[jasonkester]

But google won’t give you the recipe. It’ll give you a pretty piece of text that resembles a recipe. You’ll only find out it’s not a recipe when it fails to produce a cake.

But then, the sites it's training on are starting to do the same thing, so maybe it won’t matter. Just last night, I pulled up four sites with “gluten free almond cake” recipes. One specified less than 1/4 the flour it would have needed, and another didn’t have any butter in the ingredients list. I had to eyeball the median and tweak from experience to actually get a bakable cake out.

[tardedmeme]

You can buy recipe books at brick and mortar stores, and they're mostly not AI slop yet.

[subscribed]

I'm not going to drive to the bookstore only to find out the recipe I need twice a year is not there because the local cousine doesn't even know the ingredients.

Oh, maybe I should drive to the major city and check several bigger bookstores?

Or order it online? But that would be from the third country because this one is weirdly blind to variety. That will be €20 for a book and some €10 postage.

You're sure I can just get my recipe from the store?

[acron0]

My partner recently bought a receipe book that was probably 100% slop, from the recipes themselvea to the images for each dish.

[soco]

Completely unrelated to AI, I buy and always bought recipe books in second hand bookstores. It has this vintage vibe, and not everything has to be kale. Downside is that some ingredients aren't easily reachable, but it doesn't happen that often.

[ethbr1]

My favorite are 50s and 60s recipe books. They use modern ingredients where appropriate, but mostly basic ingredients.

Later and you start seeing "Use this new processed wunderfood ingredient substitute!" (70s-00s)

[scrame]

I kinda think everyone should have an old school "joy of cooking", where they have instructions on skinning rabbits and squirrels, just as a reference that things weren't always like this not even that long ago.

[specproc]

Totally related to AI. You're gonna be able to spot slop whilst browsing.

Local bookshops are great, use them or lose them.

[yoz-y]

Online grocery shopping service I use has added recipes to their website. Not obvious slop at first reading but then you see stuff like add 600g of carrots and 100ml of water to make a quite watery soup according to the picture.

[ethbr1]

We're already post dead info.

The only solution is to find recipe books that were printed in previous decades.

Which is ironic, given that Google's entire value proposition (to users) was extracting signal from noise...

... and now it's come full A/B-advertising-optimization to being useless at that, when the need is greater than ever.

Imho, Google's greatest failing was missing how its own incentives warped creation of new web content, and failing to account for that strategically -- it turned the web into something it can't itself usefully parse.

[bsenftner]

We have a distinct poverty when it comes to secondary considerations and long term ramifications - which used to be manageable when progress was slower. Now, we're on a very steep acceleration/progress curve, and any shortsighted mistakes cause extremely large ramifications. Which are then compounded by both more short sighted non-fixes and our rapid acceleration/progress curve layering in additional confusion, misunderstandings, omissions of critical information.

[taude]

What kind of insanity are you all talking about? Plenty of cook book authors out there with good recipes, tested, big-personal brand, etc. no need to go to prior decades for good books.

[tardedmeme]

How do you know which ones are good?

[emayljames]

You don't need butter to make cake, it ends up lighter and softer without it

[jasonkester]

You need to compensate for not adding it though. The recipe without was literally the same ingredient list as the site it copied, just missing a line.

And almond flour does its thing by carmelizing in combination with butter and sugar, turning your whole cake into a sort of giant macaron. You can’t pull it off without any one of those things.

[subscribed]

LOL, that's some confident pan-cake misinformation.