Saved

Strong technologies capture the imaginations of technology enthusiasts. That is why many important technologies start out as weekend hobbies. Enthusiasts vote with their time, and, unlike most of the business world, have long-term horizons. They build from first principles, making full use of the available resources to design technologies as they ought to exist.

Thinking in dialogue is easier and more entertaining than struggling with feelings, letters, grammar and style all by ourselves. Using AI as a writing dialogue partner, ChatGPT can become a catalyst for clarifying what we want to say. Even if it is wrong.6 Sometimes we need to hear what’s wrong to understand what’s right.

Seeing in clear text what is wrong or, at least, what we don’t mean can help us set our minds straight about what we really mean. If you get stuck, you can also simply let it ask you questions. If you don’t know how to improve, you can tell it to be evil in its critique of your writing

Just compare usage with AI to how we dealt with similar issues before AI. Discussing our writing with others is a general practice and regarded as universally helpful; honest writers honor and credit their discussion partners We already use spell checkers and grammar tools It’s common practice to use human editors for substantial or minor copy editing of our public writing Clearly, using dictionaries and thesauri to find the right expression is not a crime

Using AI in the editor replaces thinking. Using AI in dialogue increases thinking. Now, how can connect the editor and the chat window without making a mess? Is there a way to keep human and artificial text apart?

preserving the book’s spirit was paramount. “I was trying to be, as a filmmaker, as invisible as possible. I tried my best to keep the poetry of the book, the atmosphere, the colors, the smell, everything that I felt when I read the book. I tried.”

in Herbert’s Dune, computers and artificial intelligence have been banished. Humans try to develop the potential of the human brain, “which is actually the opposite of what we’re trying to do right now,” Villeneuve says.

he worries less about AI “than the fact that we behave like algorithms, as filmmakers. We’re in a very conservative time; creativity is restricted. Everything’s about Wall Street. What will save cinema is freedom and taking risks. And you feel the audience is excited when they see something they haven’t seen before.”

a more powerful aim is to develop a new medium for thought. A medium such as, say, Adobe Illustrator is essentially different from any of the individual tools Illustrator contains. Such a medium creates a powerful immersive context, a context in which the user can have new kinds of thought, thoughts that were formerly impossible for them. Speaking loosely, the range of expressive thoughts possible in such a medium is an emergent property of the elementary objects and actions in that medium. If those are well chosen, the medium expands the possible range of human thought.

Memory systems make memory into a choice, rather than an event left up to chance: This changes the relationship to what we're learning, reduces worry, and frees up attention to focus on other kinds of learning, including conceptual, problem-solving, and creative.

Memory systems can be used to build genuine conceptual understanding, not just learn facts: In Quantum Country we achieve this in part through the aspiration to virtuoso card writing, and in part through a narrative embedding of spaced repetition that gradually builds context and understanding.

Mnemonic techniques such as memory palaces are great, but not versatile enough to build genuine conceptual understanding: Such techniques are very specialized, and emphasize artificial connections, not the inherent connections present in much conceptual knowledge. The mnemonic techniques are, however, useful for bootstrapping knowledge with an ad hoc structure.

What practices would lead to tools for thought as transformative as Hindu-Arabic numerals? And in what ways does modern design practice and tech industry product practice fall short? To be successful, you need an insight-through-making loop to be operating at full throttle, combining the best of deep research culture with the best of Silicon Valley product culture.

Historically, work on tools for thought has focused principally on cognition; much of the work has been stuck in Spock-space. But it should take emotion as seriously as the best musicians, movie directors, and video game designers. Mnemonic video is a promising vehicle for such explorations, possibly combining both deep emotional connection with the detailed intellectual mastery the mnemonic medium aspires toward.

