alt Hacker NewsI actually think "just asking ChatGPT" is fine, because A) the data in these apps is suspect at best and B) the data behind calories is also pretty suspect (but we all play along because we can adjust other variables to make it all "work" well enough).
Once or twice a year I spend a few weeks meticulously measuring ingredients/cooked foods and recording calories and on complex recipes apps are next to useless at getting accurate data. You're trying to input five or ten relevant ingredients, and then weighing your cooked outcome to try and divide the ingredients by proportion. Frankly it's a mess and most people aren't doing it for home cooked meals, and are getting very lossy outcomes (weighing cooked chicken and marking it as raw chicken, etc)
With reasoning and tool calling (combined with me meticulously weighing before and after), it's producing fine data for my purposes.
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I honestly think that, given the sorry state of the pre-GenAI internet, with all the SEO optimization nonsense, clickbait, and supplement peddling everywhere, LLMs are for now actually better than Google for “doing your own research” on many things.
At least at the entry level. Once you want to go in depth, the outcome in my experience is the same as with LLM use on any topic depends heavily on the domain knowledge of the prompter and their ability to steer it.
I was complaining about AI generated clothes being misleading marketing, deceiving customers as to whether the garment even exists.
And then I learned that the pre-AI norms weren't any less fictional: they made an exemplar garment and did photoshoots, sure, but then they send the pictures and patterns to the lowest bidder factories with permission to make whatever edits are necessary to make it cheap and manufactureable. The whole thing was already a simulacrum.