Permies' lived experience versus AI

Hello, Permies! It's been a LOOOONG time since I last posted here, and lots of things have happened since (I've started a new permaculture project, which is now in its 3rd year - but more about that in a separate post).

There have been a few reasons why I haven't posted on Permies - being busy / lacking time was one of them, but not the main one.

Over the years, I have turned repeatedly to this forum for advice on all sorts of issues - but with the emergence of AI, suddenly I'm given the opportunity to ask complex, potentially difficult, and very specialised questions on ANY topic, and - within seconds - to obtain answers / solutions that are relevant, reliable, and tailored / specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

Obtaining information of comparable specificity / relevance and detail on Permies or similar forums would be next to impossible - there is no guarantee that relevant or usable info will turn up in the answers to my posts, and what does turn up has to be sorted through and organised, before I can arrive at something that I can use.

So my question is: has the role of this forum (or the way it is being used) been redefined / adapted in any way since the emergence of AI, and if so, how? I have a vague feeling that members' lived experiences - especially if described in adequate detail, and documented with quality photos / videos - may provide value - inspiration? other? - that cannot be offered by AI. I'd like to hear your opinions.

Today I decided to see if ai is better at stuff yet.  I asked if a specific brand of danish oil can be used over acrylic paint.  Ai said no, never, then 6 paragraphs on how to do it, including several passages where acrylic and oil paint are confused, and how oil paint can be dry in under an hour, but acrylic must wait several weeks. Then two paragraphs why danish oil is the best finish for acrylic paint but must never be used on raw wood or poison will happen.

Self contradictory and wrong.  

Wrong when compared to the safety data sheet, the company's website, and my personal expierence with the product.

...

AI has a long way to go for accuracy.   Although it is improving at organizing data, it doesn't hold a candle to personal expierence for answering questions.  For that, I adore these forums.  

And sheep don't read books, or the internet, or watch YouTube.   The information from those sorces have no influence on their behaviour.  The material available online is only a starting point.  But that's all the material ai has to work with.

...

The other big issue is the cost of using ai. My query above took about .3 to .5wh that's almost 30 min on my led light bulb.  

Given how many power supply companies depend on oil and gas, and with global events of march 2026, the price of running ai is about to skyrocket.   They will probably move to the next phase where they get the customers to pay for it sooner than expected. Although I suspect they were hoping to get more people addicted before that.

AI is not currently sustainable and wicked icky for the environment.  

...

We've talked about adding some ai to permies, but it's not as good as a real human evaluating each situation individually.   Nor would it be good if we came to rely on it and the cost suddenly increased.

And with the site being all about permaculture and sustainability, ai isn't there yet,

But we run samples, experiment, observe, and wait for the technology to improve.

Levente Andras wrote:with the emergence of AI, suddenly I'm given the opportunity to ask complex, potentially difficult, and very specialised questions on ANY topic, and - within seconds - to obtain answers / solutions that are relevant, reliable, and tailored / specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

That hasn't been my experience. I'm an IT guy for a living and an enthusiastic futurist. I look forward to the time when we birth machines smart enough to replace us. These "AI" tools you're talking about are laughably crude and hide incorrect information among correct-sounding stuff ALL THE TIME. People on Permies can be wrong too. Or their experience in a Mediterranean climate doesn't shed much light on how things will work for me up north. But it isn't ever tricking me into trusting that it's anything more than it is.

But good luck with your work and I'm hopeful that it'll keep getting better!

I'd rather have an answer or an opinion from a real person than an AI bot - permies is by real people for real people.

As r ranson says AI answers can't to be trusted to be correct, and the social cost is immense and mostly hidden. I dislike the way they are being promoted so you can hardly avoid AI, but there is a financial reason for that - it's not 'free'.

AI is interesting!

I asked for discounted flights for seniors over 65.   Came back and said discounts ONLY if you were 55 years old.   Got a good chuckle over that.

Overall the AI answers have been good, but I don't fully trust it.

