This March, I spent a couple of days traveling through western Iceland.| thesephist.com
Last night, I built and started using Mira, a sort of a hybrid contacts-app-CRM that’s designed for my workflow around the people in my work and life. I’m calling it a “people notes” app.| thesephist.com
As I’ve written more often, writing has become more than just a way for me to communicate. To me these days, writing is the creative by-product of my learning and thinking process. If I learn something new, it begins life as just an idea, thrown somewhere into the distant orbit in my mental solar system of ideas. Over time, as this speck of an idea develops through conversations and readings, it starts growing and colliding into other ideas. Asteroids of ideas agglomerate in my mental orbit...| thesephist.com
As we use any kind of tool over time, we naturally want the tool to work better for us, to fit our workflows and our use cases. The more we use a tool as a part of our day to day work, the more important it is that the tool work exactly the way we want to work with it.| thesephist.com
Last March, when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted my travels and threw a wrench into my general life plans, I took a couple of months of break from work to recollect and work on my own projects full-time. Many of the projects I ended up building were about growing a personal universe of tools that augmented my workflows, the way I wanted my thoughts and ideas to flow around me. I learned that I enjoyed building tools at many different levels, from thinking about how we should design better c...| thesephist.com
My projects include artifacts of independent research, original music, programming languages and UI frameworks, web apps, artwork, writing, software libraries, and a small set of personal tools for thinking.| thesephist.com
During April, I spent a couple of weeks away from my usual habitus, and traveled to Hawai’i, working and getting to know my team at Ideaflow. In between the commits and deploys, we spent a lot of time surfing. (Or, I should say, in between all the surfing, we made some commits.)| thesephist.com
I like the process of creating something almost more than the artifact that comes out of it. For me, the best part of making something from nothing is the process of exploration required to stumble upon interesting ideas, the trials-and-errors of navigating a maze of thoughts before settling into one that works or feels right. Because of this, my ideal job as a maker of things is not a string of successful inventions, but an environment where I can freely play with new ideas and learn from tr...| thesephist.com
Here is a mental model I share often with friends looking for job opportunities: your ability to get a job is the product of two quantities, the value of your skill and the liquidity of your skill.| thesephist.com
Strong, lasting, intentionally nurtured interpersonal communities will have a profound impact on how we live and work in the next decade, rivaling the impact of software services on how we communicate or the creator economy on how we consume entertainment.| thesephist.com
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.| thesephist.com
I’ve had an easy time being focused lately. I say no to obligations or opportunities that I would have easily accepted before. I have fewer things on my todo list, which means I get to spend more time on the few things that I’ve said yes to when I sit down to be creative. I also have a stronger sense of my values – what’s important to me, and what’s less important – and that’s helped me leave more room in my schedule for myself. I’ve been thinking about why it’s easier for m...| thesephist.com
I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our knowledge effectively.| thesephist.com
One of the beautiful privileges of living in a city like New York is that you can just go for a stroll around town and encounter pieces of art that could plausibly belong in museums. My favorite such area of the city is the Rockefeller Plaza. Imagine yourself as John D. Rockefeller in 1930, one of the most capitalist capitalists to ever have been capitalized. The economy is tumbling into a recession and then a depression, jeopardizing your plan for a new metropolitan opera house — how Europ...| thesephist
I will never forget the first time I watched Soul. It was not the haunting soundtrack from the Reznor and Ross duo nor the whirlwind storyline that glued my eyes to the makeshift projector wall I had fashioned last minute out of my window curtains but this: I mean– How do you, as an ordinary mind walking around the physical world, surrounded at every turn with mundane, opaque objects fastened to the banal constraints of our three dimensions and material world– How does one even begin to i...| thesephist
I’ve joined Thrive Capital as an EIR and advisor, working with the Thrive team to support our founders in understanding and deploying AI thoughtfully, while furthering my own research and explorations around AI interpretability, knowledge representations, and interface design. August was my last month as a part of Notion’s AI engineering team. It’s been a privilege at Notion to get to work with a world-class team at the frontier of applied LLM products. Notion was one of the first compa...| thesephist
It’s not easy, but with a lifetime of dedication to the craft, many people become virtuoso guitar players. They learn the intricate nuances and details of the instrument and attain a level of mastery over it as if it were an extension of their mind. Some of the best instrumentalists even transcend traditional techniques of guitar performance and find their own ways of creating music with the instrument, like using it as a percussion voice. Alex Misko’s music is a beautiful example of virt...| thesephist.com
We generally understand that it’s better to own things that are important to us, rather than to lease or borrow them. Ownership usually means more control, and sometimes the ability to own something also signals a degree of wealth or pedigree.| thesephist.com
