the first time
Do you remember the first time you worked with a computer?
Or the first time you saw a movie?
Can you picture your first beloved toy?
I’ve spent the last week experiencing those feelings again.
Plus another emotion that I couldn’t place at first.
It had been so long since I’d felt it last.
I felt hopeful.
To be hopeful is to reject either/or and embrace both/and.
I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.
I’ve been using LLMs at work to make software and it feels like the first time I used a computer: a relief.
Technology should feel this way; the weight of a burden lifted. (Air conditioning, the clothes washer, a vaccine.)
As I’ve written before, there are two kinds of people who appreciate labor saving devices: labor and management.1
When their interests are aligned a magical thing happens: as when you enter a store and pay for a product.2
The person selling the product and the person buying the product both say the same thing: Thank you!
It’s a relief.
When I showed Ana how one LLM made an accurate memo of a meeting I’d attended, her years of taking notes on behalf of others disappeared in front of her like a baby’s breath.
What a relief.
Of course, a person thus unburdened may also move faster.
It took me four days to make my first app. It took me one day to make my second.
But that doesn’t tell you the full story. Working faster is not necessarily working smarter. And work can always revert to being a grind.
Such was my initial experience a few days ago working with ChatGPT. It bullshitted me. Not fun!
Later that day, I decided to switch to Claude.
I wanted it to improve upon a simple program I’d written in a relatively new codebase, with very little documentation online.
Claude said something to the effect of: It looks like I’m not going to be able to help you here, it would be better if you stuck with what you have since it does much of what you need.
The computer was telling me not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
At that moment, it won me over.
After that exchange, I began to treat Claude less like a machine and more like a handy tool; say, the way an experienced potter might treat their favorite wheel or a tanner their favorite knife.
It became charming.
And so I began to help it help me.
I met it halfway.3
(Yes, charming comes from “charm: song, verse, enchantment, religious formula,” but we will postpone that discussion! And if we return to it, we will indict everything wrong with Mickey Mouse’s charmed tools in Fantasia.)
On the one hand: I was teaching the LLM, the property of a company. But I was also learning, as fast as I can. (Reportedly, pretty fast.)
Thank you, we both said to each other. Repeatedly.
It was not the sound of ~infinite monkeys typing for eternity in search of Shakespeare, but rather the beat of a drum, the lament of a sax, the nearly inaudible tracing of a thousand brushstrokes on a painting.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding – or, in this case, a flat image of the pudding:
I mentioned that I was writing software and I worry I may have buried the lede here.
I’ve been learning to make near hallucinatory experiences on Apple’s experimental spatial computer, the Vision Pro.4
(The video above shows what I worked on yesterday.)
Having spent most of my adult life in earnest pursuit of beauty as produced by technology (our music catalog speaks for itself, consider this frame from my first movie), having the privilege to do this feels like a dream come true.
That this technology became available at the same time as collaborative interfaces like LLMs, has me reeling.
To be able to conjure candy and then taste it is uplifting, to say the least.5
And, of course, Joe Biden did the right thing.
What a hero.
May the days ahead of us exceed our wildest imaginations. May we thrive and not just survive.
Postscript
I must thank my friend Adam for patiently showing me this way; my conversion on the road to Damascus happened quite literally when he took my hand. We should do that for each other, always. (Lowell, you may recognize the location!)
If you’d like to talk to me about this new interface, hit me up!
Some of you will have had an involuntary response to seeing the phrase “it’s more fun to compute” above. let me scratch that itch for you. Fun fact: I bought that Kraftwerk record from a yard sale in San Francisco in 1995. I used one of its synthesizer sounds for the CD-ROM I made around then with some of you reading this today.
I found this video while searching for the first image above:
When I started writing this letter last night, I mentioned the skateboard as a magical tool. This is probably not the time to talk about tools for meditation! Nonetheless, here’s a short video of me meditating while levitating thanks to the tool we call a skateboard:
I spend too much time thinking about the outsized political power of management because we don’t think about labor enough. There is, of course, a Labor Day. If there are still parades for nurses and garbage collectors, cashiers and warehouse stockers, call center operators and dishwashers, I’m unaware. Let’s bring them back?!
As the late, great John Connelly taught hundreds if not thousands of young boys at Regis High School.
The Gadamerian bridge is what connects different horizons of understanding. I don’t need the blessed machine to be like me. We just need to create a common language that we share.
FOR HALF THE PRICE OF THE MACINTOSH WHEN IT WAS RELEASED. The Apple Vision Pro costs half the price of the Macintosh when it was released. And the next one will cost half as much.
The Vision Pro is also the largest, sharpest monitor I’ve ever owned. That’s especially handy When I need to do painstaking work. e.g., If you’ve ever had to adjust keyframes in Premiere, you know it’s like needlepoint but more painful. Now, imagine bringing those nodes all the way in front of you. Peak productivity. That said, it’s a little heavy for wearing for ~8 hours. The consumer one will be lighter. Hopefully without sacrificing some of the… charm of this Pro version.