cope with and work around their limitations) is going to be left in the dust in months, perhaps weeks. It’s insane how much utility they have.
- breuleux 1y ago
  They won't. The speed at which these models evolve is a double-edged sword: they give you value quickly... but any experience you gain dealing with them also becomes obsolete quickly. One year of experience using agents won't be more valuable than one week of experience using them. No one's going to be left in the dust because no one is more than a few weeks away from catching up.
  - kossTKR 1y ago
    Very important point, but there's also the sheer amount of reading you have to do, the inevitable scope creep, gargantuan walls text going back and fourth making you "skip" constantly, looking here then there, copying, pasting, erasing, reasking. Literally the opposite of focus, flow, seeing the big picture. At least for me to some degree. There's value there as i'm already using these tools everyday but it also seems like a tradeoff i'm not really sure how valuable is yet. Especially with competition upping the noise too. I feel SO unfocused with these tools and i hate it, it's stressful and feels less "grounded", "tactile" and enjoyable. I've found myself in a new weird workflowloop a few times with these tools mindlessly iterating on some stupid error the LLM keeps not fixing, while my mind simply refuses to just fix it myself way faster with a little more effort and that's a honestly a bit frightening.
    - lechatonnoir 1y ago
      I relate to this a bit, and on a meta level I think the only way out is through. I'm trying to embrace optimizing the big picture process for my enjoyment and for positive and long-term effective mental states, which does include thinking about when not to use the thing and being thoughtful about exactly when to lean on it.
- grey-area 1y ago
  Looking forward to seeing you live up to your hyperbole in a few weeks, the singularity is near!
- malfist 1y ago
  Once? Lol. I present a simple problem with well defined parameters that LLMs can use to search product ingredient lists (that are standardized). This is the type of problems LLMs are supposed to be good at and it failed in every possible way. If you hired master woodworker and he didn't know what wood was, you'd hardly trust him with hard things, much less simple ones
  - phantompeace 1y ago
    You haven’t shared the chat where you claim the model gave you incorrect answers, whilst others have stated that your query returned correct results. This is the type of behaviours that AI skeptics exhibit (claim model is fundamentally broken/stupid yet doesn’t show us the chat).
- sensanaty 1y ago
  Surely if these tools were so magical, anyone could just pick them up and get out of the dust? If anything, they're probably better off cause they haven't wasted all the time, effort and money in the earlier, useless days and instead used it in the hypothetical future magic days.
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    > Surely if these tools were so magical The article is not claiming they are magical, the article is claiming that they are useful. > > but it’ll never be AGI > I don’t give a shit. > Smart practitioners get wound up by the AI/VC hype cycle. I can’t blame them. But it’s not an argument. Things either work or they don’t, no matter what Jensen Huang has to say about it.
- creata 1y ago
  I see this FOMO "left in the dust" sentiment a lot, and I don't get it. You know it doesn't take long to learn how to use these tools, right?
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    it actually does if you want to do serious work. hence these types of post generate hundreds of comments “I gave it a shot, it stinks”
    - worthless-trash 1y ago
      I like how the post itself says "if hallucinations are your problem, your language sucks". Yes sir, I know language sucks, there isnt anything I can do about that. There was nothing I could do at one point to convince claude that you should not use floating point math in kernel c code. But hey, what do I know.
      - simonw 1y ago
        Did saying to Claude "do not use floating point math in this code" not work?
        worthless-trash 1y ago
        Correct, it did not work.
pmdrpg 1y ago
Feel similarly, but even if it is wrong 30% of the time, you can (as the author of this op ed points out) pour an ungodly amount of resources into getting that error down by chaining them together so that you have many chances to catch the error. And as long as that only destroys the environment and doesn’t cost more than a junior dev, then they’re going to trust their codebases with it yes, it’s the competitive thing to do, and we all know competition produces the best outcome for everyone… right?
- csallen 1y ago
  It takes very little time or brainpower to circumvent AI hallucinations in your daily work, if you're a frequent user of LLMs. This is especially true of coding using an app like Cursor, where you can @-tag files and even URLs to manage context.
- 0points 1y ago
  > it’s the competitive thing to do I'm expecting there should be at least some senior executive that realize how incredible destructive this is to their products. But I guess time will tell.
gertlex 1y ago