It's striking to contrast conventional technical books with the possibilities enabled by executable books. You can imagine starting an executable book with, say, quantum teleportation, right on the first page. You'd provide an interface – perhaps a library is imported – that would let users teleport quantum systems immediately. They could experiment with different parts of the quantum teleportation protocol, illustrating immediately the most striking ideas about it. The user wouldn't necessarily understand all that was going on. But they'd begin to internalize an accurate picture of the meaning of teleportation. And over time, at leisure, the author could unpack some of what might a priori seem to be the drier details. Except by that point the reader will be bought into those details, and they won't be so dry

Aspiring to canonicity, one fun project would be to take the most recent IPCC climate assessment report (perhaps starting with a small part), and develop a version which is executable. Instead of a report full of assertions and references, you'd have a live climate model – actually, many interrelated models – for people to explore. If it was good enough, people would teach classes from it; if it was really superb, not only would they teach classes from it, it could perhaps become the creative working environment for many climate scientists.

In serious mediums, there's a notion of canonical media. By this, we mean instances of the medium that expand its range, and set a new standard widely known amongst creators in that medium. For instance, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, and 2001 all expanded the range of film, and inspired later film makers. It's also true in new media. YouTubers like Grant Sanderson have created canonical videos: they expand the range of what people think is possible in the video form. And something like the Feynman Lectures on Physics does it for textbooks. In each case one gets the sense of people deeply committed to what they're doing. In many of his lectures it's obvious that Feynman isn't just educating: he's reporting the results of a lifelong personal obsession with understanding how the world works. It's thrilling, and it expands the form.

There's a general principle here: good tools for thought arise mostly as a byproduct of doing original work on serious problems.

Game companies develop many genuinely new interface ideas. This perhaps seems surprising, since you'd expect such interface ideas to also suffer from the public goods problem: game designers need to invest enormous effort to develop those interface ideas, and they are often immediately copied (and improved on) by other companies, at little cost. In that sense, they are public goods, and enrich the entire video game ecosystem.

Many video games make most of their money from the first few months of sales. While other companies can (and do) come in and copy or riff on any new ideas, it often does little to affect revenue from the original game, which has already made most of its money In fact, cloning is a real issue in gaming, especially in very technically simple games. An example is the game Threes, which took the developers more than a year to make. Much of that time was spent developing beautiful new interface ideas. The resulting game was so simple that clones and near-clones began appearing within days. One near clone, a game called 2048, sparked a mini-craze, and became far more successful than Threes. At the other extreme, some game companies prolong the revenue-generating lifetime of their games with re-releases, long-lived online versions, and so on. This is particularly common for capital-intensive AAA games, such as the Grand Theft Auto series. In such cases the business model relies less on clever new ideas, and more on improved artwork (for re-release), network effects (for online versions), and branding. . While this copying is no doubt irritating for the companies being copied, it's still worth it for them to make the up-front investment.

in gaming, clever new interface ideas can be distinguishing features which become a game's primary advantage in the marketplace. Indeed, new interface ideas may even help games become classics – consider the many original (at the time) ideas in games ranging from Space Invaders to Wolfenstein 3D to Braid to Monument Valley. As a result, rather than underinvesting, many companies make sizeable investments in developing new interface ideas, even though they then become public goods. In this way the video game industry has largely solved the public goods problems.

It's encouraging that the video game industry can make inroads on the public goods problem. Is there a solution for tools for thought? Unfortunately, the novelty-based short-term revenue approach of the game industry doesn't work. You want people to really master the best new tools for thought, developing virtuoso skill, not spend a few dozen hours (as with most games) getting pretty good, and then moving onto something new.

Adobe shares in common with many other software companies that much of their patenting is defensive: they patent ideas so patent trolls cannot sue them for similar ideas. The situation is almost exactly the reverse of what you'd like. Innovative companies can easily be attacked by patent trolls who have made broad and often rather vague claims in a huge portfolio of patents, none of which they've worked out in much detail. But when the innovative companies develop (at much greater cost) and ship a genuinely good new idea, others can often copy the essential core of that idea, while varying it enough to plausibly evade any patent. The patent system is not protecting the right things.

many of the most fundamental and powerful tools for thought do suffer the public goods problem. And that means tech companies focus elsewhere; it means many imaginative and ambitious people decide to focus elsewhere; it means we haven't developed the powerful practices needed to do work in the area, and a result the field is still in a pre-disciplinary stage. The result, ultimately, is that it means the most fundamental and powerful tools for thought are undersupplied.

