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by flux312513 hours ago |
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upvoteby elSidCampeador5 hours ago|
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I changed the prompt to 50 feet, and poked gemini a bit when it failed and it gave me

> In my defense, 50 feet is such a short trip that I went straight into "efficiency mode" without checking the logic gate for "does the car have legs?"

interesting

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upvoteby Rapzid42 minutes ago|
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LLMs introspection is good at giving plausible ideas about prior behavior to consider, but it's just that; plausible.

They do not actually "know" why a prior response occurred and are just guessing. Important for people to keep in mind.

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upvoteby 8 hours ago|
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upvoteby weird-eye-issue11 hours ago|
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It's a bit of a dishonest question because by giving it the option to walk then it's going to assume you are not going to wash your car there and you're just getting supplies or something.
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upvoteby PessimalDecimal10 hours ago|
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People ask dumb questions with obvious answers all the time. This is at best a difference of degree, not of type.
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upvoteby Nition4 hours ago|
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And in real life you'd get them to clarify a weird question like this before you answered. I wonder if LLMs have just been trained too much into always having to try and answer right away. Even for programming tasks, more clarifying questions would often be useful before diving in ("planning mode" does seem designed to help with this, but wouldn't be needed for a human partner).
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upvoteby cracki51 minutes ago|
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Absolutely!

I've been wondering for years how to make whatever LLM ask me stuff instead of just filling holes with assumptions and sprinting off.

User-configurable agent instructions haven't worked consistently. System prompts might actually contain instructions to not ask questions.

Sure there's a practical limit to how much clarification it ought to request, but not asking ever is just annoying.

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upvoteby x3ro11 hours ago|
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It's a trick question, humans use these all the time. E.g. "A plane crashes right on the border between Austria and Switzerland. Where do you bury the survivors?" This is not dishonest, it just tests a specific skill.
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upvoteby robocat3 hours ago|
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Trick questions test the skill of recognizing that you're being asked a trick question. You can also usually find a trick answer.

A good answer is "underground" - because that is the implication of the word bury.

The story implies the survivors have been buried (it isn't clear whether they lived a short time or a lifetime after the crash). And lifetime is tautological.

Trick questions are all about the questioner trying to pretend they are smarter than you. That's often easy to detect and respond to - isn't it?

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upvoteby lamonade10 hours ago|
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What’s funny is that it can answer that correctly, but it fails on ”A plane crashes right on the border between Austria and Switzerland. Where do you bury the dead?”
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upvoteby vlovich1235 hours ago|
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For me when I asked this (but with respect to the border between Austria and Spain) Claude still thought I was asking the survivors riddle and ChatGPT thought I was asking about the logistics. Only Gemini caught the impossibility since there’s no shared border.
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