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jjulius | 1 month ago

I apologize in advance for the tone of my response.

>Gemini informed me...

Phrases like this are essentially, "I asked an LLM to interpret this and I didn't bother verifying it's accuracy, but I will now post it as fact."

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bitshiftfaced|1 month ago

Contrast this with taking the headline as fact without further scrutinizing it, which happens often. Or, look at the other posts here that are assuming that the cohort was restricted to only those who lost weight.

In an informal conversational context such as a forum, we don't expect every commentator to spend 20 minutes reading through the research. Yet we now have tools that allow us to do just that in less than a minute. It was not long ago that we'd be justified to feel skeptical of these tools, but they've gotten to the point where we'd be justified to believe them in many contexts. I believed it in this case, and this was the right time spent/scrutinization tradeoff for me. You're free to prove the claim wrong. If it was wrong, then I'd agree that it would be good to see where it was wrong.

Probably many people are using the tools and then "covering" before posting. That would be posting it as "fact". That's not what I did, as I made the reader aware of the source of the information and allowed them to judge it for what it was worth. I would argue that it's actually more transparent and authentic to admit from where exactly you're getting the information. It's not like the stakes are that high: the information is public, and anyone can check it. Hacker News understandably might be comparably late to this norm, as its users have a better understanding of the tech and things like how often they hallucinate. But I believe this is the way the wind is blowing.

jjulius|1 month ago

>Yet we now have tools that allow us to do just that in less than a minute.

With this tool, you read in under one minute what would've taken you 20 minutes before?