Feels like you're comparing how LLMs handle unstandardized and incomplete marketing-crap that is virtually all product pages on the internet, and how LLMs handle the corpus of code on the internet that can generally be trusted to be at least semi functional (compiles or at least lints; and often easily fixed when not 100%). Two very different combinations it seems to me... If the former combination was working, we'd be using chatgpt to fill our amazon carts by now. We'd probably be sanity checking the contents, but expecting pretty good initial results. That's where the suitability of AI for lots of coding-type work feels like it's at.
- malfist 1y ago
  Product ingredient lists are mandated by law and follow a standard. Hard to imagine a better codified NLP problem
  - gertlex 1y ago
    I hadn't considered that, admittedly. It seems like that would make the information highly likely to be present... I've admittedly got an absence of anecdata of my own here, though: I don't go buying things with ingredient lists online much. I was pleasantly surprised to see a very readable list when I checked a toothpaste page on amazon just.
- layer8 1y ago
  At the very least, it demonstrates that you can’t trust LLMs to correctly assess that they couldn’t find the necessary information, or if they do internally, to tell you that they couldn’t. The analogous gaps of awareness and acknowledgment likely apply to their reasoning about code.
NikkuFox 1y ago
If you've not found a toothpaste yet, see if UltraDex is available where you live.
GoatInGrey 1y ago
If you want the trifecta of no SLS, contains fluoride, and is biodegradable, then I recommend Hello toothpaste. Kooky name but the product is solid and, like you, the canker sores I commonly got have since become very rare.
- Game_Ender 1y ago
  Hello toothpaste is ChatGPT's 2nd or 1st answer depending on which model I used [0], so I am curious for the poster above to share the session and see what the issue was. There is known sensitivity (no pun intended ;) to wording of the prompt. I have also found if I am very quick and flippant it will totally miss my point and go off in the wrong direction entirely. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164633
Game_Ender 1y ago
What model and query did you use? I used the prompt "find me a toothpaste that is both SLS free and has fluoride" and both GPT-4o [0] and o4-mini-high [1] gave me correct first answers. The 4o answer used the newish "show products inline" feature which made it easier to jump to each product and check it out (I am putting aside my fear this feature will end up kill their web product with monetization). 0 - https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3807-0bf8-800a-8bab-5089e4af5153 https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3807-0bf8-800a-8bab-5089e4af51... 1 - https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3558-6738-800a-a8fb-3adc20b69d6c https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3558-6738-800a-a8fb-3adc20b69d...
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  This is the thing that gets me about LLM usage. They can be amazing revolutionary tech and yes they can also be nearly impossible to use right. The claim that they are going to replace this or that is hampered by the fact that there is very real skill required (at best) or just won't work most the time (at worst). Yes there are examples of amazing things, but the majority of things from the majority of users seems to be junk and the messaging designed around FUD and FOMO
  - kristofferR 1y ago
    The AI skeptics are the ones who never develop the skill though, it's self-destructive.
    - caycep 1y ago
      if one needs special "skill" to use AI "properly", is it truly AI?
      - HappMacDonald 1y ago
        Human labor needs skill to compose properly into any larger effort..
      - wickedsight 1y ago
mediaman 1y ago
What are you doing to get results this bad? I tried this question three times and each time the first two products met both requirements. Are you doing the classic thing of using the free version to complain about the competent version?
- fwip 1y ago
  If the demo version of something is shitty, there's no reason to pay that company money.
  - mediaman 1y ago
    That's the old way of thinking about software economics, where marginal cost is zero. Marginal cost of LLMs is not zero. I come from manufacturing and find this kind of attitude bizarre among some software professionals. In manufacturing we care about our tools and invest in quality. If the new guy bought a micrometer from Harbor Freight, found it wasn't accurate enough for sub-.001" work, ignored everyone who told him to use Mitutoyo, and then declared that micrometers "don't work," he would not continue to have employment.
    - andrewflnr 1y ago
      The closer analogy there is if someone used ChatGPT despite everyone telling them to use Claude, and declared that LLMs suck. This is closer to the mistake people actually make. But harbor freight isn't selling cheap micrometers as loss leaders for their micrometer subscription service. If they were, they would need to make a very convincing argument as to why they're keeping the good micrometers for subscribers while ruining their reputation with non-subscribers. Wouldn't you say?
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  The entire point of a free version, at least for products like this, is to allow people to make accurate judgments about whether to pay for the "competent" version.