Culturally, tech is dominated by an engineering, goal-driven mindset. It's much easier to set KPIs, evaluate OKRs, and manage deliverables, when you have a very specific end-goal in mind. And so it's perhaps not surprising that tech culture is much more sympathetic to AGI and BCI as overall programs of work. But historically it's not the case that humanity's biggest breakthroughs have come about in this goal-driven way. The creation of language – the ur tool for thought – is perhaps the most important occurrence of humanity's existence. And although the origin of language is hotly debated and uncertain, it seems extremely unlikely to have been the result of a goal-driven process. It's amusing to try imagining some prehistoric quarterly OKRs leading to the development of language. What sort of goals could one possibly set? Perhaps a quota of new irregular verbs? It's inconceivable!

Even the computer itself came out of an exploration that would be regarded as ridiculously speculative and poorly-defined in tech today. Someone didn't sit down and think “I need to invent the computer”; that's not a thought they had any frame of reference for. Rather, pioneers such as Alan Turing and Alonzo Church were exploring extremely basic and fundamental (and seemingly esoteric) questions about logic, mathematics, and the nature of what is provable. Out of those explorations the idea of a computer emerged, after many years; it was a discovered concept, not a goal.

Fundamental, open-ended questions seem to be at least as good a source of breakthroughs as goals, no matter how ambitious. This is difficult to imagine or convince others of in Silicon Valley's goal-driven culture. Indeed, we ourselves feel the attraction of a goal-driven culture. But empirically open-ended exploration can be just as, or more successful.

There's a lot of work on tools for thought that takes the form of toys, or “educational” environments. Tools for writing that aren't used by actual writers. Tools for mathematics that aren't used by actual mathematicians. And so on. Even though the creators of such tools have good intentions, it's difficult not to be suspicious of this pattern. It's very easy to slip into a cargo cult mode, doing work that seems (say) mathematical, but which actually avoids engagement with the heart of the subject. Often the creators of these toys have not ever done serious original work in the subjects for which they are supposedly building tools. How can they know what needs to be included?

Rumination is a form of perserverative cognition that focuses on negative content, generally past and present, and results in emotional distress. Initial studies of rumination emerged in the psychological literature, particularly with regard to studies examining specific facets of rumination (e.g., positive vs. negative rumination, brooding vs. self-reflection, relationships with catastrophic thinking, role of impaired disengagement, state vs. trait features) as well as the presence of rumination in various psychiatric syndromes (e.g., depression, alcohol misuse, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, bulimia nervosa).

in 2023, I switched gears to emphasize intimacy. Instead of statistical analysis and summative interviews, I sat next to individuals for hours, as they used one-off prototypes which I’d made just for them. And I got more insight in the first few weeks of this than I had in all of 2022

I’d been building systems and running big experiments, and I could tell you plenty about forgetting curves and usage patterns—but very little about how those things connected to anything anyone cared about.

I could see, in great detail, the texture of the interaction between my designs and the broader learning context—my real purpose, not some proxy.

Single-user experiments like this emphasize problem-finding and discovery, not precise evaluation.

a good heuristic for evaluating my work seems to be: try designs 1-on-1 until they seem to be working well, and only then run more quantitative experiments to understand how well the effect generalizes.

My aim is to invent augmented reading environments that apply to any kind of informational text—spanning subjects, formats, and audiences. The temptation, then, is to consider every design element in the most systematic, general form. But this again confuses aims with methods. So many of my best insights have come from hoarding and fermenting vivid observations about the particular—a specific design, in a specific situation. That one student’s frustration with that one specific exercise.

