> Why should I care about efficiency of the underlying process.
Because, as you just said yourself…
> The ultimate resource is human time and effort.
This is a disconnect I don’t think most people appreciate. Developers seem to operate as if Moore’s law will continue forever, that components are infinite, that cloud resources appear and disappear at the snap of their fingers, and that optimization is pointless in an era of excess.
Meanwhile, the actual engineers are building out new data centers to support these fancy prediction machines, supply chains are exploiting labor abroad for the raw materials necessary to power these guessing boxes, and we’re tearing our hair out at developers casually demanding dozens of CPU cores or terabytes of memory for their newest product specifically because they did no optimizations.
Actual humans – millions of them, in and outside of technology fields – are working in concert to support the least optimized software product in human history, just so you can squander water, energy, and land to run inference on a farm of GPUs to output a static website that Microsoft Word could generate in 2003 on a Pentium 4.
Jesus christ I am sick of this nonsensical argument that because something is cheap, it is somehow optimized and/or superior.