AI is only as good as the multitude pseudo gardening/DYI websites loaded with ads from which AI takes its information. These websites are copies of each other in terms of contents and usually very vague and generic. Because I'm interested in empirical knowledge of real persons and things that work I use Permies as the reference and basically get serious information only from forums from real people with experience. The good thing is that sometimes AI uses Permies as the source, but at the end nobody will guarantee the answer is correct or some algorithmic delusion. I was disappointed so many times on specific questions related to IT or engineering that gave plain wrong answers that I can only imagine that the solutions to more abstract topics may be equally wrong. If AI had robots in all parts of the world that would be doing gardening, building, developing within local conditions and materials THEN it would have some merit.

100% of the time I have used AI for biographical information  it includes information that is doubtful and I cannot substantiate elsewhere.   In some cases I find strong contradictory information.For  example, most recently I “learned” of Clint Eastwood in action in France in WW2.  The problem I have with that is no place else had a record of Eastwood serving in WW2. I suspect that AI might have confused a movie he was in with reality.

I think that I would sum up the info on the WWW and AI in the context of a follow up question I always like to ask when I get advice and the advice giver is not clear on their direct experience with the thing they are giving the advice about; Was that your experience?

If I watch a video on how to change the brakes on a XXXX model XXXX, I get to see it in action and see that the person in the video does the work. Not sure now with ai generated videos and if they have penetrated the "how to" market. I do not need to contact the maker of the video and ask if it was his experience. If ai videos are in the how to section, I may have to reconsider.

We eat roasted peanuts. If I search the web or ai, I see I should never feed the shells to my meat rabbits. If I ask a friend of ours up the road who has kept rabbits for decades, she says; yes you can, in moderation less than sunflower seeds.

I say all that to say I think this forum and others like it will never be replaced with ai. Maybe ai can help me search the forum better but will not have the full breadth of the value of other peoples experiences. When I read posts and replies, I am normally able to see the posters zone or location and put the reply in that context. Then I experiment for our location.

Maybe the only improvement to the forum would be if every person on this forum, lived in my community so we could talk face to face. But, if that were the case, I would probably not try and fail, or try and succeed with things people do in other parts of the country or world.

Time + Experience = Wisdom. I do not think ai will ever be able to accomplish that mantra in most of the areas of our life that matter the most. Real life is much too nuanced.

There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt.

Stick with information from known sources.

Libraries are full of book by leading authorities.

Levente Andras wrote:... specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

I'm not sure AI will be right about all those things.

There's a permie living only about 15 km south of me. Their farm is further from salt water, at a higher elevation, but likely has similar soil. Their weather and growing experience is *very* different from mine.

The difficult answer is that you need to get a whole lot of people in your region to study and start practicing permaculture! Developing a varied and deep local data base seems like the better medium term plan.

Anne Miller wrote:There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt.

Stick with information from known sources.

Libraries are full of book by leading authorities.

Yes! Those of us with real dirt under our nails know something (not everything) but we've made it work in our locale.

And leading authorities who write books are mindful that they, and their publishers, can be sued for providing grossly incorrect and dangerous information. How about AI?

I favor Permies much more!

AI, in my experience, is just computer software that 'pretends' to have a personality and presents the work of others as its own facts.
Frequently the information offered is strangely irrelevant or flat wrong.
AI confuses and misleads many - and using it deprives us of the delightful activity of *doing research*!
It seems to me that reliance on AI is weakening to the mind and funnels thinking into narrow paths.
Permies is frequented and maintained by many individuals with many backgrounds and real-life experiences in particular places.
Sometimes the posts on Permies.com goes beyond mere information or knowledge - sometimes Wisdom is shared here.
I am so glad Permies is here!  I hope AI becomes a humble calculator type tool instead of a demigod figure.

If you ever want to lose faith in AI, just ask it questions about things you're a specialist in...

LLMs scrape answers for your questions from places like Quora, Reddit, Wikihow, etc. then make a bunch of assumptions to fill in the rest of the information that they can't find, but because it's "superhuman intelligence" people will take those suppositions for fact and act on them as such.

