7 ms·
Question: I have a dirty car and the car wash is just 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive to the carwash? Answer: . . . . So, unless you have a compelling r
by mlmonkey 4mo ago
Question: I have a dirty car and the car wash is just 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive to the carwash?
Answer: . . . . So, unless you have a compelling reason not to, walk to the car wash.
- cwnyth 4mo agoI'm surprised these models haven't picked this up yet in the training data. Both Claude and ChatGPT missed that one when I posed the question to them last year.
- tingletech 4mo agoWhy would a model know that one washes cars at a car wash? We don't clean our bodies at the body wash or clean the kitchen at the kitchen wash.
- shepardrtc 4mo agoThere's meaning in the term "car wash" that it understands. But I don't suspect anyone has taught it that for 99.9% of people, going to car wash ONLY means that you're going to wash your car and that it should make that implicit assumption. What if you're the car wash owner? Or a maintenance technician? Pretty easy to just walk over there if you're just 50ft away.
- jjtheblunt 4mo agoto your point, when my Aussie friends first mentioned a "car park" to my north american born self, i wondered _momentarily_ what that was, then realized it's sort of a fun name for what i would call a parking lot.
- nl 4mo agoI've never thought of it as a fun term before. We use "park" as "I will park the car" not park as in "amusement park"
- BobbyTables2 4mo agoWhy isn’t the “pantry” called the “food store”?
- justinclift 4mo agoDoes your pantry have a cashier and let you buy stuff there? Because a food store sounds like it does.
- jjtheblunt 4mo agoyeah but syntactically "car park" gets used like a noun phrase, not verb phrase, which was (to your point really) what had me think "huh?" momentarily.
- SequoiaHope 4mo agoEvery model knows what a car wash is.
- purerandomness 4mo agoIf it doesn't, what's the point using it? Trusting it with your workflows, your code?
- nullpoint420 4mo agoOk im supposed to assume that a model doesn’t know cars get washed at a car wash? But then im supposed to give it access to write code in my repositories. Sorry, what are you trying to get at here?
- treis 4mo agoChatGPT still says walk but adds: >The main reasons to drive such a short distance would be if you're bringing the car specifically to be washed, carrying something heavy, or the weather or walking conditions make it impractical. >If your goal is to get your car washed, you'll need the car there—so driving makes sense. If you're just going to talk to someone at the car wash or check it out, walking is probably faster.
- nine_k 4mo agoYou did not express any desire to wash the car. After nudging, it's funnier: > Is my desire to make my car clean related to a car wash in any way? To driving to it? > Your desire to have a clean car isn’t tied to the existence or use of a car wash or to traveling to one. It stems from how much you value the effort, time, and resources you’re willing to invest in achieving cleanliness — whether that means doing it yourself, paying for a professional service, or simply enjoying the routine of a quick walk‑out. Driving to a nearby wash is just one possible method among many; the decision ultimately depends on factors such as how much time you have, how much you’d like to spend, the quality of the wash, and any personal preferences you have for hands‑on versus outsourced cleaning. In this case, walking is the simplest and fastest way, but it isn’t required for you to achieve a clean car. Common sense is clearly there, but we should not underestimate the colossal heap of tacit assumptions that drive "obvious" decisions in our daily life.
- andai 4mo agoReminder that the human baseline for the car wash question is also pretty bad.
- MPSimmons 4mo agoOh, I'm interested - do you have any docs with human responses to that?
- andai 4mo ago“Car Wash” test with 53 models https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128138 This article has a graph of the human response rates. About 70% correct on average. Accuracy depends on the country (maybe a language barrier?). See also original thread on the car wash thing. I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580
- yieldcrv 4mo ago
- dominotw 4mo agodoesnt seem unreasonable.
- halJordan 4mo agoThese faux questions always have a valid interpretation that the asker doesn't admit (for some reason). The model is then castigated for not making an opinionated choice
- otabdeveloper4 4mo ago[dead]
- kennywinker 4mo agoThat’s not what’s happening. The question is revealing that the model has a model of language but not of reality. It knows what words go together, but not real-world concepts.
- ahoka 4mo agoThis. LLMs are marketed on the false premise of all knowledge, intelligence and wisdom being possible to be encoded in language only.
- riversflow 4mo agolol, i think the LLM shows more wisdom here than the average person. Functionally, being 50m away from the car wash is at the car wash if you have a dirty car in your possession that needs cleaning. Realistically, the only reason you express the need to go to the carwash if you are in a 50m proximity with your car you intend to clean at the carwash is if you need to walk in and talk to someone.
- dd8601fn 4mo agoAs a test, explaining away peculiar answers by imagining unlikely outlier scenarios is not the counter you seem to think it is. For most of them, we’d worry that a human answerer using maximum effort to produce the same outcome was having a stroke.
- sroussey 4mo agoI walk to the gas station more often than I drive there.
- deklesen 4mo agoYeah, but you are not washing yourself there, I suppose? The whole twist here is that to wash your car, you need your car, so you cannot go by foot.
- strangegecko 4mo agoHis analogy is that a gas station is for putting gas into your car. But he walks there often, so the assumption that you need your car if you go to the gas station isn't inevitable. You could conceivably walk to a car wash that has similar sundries as a gas station.
- sroussey 4mo agoIndeed, the little market there is why I walk there. There is also one at the car wash another 2 blocks away. I’d walk there for a 7up if it were closer!
- walrus01 4mo ago[flagged]
- js4ever 4mo ago[flagged]