“The books that can be written about people’s feelings about Pro Tools could fill a library”
On lousy software vs chatty slot machines
Nilay Patel on his latest Decoder episode stopped me in my tracks
…the books that can be written about people’s feelings about Pro Tools could fill a library, but they’re the tools because they get the job done in specific ways.
As someone who spent ~10 years producing and editing podcasts, I will 100% co-sign. If anyone wants to co-author one of those books, let me know.
As much I loathed booting up Pro Tools, it does the job in its own very specific way and I felt that the switching costs, along with a handful of extremely specific features, kept me tethered to it, in the same way a prisoner would to a ball and chain.
I think this is very much the feeling workers now have in being funnelled into using AI at work. But the difference being that AI is non-deterministic and so it’s a gamble as to whether the pain of using lousy deterministic software is worse than using a chatty slot machine.
The entire episode is off the back of listener responses to Nilay’s banger of an essay/podcast, The People Do Not Yearn For Automation and his ideas about what he calls “software brain” which I highly recommend reading/watching/listening to.
Nilay Patel