There are extremes of this issue where people develop "Chatbot psychosis" after being gaslit by their AI into believing they are destined to save the world, etc. Ultimately it will feed you answers that will keep you spending tokens.

If you are looking for a place for forums to co-exist with AI, you can always treat forum communities as a second opinion.

Alex Howell wrote:If you ever want to lose faith in AI, just ask it questions about things you're a specialist in...

Agreed. It is embarrassingly bad. LLM's are trying to do everything, arrogantly -- and failing, spectacularly.

But there is more to AI than LLM's. Outside of the current hype, it seems there are small AI's in radiology, astronomy, chemistry, being trained specifically on hard and proven scientific data. The analyzing potential is astonishing; and I suspect these are the AI models that will matter to us all.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:
there is more to AI than LLM's. Outside of the current hype, it seems there are small AI's in radiology, astronomy, chemistry, being trained specifically on hard and proven scientific data. The analyzing potential is astonishing; and I suspect these are the AI models that will matter to us all.

Totally agree with you here. As with all tools it depends on how they're used, and the expectations you have for them.

You wouldn't call an axe useless because it isn't good for digging holes.

Christopher Weeks wrote:
People on Permies can be wrong too. Or their experience in a Mediterranean climate doesn't shed much light on how things will work for me up north. But it isn't ever tricking me into trusting that it's anything more than it is.

In my queries with AI, I ALWAYS make sure that I specify the exact context in which I operate, leaving no open door for discussion on generalities. I have to be convinced that the answers AI provides are totally relevant and specific to my precise context, and I won't close the conversation until I made sure that's the case. Of course, I can still suspect that there may be errors in the answers, even though they are specifically tailored to my context.

Sometimes, my knowledge or experience doesn't help me to make decisions on certain (more or less complex) issues. (Note: what follows has to be read as an argument made by the Devil's Advocate.) I can choose to decide based on a hunch / intuition - but I do prefer to be informed, so I can choose to post the question on Permies, and wait to see if I get a relevant answer (I might not). But since the decision HAS to be made, and preferably fast, I choose to ask AI. There is a chance that the answer I get may be wrong, but I run the same risk on Permies too, and the time it takes me to get the Permies' answers, sift through them, and decide what's relevant / useable, can be too long, and they can still yield no useable info. Hence I take the answer provided by AI and run with it, based on the principle that "sometimes, any decision is better than no decision".

Jay Angler wrote:

Levente Andras wrote:... specific to my own situation (climate, exact location, soil type, etc.).

I'm not sure AI will be right about all those things.

There's a permie living only about 15 km south of me. Their farm is further from salt water, at a higher elevation, but likely has similar soil. Their weather and growing experience is *very* different from mine.

The difficult answer is that you need to get a whole lot of people in your region to study and start practicing permaculture! Developing a varied and deep local data base seems like the better medium term plan.

As with many other things, when using AI, the principle is "garbage in, garbage out". If you provide it with limited / incomplete background information, you cannot expect to obtain answers that are truly relevant to your situation. BUT the same applies to Permies discussions! In my queries with AI, I ALWAYS make sure that I specify in great detail the exact context in which I operate, leaving no open door for misunderstanding, or discussion on generalities. I have to be convinced that the answers AI provides are totally relevant and specific to my precise context, and I won't close the conversation until I made sure that's the case. Of course, I can still suspect that there may be errors in the answers, even though they are specifically tailored to my context.

r ransom wrote:

The other big issue is the cost of using ai. My query above took about .3 to .5wh that's almost 30 min on my led light bulb.  

Given how many power supply companies depend on oil and gas, and with global events of march 2026, the price of running ai is about to skyrocket.   They will probably move to the next phase where they get the customers to pay for it sooner than expected. Although I suspect they were hoping to get more people addicted before that.

AI is not currently sustainable and wicked icky for the environment.  