  - 1y ago
artursapek 1y ago
do you take lysine? total miracle supplement for those
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
shlant 1y ago
cool story
cowlby 1y ago
This is where o3 shines for me. Since it does iterations of thinking/searching/analyzing and is instructed to provide citations, it really limits the hallucination effect. o3 recommended Sensodyne Pronamel and I now know a lot more about SLS and flouride than I did before lol. From its findings: "Unlike other toothpastes, Pronamel does not contain sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which is a common foaming agent. Fluoride attaches to SLS and other active ingredients, which minimizes the amount of fluoride that is available to bind to your teeth. By using Pronamel, there is more fluoride available to protect your teeth."
- fc417fc802 1y ago
  That is impressive, but it also looks likely to be misinformation. SLS isn't a chelator (as the quote appears to suggest). The concern is apparently that it might compete with NaF for sites to interact with the enamel. However, there is minimal research on the topic and what does exist (at least what I was quickly able to find via pubmed) appears preliminary at best. It also implicates all surfactants, not just SLS. This diversion highlights one of the primary dangers of LLMs which is that it takes a lot longer to investigate potential bullshit than it does to spew it (particularly if the entity spewing it is a computer). That said, I did learn something. Apparently it might be a good idea to prerinse with a calcium lactate solution prior to a NaF solution, and to verify that the NaF mouthwash is free of surfactants. But again, both of those points are preliminary research grade at best. If you take anything away from this, I hope it's that you shouldn't trust any LLM output on technical topics that you haven't taken the time to manually verify in full.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - cowlby 1y ago
    Very interesting. It grabbed that from the marketing at ahttps://www.pronamel.us/why-pronamel/how-pronamel-works/ https://www.pronamel.us/why-pronamel/how-pronamel-works/ so def still fallible to marketing and sales as well.
cgh 1y ago
There is a reason why corporations aren’t letting LLMs into the accounting department.
- sriram_malhar 1y ago
  That is not true. I know of many private equity companies that are using LLMs for a base level analysis, and a separate validation layer to catch hallucinations. LLM tech is not replacing accountants, just as it is not replacing radiologists or software developers yet. But it is in every department.
  - suddenlybananas 1y ago
    That's not what the accounting department does.
    - sriram_malhar 1y ago
      Not sure what you think I mean by "that". The accounting department does a large number of things, only some of which involves precise bookkeeping. There is data extraction from documents, DIY searching (vibe search?), checking data integrity of submitted forms, deviations from norms etc.
      - jdietrich 1y ago
        Suddenlybananas appears to be unaware of the field of management accounting.
- lazide 1y ago
  Don’t bet on it. I’ve had to provide feedback on multiple proposals to use LLMs for generating ad-hoc financial reports in a fortune 50. The feedback was basically ‘this is guaranteed to make everyone cry, because this will produce bad numbers’ - and people seem to just not understand why.
- renewiltord 1y ago
  This is false. My friend works in tax accounting and they’re using LLMs at his org.
jorams 1y ago
For reference I just typed "sls free toothpaste with fluoride" into a search engine and all the top results are good. They are SLS-free and do contain fluoride.
def_true_false 1y ago
Try Biomin-F or Apagard. The latter is fluoride free. Both are among the best for sensitive teeth.
emeril 1y ago
consider a multivitamin (or least eating big varied salads regularly) - that seemed to get rid of my recurrent canker sores despite whatever toothpaste I use fwiw, I use my kids toothpaste (kids crest) since I suspect most toothpastes are created equal and one less thing to worry about...
jf22 1y ago
"An LLM is bad at this specific example so it is bad at everything"
neRok 1y ago
I've only just got around to reading this article and HN discussion, hence the belated reply. I thought I would test out your use-case, and it gave me 4 legit products (I verified them), and also 3 additional tips. One reason I think our results could differ is because I don't just "bark orders at it" but instead "talk to it" and give it context. I think the contextgives it chance to "understand the topic" and then "answer the question" in 2 steps, whereas when you just say "toothpaste without SLS", it's just filtering a list without understanding why you or it would want to filter it that way. Also I think being polite helps, and I've seen posts here on HN that agree. So here's my prompt, FYI; > Today I had a dentist appointment and mentioned having sensitivity issues, to which the dentist suggested I try a different toothpaste. I would like you to suggest some options that contain fluoride. However, I am also predisposed to canker sores if I use toothpaste with SLS in it, so please do not suggest products with SLS in them.