I don’t normally write about new gadgets when they come out, but once in a while, a new device captures my imagination and creativity so much that I can’t help write a little bit about how I use it, and why it gets me so excited. The last time this happened, it was about the 2018 iPad Pro which I still use daily. This time, it’s about the Surface Duo, a dual-screen folding phone-tablet hybrid from Microsoft running a funky crossover of Google’s Android with Microsoft’s services.| thesephist.com
When I discuss interfaces on this blog, I’m most often referring to software interfaces: intermediating mechanisms from our human intentions to computers and the knowledge within them. But the concept of a human interface extends far before it and beyond it. I’ve been trying to build myself a coherent mental framework for how to think about human interfaces to knowledge and tools in general, even beyond computers.| thesephist.com
When I discuss interfaces on this blog, I’m most often referring to software interfaces: intermediating mechanisms from our human intentions to computers and the knowledge within them. But the concept of a human interface extends far before it and beyond it. I’ve been trying to build myself a coherent mental framework for how to think about human interfaces to knowledge and tools in general, even beyond computers.| thesephist.com
I have a few friends who are in the midst of navigating very hazy idea spaces, guided by strong intuition and taste, but early enough in the process that very little is visible through the fog. Whenever I’m in this situation I feel a strange internal conflict. One side of me feels conviction in a direction of exploration, while the other part of me feels the risk of potential dead ends, afraid to go out on a limb and say I should put my full effort into pursuing where my hunch leads.| thesephist.com
This post is a read-through of a talk I gave at a demo night at South Park Commons in July 2024.| thesephist.com
This is an excerpt from today’s issue of my weekly newsletter.| thesephist.com
I’ve long been enamored by DALL-E 2’s specific flavor of visual creativity. Especially given the text-to-image AI system’s age, it seems to have an incredible command over color, light and dark, the abstract and the concrete, and the emotional resonance that their careful combination can conjure.| thesephist.com
My desktop wallpaper loops through a handful of screenshots of quotes I’ve collected over the years. These quotes push on my worldview in just the right places to help me approach my work in ways I find encouraging and energizing, so I like to have them in the periphery of my workspace like virtual post-it notes.| thesephist.com
For most of the history of music, humans produced sounds out of natural materials — rubbing together strings, hitting things, blowing air through tubes of various lengths. Until two things happened.| thesephist.com
Midjourney launched a new “personalization” feature this week, and I think it presents an interesting and valuable contrast to the kind of direct manipulation interfaces for interacting with AI systems that I’ve been advocating for. I also think this implementation of personalization reveals an unconventional way of thinking about style in creative tools, not by concrete stylistic traits but by a style’s relationship to a universe of other tastes or style preferences.| thesephist.com
There’s a lot of great research on foundation models these days that are yielding deeper understanding of their mechanics (how they work) and phenomenology (how they behave in different scenarios). But despite a growing body of research literature, in my work at Notion and conversations with founders, I’ve noticed a big gap between what we currently know about foundation models and what we still need to build valuable tools out of them. This post is a non-exhaustive list of applied resear...| thesephist.com
Foundation models gesture at a way of interacting with information that’s at once more natural and powerful than “classic” knowledge tools. But to build the kind of rich, directly interactive information interfaces I imagine, current foundation models and embeddings are far too opaque to humans. Models and their raw outputs resist understanding. Even when we go to great lengths to try to surface what the model is “thinking” through black-box methods like prompting or dimensionality ...| thesephist.com
2025| thesephist.com
Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning… Was the Command Line is one of the most profound pieces of writing about technology I’ve read. I found myself underscoring and highlighting numerous passages in this essay that reads equally as much like political propaganda, memoir, novella, and journalistic reporting all at once. If you have a couple of hours to spare, I’d recommend this essay only behind Greg Egan’s Diaspora, my favorite piece of science fiction, as a must-read.| thesephist.com
For a long time, global supply of energy was limited by the total number of humans in the world. We could only put more energy to work by creating more humans, or by each human working more.| thesephist.com
It’s nearly 2024.| thesephist.com
Cross-posted from my Notion.| thesephist.com
Direct manipulation interfaces let us interact with software materials using our spatial and physical intuitions. Manipulation by programming or configuration, what I’ll call programmatic interfaces, trades off that interaction freedom for more power and precision — programs, like scripts or structured queries, can manipulate abstract concepts like repetition or parameters of some software behavior that we can’t or don’t represent directly. It makes sense to directly manipulate lines...| thesephist.com
I spent the last month wondering and investigating how we might design better workflows for creative work that meld the best of human intuition and machine intelligence. I think a promising path is in the design of notation. More explicitly, I believe inventing better notations can contribute far more than automated tools to our effective intelligence in understanding ourselves, the world, and our place in it.| thesephist.com
