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If 800m people think delegating thinking to a slop generator is fine, that's not my loss. It's bad for humanity, but who even cares anymore in 2026, right?

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"Delegating thinking" and "figuring out how to determine an image format from the first few bytes of a file" are not the same thing.

I disagree, in my opinion it's the exact same process, just on a much smaller scale. It's a problem, and we humans are good at solving problems. That is, until LLMs arrived, now we are supposed to become good at prompting, or something.

I used ffmpeg and yt-dlp to make an animated GIF of a kākāpō in her nest from a livestream on YouTube the other day. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/25/kakapo-cam/

Much as I love kākāpō there is no way I was going to invest more than a few minutes in figuring out how to do that.

I love this new world where I can "delegate my thinking" to a computer and get a GIF of a dumpy New Zealand flightless parrot where I would otherwise be unable to do so because I didn't have the time to figure it out.

(I published it as a looping MP4 because that was smaller than the GIF, another thing I didn't have to figure out how to do myself.)

I agree that your project is cool, I just don't think the numerous downsides are worth the occasional cool thing like this.

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