Honestly, I'm not bothered about this. Regardless whether I use AI or not, people will go on using it, seemingly uncaring about its environmental impact, and too many people use it for too many nefarious, severely damaging purposes. Consequently, I will have absolutely no qualms of conscience over using AI to try to, for example, improve the longevity and productivity of my trees, or the ecological integration of my garden. The objection above reminds me of people criticising environmental activists for flying to international conferences on global warming. I feel it silly to refuse to use a certain technology for benign and productive purposes, when millions of people use the same technology for trivial or even harmful purposes. When I restrict my use of a given technology on ethical grounds, I allow "the bad guys" to win against me using the same technology... To put things into perspective: how would you feel about me objecting to the use of earth-moving machinery in permaculture projects, on grounds that the fossil fuels used by those machines - or the industries that manufacture those machines - are not sustainable?

Has anyone ever asked one of these LLMs for information and had it just say "I don't know" or something to that effect? I haven't had that happen, which seems kind of weird.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Has anyone ever asked one of these LLMs for information and had it just say "I don't know" or something to that effect? I haven't had that happen, which seems kind of weird.

If you catch them in a lie and call them out on it then they will admit fault and admit that they didn't know the answer.

There are LLMs which will document their thought process as they draft their responses. They will often say during the thinking stage: "can't find relevant information for this query", but then will still provide you with an answer which is posed as objective truth anyhow.

At least if you can see the "logic" behind the response it's easier to make an informed decision on whether to trust it or not.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:AI is only as good as the multitude pseudo gardening/DYI websites loaded with ads from which AI takes its information. These websites are copies of each other in terms of contents and usually very vague and generic. Because I'm interested in empirical knowledge of real persons and things that work I use Permies as the reference and basically get serious information only from forums from real people with experience. The good thing is that sometimes AI uses Permies as the source, but at the end nobody will guarantee the answer is correct or some algorithmic delusion. I was disappointed so many times on specific questions related to IT or engineering that gave plain wrong answers that I can only imagine that the solutions to more abstract topics may be equally wrong. If AI had robots in all parts of the world that would be doing gardening, building, developing within local conditions and materials THEN it would have some merit.

In my experience, AI draws its information from far broader (and far more credible) sources than "pseudo gardening/DYI websites". When in doubt, you can ask the AI tool to reveal its sources.

Information shared on forums like this can be high-value, but sometimes it isn't. The correctness of the answers given by real people is not guaranteed either. I can give you a plethora of concrete, real-life examples of useless or outright bad information by real people, but I will refrain from that as it would take us into an endless discussion away from the topic at hand.

Having "AI robots that garden" is totally irrelevant - AI draws on information derived from human experience, or in other words, on human experience shared in various forms (books, articles, videos, etc.)

I personally avoid AI responses to search and prefer the old fashioned way.
I research for my job, and for the most part my process has not changed.

I do agree that there are great AI tools out there, but from what I understand we're talking here about LLMs regurgitating the crap they've scraped, also at great cost in terms of resources.
There is still great value in talking to real people with real dirt under real nails, for getting info as well as for making HUMAN connections, even if we're online. That's why I'm here, and why many of us are here.

Anne Miller wrote:There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt.

Stick with information from known sources.

Libraries are full of book by leading authorities.

I'm not sure I can agree with the first part. There are so many people "with dirt under their fingernails" whose only rationale for doing things in a certain way is "because that's how it's done" or "that's how my granddad taught me". They refuse to learn new ways and methods, and they refuse te see how the world around them has changed, and how those changes have rendered their way of doing things no longer appropriate. I'm not talking about abstract cases, but very concrete and specific ones, that I've had to deal with over the past 15 years or so. Very painful!

BUT yes to books by leading authorities!!

Levente Andras wrote:"that's how it's done" or "that's how my granddad taught me".

that's a fair enough observation. i've heard a lot of that too.
but we're at a point now where we have to think critically about everything, from every source. For me, that means gathering a lot of information and applying my own intelligence to figure out what seems credible, realistic and applicable to my own experience, here in zone 9b in subtropical south america on an urban farm. Having a diversity of sources, for me, seems like a good start, and this is a good place for me to find them.

Welcome back, BTW, hope to see you around!

