Even came with it as a standard feature" got me. That's the worst part, paying extra for something that's already included. Folks really need to dig through their policy line by line once a year.

Totally feel you on this one, Wendy. It's tough because everyone's situation is different, and what works for one stylist might not for another. That balance between covering your costs and not pricing out the people in your area is a real juggle. I've seen too many folks get fixated on what the "rule" is instead of just watching what actually happens in their chair. Sometimes you gotta just test a price and see who shows up, you know?

That whole "intent matters" argument falls apart when you look at how humans actually learn to make art. Every painter who studied the masters was doing the same thing the AI does - absorbing patterns, color schemes, and compositions from thousands of works they saw. The difference is the AI doesn't pretend it's having a spiritual experience while doing it. But here's the angle people skip: what about the person who trained the model, chose the dataset, and curated the output? That's still a human making choices about what gets generated. The guy typing prompts is just the last step in a chain of human decisions. So the real question isn't if it's art, it's who gets credit for the final piece.

Two light taps over one hard hit, I see that same idea come up all the time with DIY projects at the hardware store. People rush through the last step thinking it's the easiest part, then wonder why their shelf falls down or their paint peels. It's like the finish line is where you need to slow down the most, not speed up.

Funny you mention the pits, because that's exactly what I struggled with when I used straight borax on some twisted cable Damascus. Could it be that the borax is pulling impurities out but leaving voids behind, while the paste fills those gaps better during the weld? What brand of paste did you go with, because I tried one that felt too watery and it didn't help at all.