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Comment by gavinhoward | Hacker News Reader

> I fundamentally disagree with the premise that friction is desirable. It's not.

I agree that too much friction is terrible.

But what I was saying, and the article seems to be implying, is that too little friction is terrible too.

Using Stable Diffusion is lower friction than sketching or painting. But the latter two are better.

The difference is that there is friction that leads to a good outcome, and friction that does not. Mixers with bread hooks are eliminating bad friction, whereas Stable Diffusion is removing good friction.

And in fact, there's actually more friction when using Stable Diffusion if you have an end in mind; trying to get it to output what you want is high in bad friction.

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> too little friction is terrible too.

I just don't buy it.

> Using Stable Diffusion is lower friction than sketching or painting. But the latter two are better.

No, the latter two aren't "better". All three are totally different tools for achieving different purposes. I'm going to use Stable Diffusion to raise engagement on my blog with a hero image and a relevant thumbnail, I'm going to sketch to explore visual ideas and improve my skill of seeing, and I'm going to oil paint to carefully craft something designed to hopefully hang on someone's wall for a long time. (Well, not me because I don't know how to oil paint, but you get the idea.) I'm certainly not going to oil-paint something to illustrate my blog. Oil painting isn't "better".

And when I use ChatGPT to ask questions about math or physics or history or culture, the last thing I want to do is to make the process more difficult. I already spend enough time typing a prompt the AI can clearly understand. There's no way in which it would be made better with "good friction".

I mean, I literally don't know what you mean by "good friction". I don't think I've ever encountered it in my life. Life in general is challenging enough without having to add more challenge for no reason.

Friction without growth is bad friction.

Friction with growth is good friction, so long as the friction is minimized for the amount of growth.

And by "growth," I mean anything that helps people to "level up," such as learning, gaining a skill, becoming more Christ-like, whatever.

Growth cannot happen without friction. Your use of AI is stunting whatever growth you could have gained from those processes.

"So what?" you may say. However, someone who applies friction to growth consistently in their blog/code/whatever will find that growth compounds like interest, and though they may be less "productive," their productivity will be better in the long run because they will have the skills to go beyond anything you could ever dream of doing.

Then I'm just gonna say, my life has more than enough "good friction" and growth already. The last thing I need is more.

Since you use the example of a blog, just writing blog entries has plenty of friction inherent in thinking and researching and writing.

I don't want more friction in generating hero images. That's not something I want to level up in. AI is not stunting anything, because if it weren't for AI, my blog wouldn't have images at all, or they'd be stock images that were even worse. But images help your posts reach an audience, so they're necessary. So Stable Diffusion is great.

I'm not living my life to build all the skills. Skills are a means, not an end. If I can choose between spending quality time with friends vs. building skills illustrating hero images by hand, I'm going to choose the quality time with my friends, because I already don't have enough of that.

Also, the very first example of supposedly "good friction" was kneading dough. That's not leveling you up each time you knead. Just use a dough hook if you've got one.

I specifically said that kneading dough was bad friction.

Anyway, as someone with a blog, people actually have conplimented me for not using images unless they support the point in the post. I see plenty of negative comments about blog posts with header images.

> I specifically said that kneading dough was bad friction.

Ha, quite right, that's what happens when you get the bad friction of spreading an exchange out an hour or two... ;)

I think I understand what you're saying, but I don't think it's what TFA was calling friction, and I don't think it should be called friction at all. I think you're just talking about investing in building skills if they will be beneficial in the long run, and I don't think anyone will argue with that. But calling that "friction" is confusing.

And that's why your original comment that "AI chat is too devoid of friction" or later saying "too little friction is terrible too" still makes no sense to me. You should never add friction, or complain that something's friction is too low. AI chat is a tool like a dough hook. It gives you the answers you need faster than driving to a library or trawling through Google links. Adding friction to ChatGPT makes as much sense as saying you should use a card catalog rather than a library terminal to find a book's shelf. There's enough friction in life already. Don't add more.

Even kneading dough can be good friction. If you’re making one loaf of bread at home it can be a very nice part of the process. If you’re baking hundreds of loaves in a commercial bakery of course it’s neither practical nor desirable.

Agreed.

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