**A Human Premium** We’ve been conditioned to view technological progress through the lens of productivity—making things faster, cheaper, and more scalable. We celebrate the democratization of tools, but there’s an interesting, slightly ironic side effect: as we make technology ubiquitous, we seem to be making genuine human interaction more of a premium experience. In the pursuit of efficiency, we’ve automated the "friction" out of life. But in doing so, we’ve reached a point where reaching a human being feels like finding a hidden Easter egg in a video game. The ARS Gauntlet: We’ve all been there—randomly clicking through 5-to-7-digit menus on an Automated Response System just to hear a voice. The default is no longer a person; the person is the "reward" at the end of a digital obstacle course. The Scalability Tax: As digital reproduction becomes "free" and infinite, anything that can’t scale—like live music or a face-to-face conversation—starts to feel like a luxury. An Unintended Status Symbol: It’s a light irony of our time: we’ve automated so much that "real" interaction is becoming a bit of a premium tier. While technology gets cheaper for everyone, the "human touch" is quietly becoming something only the rich can easily afford. My recent decision to abandon Jekyll and move my site to plain HTML (inspired by the simplicity of Soumith’s page) fits right into this is a bit of a micro-rebellion. Modern web development is often a hamster wheel of dependencies, frameworks, and "optimized" workflows that promise productivity but often just create more layers of complexity. By going back to basics, I’m reclaiming a bit of that "directness." It's low maintenance, I’m no longer a servant to my toolchain. It's also more Agent-friendly. Ironically, in a world of LLMs, plain HTML is easier for agents to parse. It’s efficient, but in a way that prioritizes the content over the "stack." And it's putting simplicity as a feature. If productivity is the only metric, then human interaction is "inefficient." Humans are slow, unpredictable, and hard to scale. But the reality of our experience isn't found in the optimized output; it's found in the nuance of social intelligence and direct connection. Technology should be the bridge that handles the mundane, giving us more room for the "inefficient" but vital parts of life—like actually talking to each other. The most "productive" thing we can do might not be a task at all, but rather reclaiming the presence that technology often buffers us against.