Hi Tereza,

You approach a good point.   God knows I have an ample amount of grey hairs, but every once in a while I think about the way I have always done things …or how I was told to do things 60 years ago…and I make a post asking for advice.  Very often I learn a new way (for me) of doing the task.

It would seem that no matter what the job is there are legit alternative approaches out there.

John F Dean wrote:Hi Tereza,

You approach a good point.   God knows I have an ample amount of grey hairs, but every once in a while I think about the way I have always done things …or how I was told to do things 60 years ago…and I make a post asking for advice.  Very often I learn a new way (for me) of doing the task.
It would seem that no matter what the job in, there are legit alternative approaches out there.

That attribute would be part of what I define as humility. From what I have seen, ai does not and maybe can not have the attribute of humility. I suppose if it did, we'd have to call it something else.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Has anyone ever asked one of these LLMs for information and had it just say "I don't know" or something to that effect? I haven't had that happen, which seems kind of weird.

I have come across situations when, after asking a question, I was told by the AI tool that there was limited information on the subject, and whatever info there was, was not supported with good evidence. Then it showed me the available info, with all the caveats.

I find talking about AI is difficult with people because there are varying interpretations of what AI is and isn't.

In my experience, I find that AI is a useful tool to refine or polish information to make it more palatable. I have not had good luck utilizing AI as a research tool without having to carefully sourcing its claims.

Certain AI models will give you the answer it thinks you want to hear, not the information by itself. Other AI models have created 'hallucinations' which is inaccurate information that don't help.

I treat utilizing AI like talking to my cousin who loves telling fish stories. A lot of the meat and potatoes of the information may be correct but there is a good chance for exaggeration or at the very least inaccuracies.

With all of that said, when I am researching something that does not have a lot of literature/research available to scour through, I am more trusting of individuals experiences over an AI model.

One thing I learned from my family about gardening is that there is always some new gardening advise to try.

And it's fun to try it.

But we also have generations of knowledge in our family dating back to pre-industrial farming technology, so we have a pretty good idea on what works.

The conclusion: always try the new thing, but only try it on part of the garden.  Have a big area that uses the old style.  If the new thing works better, expand that area that uses that next year.  Sometimes it turns out to be better than the old way.  Other times it doesn't.  

But keep the idea for when we move house as maybe it solves a problem that this garden doesn't have.  But a different microclimate might benefit from it.  

Generations of doing this, and the willingness to keep experimenting and observing, has built up a massive tool kit for our family to apply to different gardens and situations.  Every garden is unique.  And every gardener unique, so the method has to adapt to the gardener just as much as the garden.  

When I ask AI for gardening solutions, they all speak with absolute certainty of the correct method - most of which I've tried and found wanting.  

r ransom wrote:

When I ask AI for gardening solutions, they all speak with absolute certainty of the correct method - most of which I've tried and found wanting.  

When I research a given topic, I don't simply ask a question. I treat the interaction like a conversation with someone (sure, I know AI is not a person, but for the lack of a better word...) who has a lot of knowledge and is able to retrieve that knowledge in real time. Before asking the question, I provide as much background as I can, including what I already know on the topic, methods I've already tried, etc., as well as the hypotheses that I have already considered. So if there's anything "I've already tried & found wanting", it will most likely be excluded from the suggested solutions.

Before asking the question, I provide as much background as I can, including what I already know on the topic

Sounds like growing the vegetables would be faster.

But I've only tested AI against areas I'm considered an expert in (people pay me to teach) or can check against expert advice.  I found it has the same (mis)information as blogs and most of the internet.   It seems to be only as good as the data set.  But it's worth testing every few months.

I've tried several free ai.  The closest to accurate information so far has been the one proton mail provides, but still errors and some are dangerous.  It did create a pretty cool yoga routine that I ran past my doctor before trying.   The doctor removed two of the positions as it would cause more problems than it solved.  The ai took about 2 hours of back and forth to get a routine that it felt would fit my lifestyle and needs.  The doctor took under a min to see the harmful elements that woild make my health worse.