As I’m thinking about defining more narrow focuses for my independent work next year, one area has stood out consistently as both personally exciting and more widely important: imagining and building better ways computers can help people do their best creative, thoughtful work, and in the process rethinking the relationship creative people have with the computer as a part of their work.| thesephist.com
A month ago, I built a personal search engine called Monocle that let me search through a trove of personal information I’ve saved over time, from notes to journal entries to bookmarks and tweets. Shortly thereafter, I switched my default search engine in my web browser from Google to Monocle, marking the start of my slow descent into the fascinating rabbit hole that is transmogrifying my web browser into my best, most flexible, most versatile tool for thinking, learning, and remembering.| thesephist.com
There are two ways to think about a multi-decade-long project, like building a company or growing a personal body of work.| thesephist.com
Since the start of the year, I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with friends and people I meet online about a common, difficult decision: in an ocean of interesting opportunities, how do I pick the few, right things that’ll take me the furthest? The good old “what do I commit to?” problem.| thesephist.com
I spent the last three weeks in Seoul, partly visiting family I hadn’t seen in years and partly taking a vacation from my usual work in my usual city in my usual context of life. While I haven’t been able to work much at all, I spent my subway rides and waiting-in-line times reading the Singularity Sky series of novels by Charles Stross.| thesephist.com
Some software interfaces are windows into collections of features. The Uber app, for example, literally opens with a screen full of buttons, each of which take you to a different screen with yet more buttons and inputs. Google Search is also built with features – inputs, buttons, and links that take you to different capabilities in the app – as the building block. In both of these cases, there are a few clear and obvious tasks the user wants to accomplish when they open the app. In the ca...| thesephist.com
I’m a hyperlink maximalist: everything should be a hyperlink, including everything that is hyperlinked by the author, everything that isn’t hyperlinked by the author, and perhaps even the hyperlinks themselves. Words should be hyperlinked, but so should be every interesting phrase, quote, name, proper noun, paragraph, document, and collection of documents I read.| thesephist.com
A big library holds a kind of strange faux-infinity, spanning across hundreds of topics with voices from millions of authors. Good libraries can contain in their finite space a feeling that, even if you read for centuries and centuries, you would never exhaust the knowledge contained within their walls, not only because there are simply so many books, but because there’s so much to learn when you take the ideas from one book as a lens through which to read others. Infinities assembled out o...| thesephist.com
There is a concept in physics called resonance. In lay terms, it describes the fact that for any given object there are natural frequencies at which the object “likes to vibrate”. A simple pendulum’s natural frequency is the rate at which it swings back and forth; if you wiggle the pendulum at the same frequency, the pendulum will swing farther and higher, but if your movements don’t match its own natural rhythm, it will only dampen the swing instead.| thesephist.com
In the last post, I shared some possible ideas for how humans may interact in the future with large language models. It focused on specific examples of both good and bad interface ideas. In this post, I want to continue that exploration, but from first principles, asking ourselves the question, “what properties should good human-AI interfaces have?”| thesephist.com
Suppose you’re a product engineer working on an app that needs to understand natural language. Maybe you’re trying to understand human-language questions and provide answers, or maybe you want to understand what humans are talking about on social media, to group and categorize them for easier browsing. Today, there is no shortage of tools you may reach for to solve this problem. But if you have a lot of money, a lot of compute hardware, and you’re feeling a little adventurous, you may f...| thesephist.com
A core research interest of mine is imagining new kinds of interfaces to text documents that are made possible by modern AI and software. I think an interesting place to look for such ideas may be interface designs for reading and writing legal documents.| thesephist.com
When I get stuck on a really hard problem, whether it’s some impossible bug in my code or my sofa not fitting through my front door on moving day, I close my eyes and … think really hard. Somewhere behind my shut eyelids and confused eyeballs, things are happening. Electricity is flowing through the vat of brain-stuff and spindly wires that somehow make up my thought process, and for a few seconds, they just kind of do their thing. Until, if I’m lucky, an answer pops into my head a few ...| thesephist.com
Humans are bad at coming up with search queries. Humans are good at incrementally narrowing down options with a series of filters, and pointing where they want to go next. This seems obvious, but we keep building interfaces for finding information that look more like Google Search and less like a map.| thesephist.com
I spent the last couple of months delving deeper into how I could integrate elements of modern machine learning with my love of building personal knowledge tools. This is a space brimming with untapped ideas and experiments to come. One open question for me is how exactly human users should interact with AI integrated into knowledge tools and creative tools.| thesephist.com
Monocle is a full text search engine indexed on my personal data, like my blog posts and essays, nearly a decade of journal entries, notes, contacts, Tweets, and hopefully more in the future, like emails and web browsing history. It lets me query this entire dataset to look for anything I’ve seen or written about before, and acts as a true “extended memory” for my entire life.| thesephist.com