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 —
Surely a big part of the wow! of Claude Code was that it required a richer ceremony: down 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!