It’s often hard to find “misfits” when I’m thinking about general forms. My connection to the problem becomes too diffuse. The object of my attention becomes the system itself, rather than its interactions with a specific context of use. This leads to a common failure mode among system designers: getting lost in towers of purity and abstraction, more and more disconnected from the system’s ostensible purpose in the world.

I experience an enormous difference between “trying to design an augmented reading environment” and “trying to design an augmented version of this specific linear algebra book”. When I think about the former, I mostly focus on primitives, abstractions, and processes. When I think about the latter, I focus on the needs of specific ideas, on specific pages. And then, once it’s in use, I think about specific problems, that specific students had, in specific places. These are the “misfits” I need to remove as a designer.

Of course, I do want my designs to generalize. That’s not just a practical consideration. It’s also spiritual: when I design a system well, it feels like I’ve limned hidden seams of reality; I’ve touched a kind of personal God. On most days, I actually care about this more than my designs’ utilitarian impact. The systems I want to build really do require abstraction and generalization. Transformative systems really do often depend on powerful new primitives. But more and more, my experience has been that the best creative fuel for these systematic solutions often comes from a process which focuses on particulars, at least for long periods at a time.

Also? The particular is often a lot more emotionally engaging, day-to-day. That makes the work easier and more fun.

Throughout my career, I’ve struggled with a paradox in the feeling of my work. When I’ve found my work quite gratifying in the moment, day-to-day, I’ve found it hollow and unsatisfying retrospectively, over the long term. For example, when I was working at Apple, there was so much energy; I was surrounded by brilliant people; I felt very competent, it was clear what to do next; it was easy to see my progress each day. That all felt great. But then, looking back on my work at the end of each year, I felt deeply dissatisfied: I wasn’t making a personal creative contribution. If someone else had done the projects I’d done, the results would have been different, but not in a way that mattered. The work wasn’t reflective of ideas or values that mattered to me. I felt numbed, creatively and intellectually.

Progress often doesn’t look like progressIt often feels like I’m not making any progress at all in my work. I’ll feel awfully frustrated. And then, suddenly, a tremendous insight will drive months of work. This last happened in the fall. Looking back at those journals now, I’m amused to read page after page of me getting so close to that central insight in the weeks leading up to it. I approach it again and again from different directions, getting nearer and nearer, but still one leap away—so it looks to me, at the time, like I’ve got nothing. Then, finally, when I had the idea, it felt like a bolt from the blue.

The biggest takeaway was that I didn’t know it was even possible to experience this much happiness in a single moment. It was like an emotional singularity inside of my brain and body.

The happiness had a palpable physical presence around me. At some points it felt like I was breathing in happiness particles. Not like dust or something I had to cough up, but some gas or elementary particle-- like a photon. When the sun peaks out from behind the clouds, you can feel it all over your skin and it coats the landscape. The music was just like that, but instead of photons, the crowd was awash in happitrons. Billions and billions of happitrons rushed toward me with every beat, propogating through the air, riding along the musical jet stream from the stage straight into my body.

The beat was pumping through the ground and it needed something to escape through. I realized that was my job. It was my responsibility to let the music out. I needed to dance in order to let the beat out of the ground!

I felt invincible with my friend group, like going to the festival was a team sport, and I loved everyone there.

I felt like my senses were normally small straws that I used to sip up the world around me. But in that moment, they became 10 foot wide industrial pipes that were pouring the concert straight into my head.

Whatever we decide to measure units of happiness in, it feels appropraite that “bliss” is the maximum amount of happiness you can experience per unit of time.

Instead of turning light into pictures, it turns ideas into pictures.

This new kind of camera replicates what your imagination does. It receives words and then synthesizes a picture from its experience seeing millions of other pictures. The output doesn’t have a name yet, but I’ll call it a synthograph (meaning synthetic drawing).

Photography can capture moments that happened, but synthography is not bound by the limitations of reality. Synthography can capture moments that did not happen and moments that could never happen.

Taking a great syntho is about stimulating the imagination of the camera. Synthography doesn’t require you to be anywhere or anywhen in particular.

