> Starbucks in the UK don’t sell cake pops! Do a deep investigative dive

...

I used to play games on my computer a lot. Not so much anymore, don't really want to lock myself in a room alone and play games. I have kids and a wife, and it feels isolative.

But those days I would, and often the hardware I had was underpowered to be able to experience the game in its full glory. I would often spend hours and hours just honing settings and config and environment to get the game to run at peak capability on my machine.

At some point, I would reach a zenith. Some perfect arrangement of settings and environment that gave me a game running at top quality on my machine (or as close to top as I could get). The experience for me is joyous. So enjoyable that I often didn't even play the game except maybe to test the boundaries of its performance at that level.

Reading this article made me sad for people who don't put in work for some sort of accomplishment that amounts to nothing. And it made me think of my own experience with it. Accomplishment for its own sake is still accomplishment. And it's still self realization, which is important to existing.

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simonw 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is a common theme with LLMs (and LLM criticism).

The context: I was rushing for a train, I ran into Starbucks at the station for a coffee, I noticed they didn't have cake pops and the staff member didn't appear to know what they were.

I see three choices here:

1. Since I'm mildly curious about Starbucks and cake pop availability in the UK, I get on the train, open up my laptop and dedicate realistically a solid half hour or more to figuring out what's going on.

2. I fire off a research question at GPT-5 Thinking on my mobile phone.

3. I don't do any research at all and leave my mild curiosity unsaturated.

Realistically, I think the choices are between 2 and 3. I was never going to perform a full research project on this myself.

See also: AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects, which I wrote in March 2023 and has aged extremely well. https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

I do plenty of deep dive research projects myself into topics both useful and pointless - my blog is full of them!

Now I can take on even more.

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rthrfrd 4 days ago | parent [-]

I think what's interesting/telling is you view (3) as less desirable.

Alternatively, you could have spent that half hour on the train exercising your own creativity to try and satisfy your curiosity. Whether you're right or wrong doesn't really matter, because as you acknowledge it's not really important enough to you to matter. Picking (2) eliminates all the possible avenues that might have lead you down.

I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that you're approaching the criticism on the basis of axioms that represent a narrow viewpoint: That of someone who has to be "right" about the things they are curious about, no matter how trivial.

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simonw 4 days ago | parent [-]

I think one of my personal core values is that curiosity should never be left unsatiated if ant all possible!

I spent my half hour on the train satiating all sorts of other things instead (like the identity of that curious looking building in Reading).

> Picking (2) eliminates all the possible avenues that might have lead you down.

I don't think that's the case. Using GPT-5 for the Cake Pop question lead me down a bunch of avenues I may never have encountered otherwise - the structure of Starbucks in the UK, the history of their Cake Pops rollout, the fact that checking nutritional and allergy details on their website is a great way to get an "official" list of their products independent of what's on sale in individual stores, and it sparked me to run a separate search for their Cookies and Cream cake pop and find out had been discontinued in the US.

Not bad for typing a couple of prompts on my phone and then spending a few extra minutes with the results after the research task had completed.

Now multiply that by a dozen plus moments of curiosity per day and my intellectual life feels genuinely elevated - I'm being exposed to so many more interesting and varied avenues than if I was manually doing all of the work on a smaller number of curiosities myself.

	▲	rthrfrd 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I think one of my personal core values is that curiosity should never be left unsatiated if ant all possible! I don't disagree: I just posited that there are other ways to satisfy it, and that there is an opportunity cost to the path you've chosen to satisfy it that you don't seem very aware of, because your curiosity and desire to be correct are tightly coupled - but that doesn't actually have to be the case. It has its pros and cons. Now I'm more of an "it's the journey not the destination" guy, so accelerating the journey doesn't appeal to me as much as it used to, because for me its where I get the most value. That change in my perspective is what motivated me to comment. But anyway, you clearly enjoy it and do great work, so all the best with it!