BB

// Daisy Bell

“Daisy Bell” is the first song a computer ever sang, and the one HAL 9000 sings as it’s shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey. SAM only speaks text, it has no idea what a musical note is, so this reads the melody straight out of a MIDI file and sings it syllable by syllable, one note’s pitch and duration at a time.

// The Discipline of No

More money was supposed to buy better decisions. Mostly it buys the excuse to skip making one.

A short one about Seth Godin, Yahoo’s homepage, and why more resources should mean fewer decisions, not more products.

Also: a search box with nothing else on it, a company that said yes to everything, and the part of the job that doesn’t scale with funding.

// System Personas and UCD

An AI agent doesn’t care about your brand guidelines. It cares whether you’re useful. And how efficient.

User-centered design gets a new kind of user. Not a persona you write for a user, a system standing in the queue as one.

Also: screen readers, search spiders, and a word the web has been using since the nineties without noticing what it meant.

// Emoticomp Revisited

I wrote about giving machines personality fifteen years before any of them could actually talk back.

Emoticomp again, this time asking what held up and what didn’t, now that every AI product on earth has a personality whether it wanted one or not.

Also: what I got right, what I got backwards, and the one thing I didn’t see coming at all.

// System Personas

I called it a system persona in 2011. Now I call it a CLAUDE.md file.

A short one. On rereading an old post and realising I already had the answer, over a decade before I needed it.

Also: what an object wants, and why an AI agent needs to know.

// Imagining the Traffic Jam

Technology has no inevitable trajectory.

Last of five, following on from An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence. What we didn’t imagine when we built the attention economy, what the same question means for the intention economy, and why the destructive path is always the easier one.

Also: a toddler who can infer what you meant to do, an installation at the Venice Biennale, and the moment we all lost, one more time.

// An Ocean of Artificial Intelligence

Optimise everything toward the same metrics and you get the same product.

Fourth of five, following on from Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas. About what homogenisation does to trust, once every option looks and behaves the same, and why that makes leaving easy and staying meaningless.

Also: the same coffee shop in Berlin, Bucharest and Cape Town, enshittification, and why there’s no hook left for customer intent.

// Rocket Boots for Terrible Ideas

Creativity is powered by friction.

Third of five, following on from My Reconditioned iPod. About what happens to creative work when the friction gets designed out of it. Design systems, Figma agents, and the difference between producing output and having something to say.

Also: a frozen risotto, a component library nobody had to think about, and why the operating was never the differentiator.

// The Intention Economy

We didn’t lose our attention. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to.

First of five. This started as one post that tried to do too much. This one’s about ADHD, the attention economy, and the intention economy Doc Searls imagined in 2006, then what happened when the people running the attention economy noticed it.

Also: a misdiagnosed disorder, a search engine that built the answer then buried it, and researchers arguing over who gets to use a word.

// Rhythm Generator

I wanted a quick way to sketch percussion patterns without hand-programming every ghost note in Bitwig. Now covers Latin, Arabic, African and Indian traditions, with a polymetric mode where instruments drift in and out of phase with each other. Generate variations, tweak them by hand, export straight to MIDI.

// IDHD

We didn’t lose our attention spans. We lost the moment where we decided what to pay attention to.

A post about the attention economy, the intention economy we could have had, and what the distance between them has quietly done to creativity, trust, and the future we’re building.

Also: a reconditioned iPod, rocket boots for terrible ideas, and an ocean of artificial intelligence.

// Make Your Own Tools

// Default Mode

I was called a daydreamer at school. It wasn’t a compliment.

I think it’s the most important skill I have. And I feel it has atrophied.

// DAW Sketch Namer

My music WIP folder is a graveyard of jams and sketches with names like “asdfgh” and “New 33”. I never know what any of them are. I made this to help sort that out.

// Audio Test

Testing how Claude Cowork can help me create a music player element in Hugo, so I can share my music experiments on this blog.

// CLI Personality

When every interaction happens through plain text, it’s hard to get brand attributes across. Copywriting and tone of voice do some of the work. I wanted to know what else could.