Dragoncatcher: News travels too fast these days

David Pogue's new book "Apple: The First 50 Years" highlights the electrifying impact of early tech demos, contrasting the awe of seeing the Apple II at a computer faire with the deflated experience of encountering modern AI like LLMs through a simple web page. The author argues that the ritual and anticipation of physically traveling to see new technology created a richer, more profound sense of wonder than today's instant digital access provides.

News travels too fast these days /lab/travels-too-fast/ I’m reading Apple: The First 50 Years https://bookshop.org/a/541/9781982134594?utm source=Robin Sloan sent me 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: 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 To the blog home page /lab/