I'd rather LLMs didn't exist but while they do they can be useful for finding information.  Some kinds of information are hard to find with a normal google search but LLMs can find them easily.  (Google often gives lots of fluff websites rather than original sources)

Still, take care not to replace human connections with LLMs.  I respect anyone who chooses to stay off the internet and learn from real people, or goes in that direction in some way.  Meanwhile, to the degree we do use the internet to find information, LLMs are useful, and there are a variety of ways to use them.  Getting them to give direct links to original sources is the most useful I think.

For anything that's likely been discussed on permies I'd start by googling "site:permies.com blah blah".

For example, I recently successfully convinced a friend to put in a wood floor instead of vinyl floor.  I Googled site:permies.com vinyl floor and read all the discussions that seemed relevant.  I also queried an LLM with "how long does vinyl flooring last, and does it shed toxic compounds into the room?  give direct links to sources for all the information you give"

Other example LLM queries:

"give me five direct links to pdf of the manual for ______"   And then I have the manual.  For a quick follow up I can give the pdf of the manual back to the LLM and say "give me exact quotes with page numbers for everything this manual says about ____"

Or e.g. troubleshooting a chainsaw there's a lot of information out there that won't be in manuals and the LLM can be very handy for giving next steps for what to try.  I could have made a post somewhere like arboristsite but it might take some time for useful replies to come in, and they might be mixed with people mocking me for not intuitively knowing what to do without asking.  I troubleshoot a lot of mechanical/tech things and I don't want to invest the time to become a thorough expert on all of them, LLMs are really useful here.

Or "are there people out there who think ____, and what do they say about it?  (even if they're kooky that's OK)   Give direct links to places where they're talking about it"

Or "give me direct links to pdfs of five scientific papers that discuss _____"  And again, give the pdf of the paper back with "give exact quotes and page numbers where this paper explains or shows data on _____"

At the moment, LLMs are not yet completely full of ads and stuff.  I imagine this will change rapidly and they might become far less useful.  But at the moment it's a relatively distraction-free way to find info from the internet in a simple text format with links to relevant original sources.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:And leading authorities who write books are mindful that they, and their publishers, can be sued for providing grossly incorrect and dangerous information. How about AI?

I am talking about books written before there were ambulance chasers ....  Back when Vernon's Black Statues was written or before.

I am sure that the power that be for AI know all about that.

r ransom wrote:

Before asking the question, I provide as much background as I can, including what I already know on the topic

Sounds like growing the vegetables would be faster.

But I've only tested AI against areas I'm considered an expert in (people pay me to teach) or can check against expert advice.  I found it has the same (mis)information as blogs and most of the internet.   It seems to be only as good as the data set.  But it's worth testing every few months.

I've tried several free ai.  The closest to accurate information so far has been the one proton mail provides, but still errors and some are dangerous.  It did create a pretty cool yoga routine that I ran past my doctor before trying.   The doctor removed two of the positions as it would cause more problems than it solved.  The ai took about 2 hours of back and forth to get a routine that it felt would fit my lifestyle and needs.  The doctor took under a min to see the harmful elements that woild make my health worse.

I tried this too against things I know about, specifically wild fibers that I have a lot of experience. It gave me information no better than a beginner’s guesses, i.e. a lot that was factually incorrect or inefficient techniques adapted from other fibers.

For instance, it said to harvest wood nettles in spring before the leaves unfurled… for fiber. Excellent advice for spring soup. It also mentioned milkweed as having low fiber yield and limited uses, which is the opposite of my experience. And others.

Ai technology has potential.  I think that's the key word.  Potential.

It's pretty poor at actual information still, worse than pre 2023 machine learning at gathering,  ranking, and presenting information.  

Although ai is more conversational and helps the user feel listened to.  Most humans don't feel listened to, so ai has that advantage over google search and social media.

I think we have a few more phases to work through before it's accurate and useful. And a few more before they settle the cost on the user. But I enjoy watching it change over time and usually dedicate a few hours each month to walk one of the free ai chat bots through it's paces.  When it gets better at handling information, i can see us integrating ai into permies to do the tasks humans don't enjoy.  But it's years away from that and even longer away from replacing the human element of forums.