sneak 1y ago

“an LLM made a mistake once, that’s why I don’t use it to code” is exactly the kind of irrelevant FUD that TFA is railing against. Anyone not learning to use these tools well (and cope with and work around their limitations) is going to be left in the dust in months, perhaps weeks. It’s insane how much utility they have.

breuleux 1y ago
They won't. The speed at which these models evolve is a double-edged sword: they give you value quickly... but any experience you gain dealing with them also becomes obsolete quickly. One year of experience using agents won't be more valuable than one week of experience using them. No one's going to be left in the dust because no one is more than a few weeks away from catching up.
- kossTKR 1y ago
  Very important point, but there's also the sheer amount of reading you have to do, the inevitable scope creep, gargantuan walls text going back and fourth making you "skip" constantly, looking here then there, copying, pasting, erasing, reasking. Literally the opposite of focus, flow, seeing the big picture. At least for me to some degree. There's value there as i'm already using these tools everyday but it also seems like a tradeoff i'm not really sure how valuable is yet. Especially with competition upping the noise too. I feel SO unfocused with these tools and i hate it, it's stressful and feels less "grounded", "tactile" and enjoyable. I've found myself in a new weird workflowloop a few times with these tools mindlessly iterating on some stupid error the LLM keeps not fixing, while my mind simply refuses to just fix it myself way faster with a little more effort and that's a honestly a bit frightening.
  - lechatonnoir 1y ago
    I relate to this a bit, and on a meta level I think the only way out is through. I'm trying to embrace optimizing the big picture process for my enjoyment and for positive and long-term effective mental states, which does include thinking about when not to use the thing and being thoughtful about exactly when to lean on it.
grey-area 1y ago
Looking forward to seeing you live up to your hyperbole in a few weeks, the singularity is near!
malfist 1y ago
Once? Lol. I present a simple problem with well defined parameters that LLMs can use to search product ingredient lists (that are standardized). This is the type of problems LLMs are supposed to be good at and it failed in every possible way. If you hired master woodworker and he didn't know what wood was, you'd hardly trust him with hard things, much less simple ones
- phantompeace 1y ago
  You haven’t shared the chat where you claim the model gave you incorrect answers, whilst others have stated that your query returned correct results. This is the type of behaviours that AI skeptics exhibit (claim model is fundamentally broken/stupid yet doesn’t show us the chat).
sensanaty 1y ago
Surely if these tools were so magical, anyone could just pick them up and get out of the dust? If anything, they're probably better off cause they haven't wasted all the time, effort and money in the earlier, useless days and instead used it in the hypothetical future magic days.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  > Surely if these tools were so magical The article is not claiming they are magical, the article is claiming that they are useful. > > but it’ll never be AGI > I don’t give a shit. > Smart practitioners get wound up by the AI/VC hype cycle. I can’t blame them. But it’s not an argument. Things either work or they don’t, no matter what Jensen Huang has to say about it.
creata 1y ago
I see this FOMO "left in the dust" sentiment a lot, and I don't get it. You know it doesn't take long to learn how to use these tools, right?
- bdangubic 1y ago
  it actually does if you want to do serious work. hence these types of post generate hundreds of comments “I gave it a shot, it stinks”
  - worthless-trash 1y ago
    I like how the post itself says "if hallucinations are your problem, your language sucks". Yes sir, I know language sucks, there isnt anything I can do about that. There was nothing I could do at one point to convince claude that you should not use floating point math in kernel c code. But hey, what do I know.
    - simonw 1y ago
      Did saying to Claude "do not use floating point math in this code" not work?
      - worthless-trash 1y ago
        Correct, it did not work.

pmdrpg 1y ago

Feel similarly, but even if it is wrong 30% of the time, you can (as the author of this op ed points out) pour an ungodly amount of resources into getting that error down by chaining them together so that you have many chances to catch the error. And as long as that only destroys the environment and doesn’t cost more than a junior dev, then they’re going to trust their codebases with it yes, it’s the competitive thing to do, and we all know competition produces the best outcome for everyone… right?

csallen 1y ago
It takes very little time or brainpower to circumvent AI hallucinations in your daily work, if you're a frequent user of LLMs. This is especially true of coding using an app like Cursor, where you can @-tag files and even URLs to manage context.
0points 1y ago
> it’s the competitive thing to do I'm expecting there should be at least some senior executive that realize how incredible destructive this is to their products. But I guess time will tell.

