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Sometimes you have a goal & clarity about what you want; others you're just exploring.

Just as non-assisted work: an undisciplined mind will wander. But when there's also an assistant, you're prone to having the wandering done for you.

> These tools came about because the cost of trying things out has dropped to nearly zero.

What an obscenely disconnected and privileged notion. "Nearly zero" still currently equates to thousands of dollars of subscription expense per year that normal, workaday people can't afford.

Not to mention the fact that even at this untenable "introductory" level of expense, you're really burning hundreds of thousands of dollars of tokens to do, what was that again?

"Just let the LLM run wild for a while and see what come out the other end?"

"Generate ten solutions to one targeted problem and throw nine of them away because this garbage technology still can't get it right on even the 9th try?"

No wonder the rich bastards of the world love this stuff so much. It encourages so much wanton, indiscriminate, pointless waste in its users.

Let's assume advances in harnesses, models and efficiency continue to rapidly improve. Let's say we only run on solar power.

The concept of "waste" completely shifts. Like in 1990, I had to decide if dow loading an image was worth it, because it would take 5 minutes or more. Now, it isn't even a remote concern, even though images are clearly "wasting" bandwidth sending a 12mb image to my tiny phone screen.

It is much more interesting to think about the cultural impact of that shift. You can be concerned about the impact of AI on various fronts, but worrying about "waste" is tilting at windmills.

There is a third mode that requires combination of greenhouse and lens modes, and I did not see AI that is every remotely good working at that third mode. Unfortunately, many real applications are actually require the third mode, and I suspect this is one of key reasons why adoption of AI is so low.