Photography is an important medium of expression because it is so accessible and instantaneous. Synthography will even further reduce barriers to entry, and give everyone the power to convert ideas into pictures.

Your mind should be flexible, but your process should be repeatable. Style is a set of constraints that you stick to. You can explore many types of constraints: colors, shapes, materials, textures, fonts, language, clothing, decor, beliefs, flavors, sounds, scents, rituals. Your style doesn’t have to please anyone else. Play by your own rules. Everything you do is open to stylistic interpretation.

Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after all. It’s not a life commitment, it’s just the way you do things. For now.

Having a style collapses hundreds of future decisions into one, and gives you focus. I always pluralize tags so I never have to wonder what to name new tags. Style gives you leverage. Every time you reuse your style you save time. A durable style is a great investment.

if you want to edit your constraints, you can. It will be easier to adopt the new constraints if you already had some clearly defined. You don’t need a style for everything. Make a deliberate choice about what needs consistency and what doesn’t. If you stick with your constraints long enough, your style becomes a cohesive and recognizable point of view.

Yesterday I found out that I have been alive for 12,431 days. If each day I split off into a new person those 12,430 previous selves would fill a stadium. If I live to 90 years old, there will be 32,850 selves in that stadium. That’s 20,420 more of us than there are now. Today, I am the one on stage.

The things I do today can change the lives of those 20,420 future selves

The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed.

Dreams are delicate and easy to destroy. When an idea presents itself, try to imagine the best version of it — what would make this idea great?

Pessimism and optimism share a trait: both are self-fulfilling. Your intention influences the outcome. Call it karma or, simply, effort.

Real life doesn't start tomorrow, or on the weekend. It doesn't start when you graduate, or when you land a job, or when you quit your job. It doesn’t start once you get a handle on your anxiety, or fix your sleep schedule, or finish all the tasks in your to-do list.

Real life is made of moments like this. It’s waking up with dread and clutching at your phone for relief. It’s being mildly frustrated at all your friends for the various ways in which they don’t understand you. Real life is wiping the lint from your dryer, it’s scrubbing the same pan clean for the hundredth time, it’s being surprised that even with all the fun of a friday night, you’re just as sad to say goodbye, just as sad as when you were a child.

We spend most of our time waiting, and very few precious moments feeling like we’ve finally arrived. We defer our willingness to bask in reality to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next, until we forget we ever deferred anything.

But what if you don’t need to wait until you’ve meditated for decades, what if you’re closer to that than you think? What if you were more often baffled by the fact that you’re still alive, if you began to ask of this moment, of every moment: what do you have to teach me?

You know that feeling you get when you hear the good news you’ve been waiting for, or when you’re so enthralled in conversation you forget that you haven’t checked your phone for hours, or when the rain has settled and you step into the forest and the freshness of the air wrests your lungs open and everything feels perfectly in place?

You’re inflight, you’re falling through the sky, everything feels half-complete, there is so much more you meant to do, there are so many things you’re behind on, so many things you haven’t said. I’m right there with you. This is it, the madness we were born into and have no choice but to face. Real life is more and more of this and then it’s over.

Completely non-standard arrows and buttons are used to navigate and restore files. A timeline along the right shows each backup as a tick mark, magnifying the marks on mouse-over much like the Dock magnification feature. It's all completely ridiculous, and you know what? I love it! I'm willing to indulge Apple when it comes to these flourishes in Time Machine for two reasons. First, none of the silliness renders the features significantly less usable. Yes, those arrow buttons are crazy, but they're also huge click targets, and they clearly convey their purposes. Ditto for the buttons at the bottom.

Click it and everything but the front-most Finder window falls off the screen, revealing a crazy-ass swirling nebula and moving star field, into which fades a succession of historic incarnations of the lone remaining Finder window.

As for a Hall of Shame thing? That would be the slow but steady encroachment of single-window applications in MacOS, especially via Catalyst and Electron. The reason I gravitated toward MacOS in the first place is the same reason I continue to use it: it fits my mental model of how an operating system ought to work.