gertlex 1y ago

Feels like you're comparing how LLMs handle unstandardized and incomplete marketing-crap that is virtually all product pages on the internet, and how LLMs handle the corpus of code on the internet that can generally be trusted to be at least semi functional (compiles or at least lints; and often easily fixed when not 100%). Two very different combinations it seems to me... If the former combination was working, we'd be using chatgpt to fill our amazon carts by now. We'd probably be sanity checking the contents, but expecting pretty good initial results. That's where the suitability of AI for lots of coding-type work feels like it's at.

malfist 1y ago
Product ingredient lists are mandated by law and follow a standard. Hard to imagine a better codified NLP problem
- gertlex 1y ago
  I hadn't considered that, admittedly. It seems like that would make the information highly likely to be present... I've admittedly got an absence of anecdata of my own here, though: I don't go buying things with ingredient lists online much. I was pleasantly surprised to see a very readable list when I checked a toothpaste page on amazon just.
layer8 1y ago
At the very least, it demonstrates that you can’t trust LLMs to correctly assess that they couldn’t find the necessary information, or if they do internally, to tell you that they couldn’t. The analogous gaps of awareness and acknowledgment likely apply to their reasoning about code.

NikkuFox 1y ago

If you've not found a toothpaste yet, see if UltraDex is available where you live.

GoatInGrey 1y ago

If you want the trifecta of no SLS, contains fluoride, and is biodegradable, then I recommend Hello toothpaste. Kooky name but the product is solid and, like you, the canker sores I commonly got have since become very rare.

Game_Ender 1y ago
Hello toothpaste is ChatGPT's 2nd or 1st answer depending on which model I used [0], so I am curious for the poster above to share the session and see what the issue was. There is known sensitivity (no pun intended ;) to wording of the prompt. I have also found if I am very quick and flippant it will totally miss my point and go off in the wrong direction entirely. 0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164633

Game_Ender 1y ago

What model and query did you use? I used the prompt "find me a toothpaste that is both SLS free and has fluoride" and both GPT-4o [0] and o4-mini-high [1] gave me correct first answers. The 4o answer used the newish "show products inline" feature which made it easier to jump to each product and check it out (I am putting aside my fear this feature will end up kill their web product with monetization). 0 - https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3807-0bf8-800a-8bab-5089e4af5153 https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3807-0bf8-800a-8bab-5089e4af51... 1 - https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3558-6738-800a-a8fb-3adc20b69d6c https://chatgpt.com/share/683e3558-6738-800a-a8fb-3adc20b69d...

jvanderbot 1y ago
This is the thing that gets me about LLM usage. They can be amazing revolutionary tech and yes they can also be nearly impossible to use right. The claim that they are going to replace this or that is hampered by the fact that there is very real skill required (at best) or just won't work most the time (at worst). Yes there are examples of amazing things, but the majority of things from the majority of users seems to be junk and the messaging designed around FUD and FOMO
- kristofferR 1y ago
  The AI skeptics are the ones who never develop the skill though, it's self-destructive.
  - caycep 1y ago
    if one needs special "skill" to use AI "properly", is it truly AI?
    - HappMacDonald 1y ago
      Human labor needs skill to compose properly into any larger effort..
    - wickedsight 1y ago

mediaman 1y ago

What are you doing to get results this bad? I tried this question three times and each time the first two products met both requirements. Are you doing the classic thing of using the free version to complain about the competent version?

fwip 1y ago
If the demo version of something is shitty, there's no reason to pay that company money.
- mediaman 1y ago
  That's the old way of thinking about software economics, where marginal cost is zero. Marginal cost of LLMs is not zero. I come from manufacturing and find this kind of attitude bizarre among some software professionals. In manufacturing we care about our tools and invest in quality. If the new guy bought a micrometer from Harbor Freight, found it wasn't accurate enough for sub-.001" work, ignored everyone who told him to use Mitutoyo, and then declared that micrometers "don't work," he would not continue to have employment.
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    The closer analogy there is if someone used ChatGPT despite everyone telling them to use Claude, and declared that LLMs suck. This is closer to the mistake people actually make. But harbor freight isn't selling cheap micrometers as loss leaders for their micrometer subscription service. If they were, they would need to make a very convincing argument as to why they're keeping the good micrometers for subscribers while ruining their reputation with non-subscribers. Wouldn't you say?
andrewflnr 1y ago
The entire point of a free version, at least for products like this, is to allow people to make accurate judgments about whether to pay for the "competent" version.
- 1y ago

artursapek 1y ago

do you take lysine? total miracle supplement for those

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

shlant 1y ago

cool story

cowlby 1y ago

This is where o3 shines for me. Since it does iterations of thinking/searching/analyzing and is instructed to provide citations, it really limits the hallucination effect. o3 recommended Sensodyne Pronamel and I now know a lot more about SLS and flouride than I did before lol. From its findings: "Unlike other toothpastes, Pronamel does not contain sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which is a common foaming agent. Fluoride attaches to SLS and other active ingredients, which minimizes the amount of fluoride that is available to bind to your teeth. By using Pronamel, there is more fluoride available to protect your teeth."

