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LostMyLoginyesterday at 5:16 PM7 repliesview on HN

Input: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

Output: Walk. It'll take you under a minute, and driving 50 meters barely gets the engine warm — plus you'd just have to park again at the other end. Honestly, by the time you started the car, you'd already be there on foot.

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I asked it to figure out why it made the mistake:

"Physical/spatial common sense. Exactly what just happened — I pattern-matched "50 meters, walk vs drive" to a pedestrian trip and skipped the part where the car is the thing being transported. Similar traps: "I need to move this couch upstairs, should I take the elevator or stairs?" (the couch has to go with you), or anything where the object in the task needs to accompany you.

Counting and letter-level operations. How many R's in "strawberry," counting words in a sentence, reversing strings. I process text as tokens, not characters, so these are surprisingly error-prone.

Arithmetic at scale. Small sums are fine; multi-digit multiplication, long division, or anything requiring careful carrying is where I'll confidently produce a wrong answer. I should reach for a calculator and often don't. Recent events and live data. My training has a cutoff, and even after that I can be wrong about who currently holds a role, what a stock is worth, or whether a restaurant is still open. I should search more often than I do.

Negation and constraint-stacking. "Name a movie that's not a sequel, not from the 2010s, not American, and has no dialogue" — the more filters, the more likely I quietly violate one. Your specific situation. I'll give generic advice when the right answer depends on details I didn't ask about. Sometimes I should stop and ask; often I don't.

Confidently wrong on obscure specifics. Quoting a passage from a real book, citing a real paper's exact title, naming the B-side of a 1974 single — I'll often generate something plausible rather than admit I don't know.

Taking a premise too literally. The car wash answer is a version of this: I answered the question as posed instead of stepping back to ask what you were actually trying to do. The meta-gotcha: I'm often most wrong when I sound most confident. If an answer comes out fast and tidy on a question that should be messy, that's a signal to push back."


Replies

sdeframondyesterday at 9:15 PM

Funny, just tried a few runs of the car wash prompt with Sonnet 4.6. It significantly improved after I put this into my personal preferences:

"- prioritize objective facts and critical analysis over validation or encouragement - you are not a friend, but a neutral information-processing machine. - make reserch and ask questions when relevant, do not jump strait to giving an answer."

show 3 replies
rubinlinuxyesterday at 6:00 PM

  | I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?

  ● Drive. The car needs to be at the car wash.
Wonder if this is just randomness because its an LLM, or if you have different settings than me?
show 7 replies
vintermannyesterday at 5:28 PM

Well, at least we know that's one gotcha/benchmark they aren't gaming.

smoocyesterday at 6:07 PM

I'd say the joke is on you ;-)

fragmedeyesterday at 6:46 PM

I tried o3, instant-5.3, Opus 3, and haiku 4.5, and couldn't get them to give bad answers to the couch: stairs vs elevator question. Is there a specific wording you used?

show 1 reply
slekkeryesterday at 5:48 PM

What about Qwen? Does it get that right?

show 1 reply
canarias_mateyesterday at 6:31 PM

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