Standard, Default, and Grace

When I was around thirteen, I think, my best friend was given a macbook for his birthday. It had Garageband on. It had iMovie on. We loved music, and movies, and making music, and making little movies.

I remember being viscerally struck by the complete lack of pretense in - and total freedom implied by - those two applications.

They weren't professional tools. They weren't trying to be. But for teenagers who wanted to make cool creative stuff, it changed everything. The UI said: "You want this guitar to sound fuzzy? OK - just click the thing that says it makes the guitar sound fuzzy."

Those applications were empowering. They assumed you had some intent to make something, and showed you exactly how, in language you understood.

Very few pieces of software make me feel this way any more. That is sad.

One of the things that excites me about LLMs is the fundamental requirement of intent. I hate Spotify etc for many reasons, but one of them is that I do not wish to be upsold a podcast when I am trying to engage with art. Neither do I wish to "Discover Weekly". Or, in fact, to discover art on anyone else's schedule. To me, that idea is fucking debasing.

I believe you should sit down at a machine because you have something you want to do with it. I believe LLM-based UIs can make computer use a less passive activity. I hope that there will be a movement towards UIs that are closer to what we once imagined computers would be: machines that did stuff for us, not to us.

I am aware of the hypocrisy of replacing an algorithm with an algorithm and calling it a solution. But - you gotta admit - LLMs, for all of flaws, are full of (sometimes imagined) music metadata. They are full of old music journalism. They are actually really, really good at suggesting music, if you ask them. This is the important part: you are asking them.

I once called that same friend on his parents' landline to play a song down the phone to him that I'd just discovered and loved so much and wanted to enthuse with him about it. He loved it too. We went to so many of their shows together, I can't even remember how many.

Loving something alone is noble, but it is lonely. Chatting with Dr Von Peel is not the same as passing the aux between you and your friends. Nothing is.

But at least - even though you can enthuse with him - Dr Von Peel isn't claiming to simulate that lost and magical aux-passing experience for the benefit of his own marketing copy. He is not saying: "music is a social experience (or some other such utterly true nonsense) to drive usage of a new and poorly-thought-through "shared queue" feature, for the benefit of some utterly Godless "Product Owner - Social Experience" wanker who wants to get extra quarterly good-boy points.

I am not interested in insincere treatment of things I love. What I am interested in is a cat, who is a DJ, from London / Germany / Louisiana, called Dr Von Peel, who has an eyepatch, which is why I have made him available for adoption - in case anyone else should feel similarly :-)