fc417fc802 1y ago
That is impressive, but it also looks likely to be misinformation. SLS isn't a chelator (as the quote appears to suggest). The concern is apparently that it might compete with NaF for sites to interact with the enamel. However, there is minimal research on the topic and what does exist (at least what I was quickly able to find via pubmed) appears preliminary at best. It also implicates all surfactants, not just SLS. This diversion highlights one of the primary dangers of LLMs which is that it takes a lot longer to investigate potential bullshit than it does to spew it (particularly if the entity spewing it is a computer). That said, I did learn something. Apparently it might be a good idea to prerinse with a calcium lactate solution prior to a NaF solution, and to verify that the NaF mouthwash is free of surfactants. But again, both of those points are preliminary research grade at best. If you take anything away from this, I hope it's that you shouldn't trust any LLM output on technical topics that you haven't taken the time to manually verify in full.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- cowlby 1y ago
  Very interesting. It grabbed that from the marketing at ahttps://www.pronamel.us/why-pronamel/how-pronamel-works/ https://www.pronamel.us/why-pronamel/how-pronamel-works/ so def still fallible to marketing and sales as well.

cgh 1y ago

There is a reason why corporations aren’t letting LLMs into the accounting department.

sriram_malhar 1y ago
That is not true. I know of many private equity companies that are using LLMs for a base level analysis, and a separate validation layer to catch hallucinations. LLM tech is not replacing accountants, just as it is not replacing radiologists or software developers yet. But it is in every department.
- suddenlybananas 1y ago
  That's not what the accounting department does.
  - sriram_malhar 1y ago
    Not sure what you think I mean by "that". The accounting department does a large number of things, only some of which involves precise bookkeeping. There is data extraction from documents, DIY searching (vibe search?), checking data integrity of submitted forms, deviations from norms etc.
    - jdietrich 1y ago
      Suddenlybananas appears to be unaware of the field of management accounting.
lazide 1y ago
Don’t bet on it. I’ve had to provide feedback on multiple proposals to use LLMs for generating ad-hoc financial reports in a fortune 50. The feedback was basically ‘this is guaranteed to make everyone cry, because this will produce bad numbers’ - and people seem to just not understand why.
renewiltord 1y ago
This is false. My friend works in tax accounting and they’re using LLMs at his org.

jorams 1y ago

For reference I just typed "sls free toothpaste with fluoride" into a search engine and all the top results are good. They are SLS-free and do contain fluoride.

def_true_false 1y ago

Try Biomin-F or Apagard. The latter is fluoride free. Both are among the best for sensitive teeth.

emeril 1y ago

consider a multivitamin (or least eating big varied salads regularly) - that seemed to get rid of my recurrent canker sores despite whatever toothpaste I use fwiw, I use my kids toothpaste (kids crest) since I suspect most toothpastes are created equal and one less thing to worry about...

jf22 1y ago

"An LLM is bad at this specific example so it is bad at everything"

neRok 1y ago

I've only just got around to reading this article and HN discussion, hence the belated reply. I thought I would test out your use-case, and it gave me 4 legit products (I verified them), and also 3 additional tips. One reason I think our results could differ is because I don't just "bark orders at it" but instead "talk to it" and give it context. I think the contextgives it chance to "understand the topic" and then "answer the question" in 2 steps, whereas when you just say "toothpaste without SLS", it's just filtering a list without understanding why you or it would want to filter it that way. Also I think being polite helps, and I've seen posts here on HN that agree. So here's my prompt, FYI; > Today I had a dentist appointment and mentioned having sensitivity issues, to which the dentist suggested I try a different toothpaste. I would like you to suggest some options that contain fluoride. However, I am also predisposed to canker sores if I use toothpaste with SLS in it, so please do not suggest products with SLS in them.