[throwaway2037]

    > To be honest, I think "vendor financing" is still a very risky premise.

Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products? Siemens is a perfect example of a well-run, stable, industrial giant. They offer vendor financing for large purchases. Same for the "heavies" (Mitsubishi, Kawasaki, IHI, Hyundai, Doosan, Hanjin) in Japan and Korea.

If anyone is interested to learn about the damage that the financialisation of General Electric (USA) brought upon itself, you can ask ChatGPT to tell you the story. It is too long to repeat here.

Here is a sample prompt that I used to remind myself:

    > I am interested in the history of General Electric and the trouble that their financing units brought in the early to mid 2000s. Can you tell me more?

[HappMacDonald]

Are we replacing "Let me google that for you" with "Here is a prompt to feed ChatGPT" now?

Edit: I am not asking whether ChatGPT is better than Google Search, I am asking after the standard dodge of citing one's sources.

[throwaway2037]

Fair point/question. For many of my HN responses, I first ask ChatGPT for a bit of information about the topic. For the case of GE Cap's wrecking of parent GE with excessive financialisation, I could only loosely remember the details from the 2000s. It is a long time ago! That prompt that I shared gave a reply that was 100s of words. Too much for copy/pasta, and too hard for me to summarise briefly. Instead, I decided to share the prompt. It is not my intention to dodge sources. Plus, the newest versions of ChatGPT is pretty good about sharing sources. (Of course, the quality of sources can be debatable.) In short, it was not my intention to be snarky by sharing my ChatGPT prompt.

EDIT ---- Also, the OP was so brief about GE Cap, I realised that most readers under 30 (maybe 35) will have almost no knowledge or memory of that economic history. I wanted to offer an "intellectual carrot" (ChatGPT prompt) for anyone wishing to learn more. ----

What bothered me most about the original post was the person was putting all vendor financing in the same "bad" bucket. I disagree. I would characterise GE Cap as an infamous example! They were the worst of the worst in a generation (25 years). Most vendor financing is very boring and is used to buy big heavy things with very long operational lives. If the buyer goes bankrupt, it is (relatively) easy to repossess the big heavy thing and sell it again (probably with vendor financing again!).

[HappMacDonald]

Well, at the very least one thing I would caution against in "prompt sharing as a way to lead people to information" is that a chat bot is far less deterministic than even a traditional web search (let alone a link to a static source): any other user putting in the prompt won't get the same explanation you got, and thanks to hallucination they may get a wildly different answer or a case where this time around the bot wound up misunderstanding what was asked.

[jona-f]

Yes, cause google has been giving crap results long before chatgpt was a thing and it only got worse. Before ai it was "let me google that on reddit for you".

[chiffaa]

Very tangentially related comment, but I remember seeing a post on a local Facebook clone with a prompt to throw at Claude to "make a custom YouTube downloader for MacOS", so the general "Here is a prompt to feed an LLM" is somewhat real for some, apparently

[OJFord]

It's a good use case really – it'll tell it differently according to what it knows about your background, if you 'just Google it' you'll get the same maybe-appropriate results as anyone else.

[2ndorderthought]

Google search has gone way down hill after they nerfed it and then did nothing to prevent the flood of AI slop seo websites. So unfortunately, instead of sharing links everyone now gets sent to the inefficient text generator that hallucinates nonsense and will color the average summary of a topic by whoever trained it and your most recent chat history instead.

[datavirtue]

I haven't run a Google search in two years. Your comment just made me realize that. Doing a Google search is like trying to watch cable after being on YouTube for years.

[2ndorderthought]

I use different search engines than Google. They have similar issues, but some are better at ignoring the slop.

I just cannot justify the environmental impact and surveillance of using LLMs for everything. I prefer to summarize recent information myself. LLMs are not particularly good at it.

Funny thing about the cable analogy. Ever since all streaming providers have started cranking up prices and still forcing users to see hundreds of ads my family has been buying second hand dvds. So we have regressed from streaming to right after cable. I know one family that went back to cable, they do still watch YouTubes here and there but they got sick of it.

[exoverito]

Yes.

[paganel]

> Are you aware that all heavy industry in all highly developed nations make extensive use of vendor financing to sell their products?

The OP did mention GE Capital, the motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing. And of massaging the accounting books in order to increase shareholder value in the short term, also.

[throwaway2037]

    > motherload of all heavy industry vendor financing

I doubt they are bigger than other national "heavy industry" champions from East Asia and Western/Central Europe. Without checking, I would guess that the global leaders are Boeing and Airbus.

[paganel]

Back in the day GE (including GE Capital) was, on paper at least, the largest company in the world when it comes to market cap, my memory is fuzzy but I’d say that happened just after the Dot Com crash and going into the Great Recession. Greater than a heavy industry company like Samsung, yes. Again, this was in a big part as a result of GE Capital doing very scammy things, but for a good few years Jack Welch was regarded like an actually business guru.

[zymhan]

Its odd that don't care enough to at least confirm your arguments are right.

I'd suggest learning more about this subject instead of assuming you already know enough.