A couple hours later I decided to ask an LLM if it could tell me. It quickly answered, giving the same reason that I had guessed in my HN comment.
I then clicked the two links it cited as sources. One was completely irrelevant. The other was a link to my HN comment.
I'm pretty good at reading the original sources. But what I don't have in a lot of cases is a gut that tells me what's available. I'll search for some vague idea (like, "someone must have done this before") with the wrong jargon and unclear explanation. And the AI will... sort of figure it out and point me at a bunch of people talking about exactly the idea I just had.
Now, sometimes they're loons and the idea is wrong, but the search will tell me who the players are, what jargon they're using to talk about it, what the relevant controversies around the ideas are, etc... And I can take it from there. But without the AI it's actually a long road between "I bet this exists" and "Here's someone who did it right already".
In this case, all that matters is that the outputs aren't complete hallucination. Once you know the magic jargon, everything opens up easily with traditional search.
I’ve had it ‘dream’ up entire fake products, APIs, and even libraries before.
Well, some redditor had posted a comparison of a much later book in the series, and drawn all sorts of parallels and foreshadowing and references between this quite early book I was looking for and the much later one. It was an interesting post so it had been very popular.
The AI summary completely confused the two books because of this single reddit post, so the summary I got was hopelessly poisoned with plot points and characters that wouldn't show up until nearly the conclusion. It simply couldn't tell which book was which. It wasn't quite as ridiculous as having, say, Anakin Skywalker face Kylo Ren in a lightsaber duel, but it was definitely along those same lines of confusion.
Fortunately, I finished the later book recently enough to remember it, but it was like reading a fever dream.
Sadly, the resource didn't actually exist. It would have been perfect if it did, though!
At some point in time when asked how many Kurdish people live in Poland, Google's AI would say that several million, which was true, but only in a fantasy world conjured by a certain LARP group, who put a wiki on fandom.com.
Now that AI summaries exist, I have to scroll past half a page of result and nonsense about a Turkish oil company before I find the item I'm looking for.
I hate it. It's such a minor inconvenience, but it's just so annoying. Like a sore tooth.