News travels too fast these days

I’m reading Apple: The First 50 Years by David Pogue, a chron­icle replete with elec­tri­fying encounters. This is a book stuffed full of people seeing some com­puter for the first time and thinking, of course! This is how it’s all going to work!

Steve Jobs chief among them, watching the demos at PARC.

The aston­ish­ment of a modern LLM is on the same level, yet most people’s first encounter has been simply … visiting a web page … with the effect, I think, of deflating the expe­ri­ence somewhat. I sup­pose this is just an obser­va­tion about how it feels to encounter things on the web — the dynamic range of the medium.

Surely a big part of the wow! of Claude Code was that it required a richer ceremony: down­loading a program, inviting it into your dig­ital home, launching an odd new interface. Yet even that is pretty thin gruel com­pared to the buildup and payoff of, e.g., a trek to the West Coast Com­puter Faire to behold the brand-new Apple II.

A bit of dis­tance does won­ders for an expe­ri­ence; a bit of waiting has never been a bad thing!