> But to make that decision, I need to see the images. I could run a bash script to generate those images in a bunch of different qualities and then view them with some kind of image viewer, but that's extra steps - and it involves creating a bunch of temporary files that I then need to clean up.

That's not correct at all. You can, in fact, do all of these steps in a single command line program with Konsole (or iTerm2 on Mac, or Kitty - whatever terminal you're using, as long as it supports these features), imagemagick, and bash.

$ for size in $(seq 10 10 100); do; convert -resize $size% input.png output_$size.webp; timg output_$size.webp; done

timg, here, is https://github.com/hzeller/timg, but you could use anything that speaks iTerm2 or kitty. This approach generalizes easily, too; you can easily use this to vary any parameter imagemagick supports, like webp compression or posterization or dithering, and print out any parameters of the image, like size, along with the image itself.

> With the web version I can snap a screenshot with CleanShot X and then drag that screenshot straight onto the web page. I instantly see the different images, pick one that looks good to me, download that and then drag it into my S3 uploading software (Transmit).

In my workflow, I edit in Showfoto or Darktable, resize (or, in my case, more often dither and resize) as demonstrated, and then `cp` the appropriate selected image into my blog's main image folder. Hardly more difficult, and while you might not enjoy it, that's exactly my point - we can both make things we like, but you're asserting that LLMs massively changed the landscape overall, while I'm not using them at all.

I also have a script, which took about one minute to write, that cleans up the extra temporary images, so that's not much of a concern either.

How long would it take you to knock up a working imagemagick prototype?

My LLM-assisted web prototype took two prompts and less than three minutes, start to finish.

THAT’s the game changer here. I’ve spent my career building prototypes, and I’m really fast at it. With LLMs I am 5-10x faster still.

Which means I can roll way more prototypes, and I often build prototypes that I wouldn’t have built otherwise - see: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/27/ai-enhanced-developmen...

I really think you overestimate how hard it is to use imagemagick. Unless you're doing really deep wizardry - or editing video on the command line, but I'm almost certain the LLM will have more trouble with that, too - it's not hard. I didn't take that command line in the above command from a script, by the way; I rewrote it from memory, in about thirty seconds, because it's not hard. There might be a syntax error, but that'd be, what, another ten seconds?

I'm not asserting that LLMs aren't useful. You demonstrate successfully that, to you, they are. I'm asserting that they're not orders of magnitude more useful than powerful, composeable interfaces to the software we already have - and they are orders of magnitude more environmentally and socially destructive.

Comparing them to "powerful, composeable interfaces to the software we already have" doesn't make sense to me, because I'm using them in conjunction with that - I'm far more able to take advantage of the software we have now because LLMs mean I don't have constantly look up zsh escaping rules, or ffmpeg invocations, or how to run AppleScript from my terminal, or how to get a fetch() to work cross-domain via CORS or whatever.

It's funny you say "editing video on the command line, but I'm almost certain the LLM will have more trouble with that, too" because ffmpeg is the perfect example of software that is almost unusable for me without LLMs, but thanks to LLMs is something I solve problems with every week: https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/quicktime-capture-script

I won't disagree on the environmentally and socially destructive aspects. The question for me is if the benefits they provide compensate for the many downsides - like the fact that I can prototype 5-10x faster, while people who have never programmed before are finally able to get started on that learning curve without being put off the first time they forget a semicolon.

Will I look back in ten year's time and say "wow, the positive applications of LLMs really had nothing on the negatives, I wish this had never been invented"? I don't know. Currently I'm leaning "it's worth it".

Could you not go a step further and use gpt4o-mini’s vision to check if the text is readable? Basically, extract the text from the biggest screenshot. Then compare it to extracts from increasingly smaller versions until the text degrades / diff crosses a threshold.

I don't think GPT-4o (or any of the other vision models) "see" at a high enough resolution to help here. The differences between high and low quality images are very slight - the text almost always remains legible in the smaller images, just with slightly more JPEG artifacts that are visible.

It may be possible to train a custom machine learning model that can identify the quality I'm looking for, but honestly it's very much a human judgement thing here.