Our site traffic and other metrics show the real human element of forums is more popular than ever.
https://permies.com/t/1734/site-traffic

I've also been watching closely to see how ai can amplify and assist with creative endevours like art.
https://permies.com/t/281760/art/AI-art-guru-disappointment-AI

Philip McGarvey wrote:I'd rather LLMs didn't exist but while they do they can be useful for finding information.  Some kinds of information are hard to find with a normal google search but LLMs can find them easily.  (Google often gives lots of fluff websites rather than original sources)

Still, take care not to replace human connections with LLMs.  I respect anyone who chooses to stay off the internet and learn from real people, or goes in that direction in some way.  Meanwhile, to the degree we do use the internet to find information, LLMs are useful, and there are a variety of ways to use them.  Getting them to give direct links to original sources is the most useful I think.

For anything that's likely been discussed on permies I'd start by googling "site:permies.com blah blah".

For example, I recently successfully convinced a friend to put in a wood floor instead of vinyl floor.  I Googled site:permies.com vinyl floor and read all the discussions that seemed relevant.  I also queried an LLM with "how long does vinyl flooring last, and does it shed toxic compounds into the room?  give direct links to sources for all the information you give"

Other example LLM queries:

"give me five direct links to pdf of the manual for ______"   And then I have the manual.  For a quick follow up I can give the pdf of the manual back to the LLM and say "give me exact quotes with page numbers for everything this manual says about ____"

Or e.g. troubleshooting a chainsaw there's a lot of information out there that won't be in manuals and the LLM can be very handy for giving next steps for what to try.  I could have made a post somewhere like arboristsite but it might take some time for useful replies to come in, and they might be mixed with people mocking me for not intuitively knowing what to do without asking.  I troubleshoot a lot of mechanical/tech things and I don't want to invest the time to become a thorough expert on all of them, LLMs are really useful here.

Or "are there people out there who think ____, and what do they say about it?  (even if they're kooky that's OK)   Give direct links to places where they're talking about it"

Or "give me direct links to pdfs of five scientific papers that discuss _____"  And again, give the pdf of the paper back with "give exact quotes and page numbers where this paper explains or shows data on _____"

At the moment, LLMs are not yet completely full of ads and stuff.  I imagine this will change rapidly and they might become far less useful.  But at the moment it's a relatively distraction-free way to find info from the internet in a simple text format with links to relevant original sources.

Your answer chimes with many of my experiences !!!

Levente Andras wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt.

I'm not sure I can agree with the first part. There are so many people "with dirt under their fingernails" whose only rationale for doing things in a certain way is "because that's how it's done" or "that's how my granddad taught me".

I found early in life to ask question though use common sense in how I apply that information.  It is always good to hear other folks suggestions though I usually end up doing it `My Way` ...

Levente Andras wrote:

Anne Miller wrote:There is nothing better than learning from someone with dirt under there fingernails.

Real dirt not fake dirt..

I'm not sure I can agree with the first part. There are so many people "with dirt under their fingernails" whose only rationale for doing things in a certain way is "because that's how it's done" or "that's how my granddad taught me". They refuse to learn new ways and methods, and they refuse te see how the world around them has changed, and how those changes have rendered their way of doing things no longer appropriate. I'm not talking about abstract cases, but very concrete and specific ones, that I've had to deal with over the past 15 years or so. Very painful!

In places where tradition rules supreme and rigid, I can see how that would make an innovative person throw up their hands in frustration.

However, when confronted with endless websites that quote each other to sell ads, none of whom could grow a dandelion if their lives depended on it, and AI quoting all of them in the tone of complete authority, I personally think a "dirt check" is a very good idea.

A "dirt check" is important, a foundation -- it builds on the fact that somebody has proved, repeatedly and reliably, that "this can be done with this method!" Obviously none of us here are letting the grass grow under our feet, so we are endlessly innovating and tweaking and improving.

But the "dirt check" is a fine winnowing fork, separating knowledge from slop. My 2c.