Andy Matuschak
More wonder, more insight, more expression, more joy!
Currently exploring tools that augment human memory and attention.
https://andymatuschak.org
Twitter: andy_matuschak
Mastodon: @andy@andymatuschak.org
- Confused: exciting new UIs seem rare in large part because inventing them requires both programming and imaginative design skills. It’s rare to find both in one person, and hard to coordinate in a dyad. But then: why does this kind of invention seem more common in games?
- I always forget this skew: the shortest day of the year is in a few days, but the earliest sunset was earlier this month! Afternoons are already getting brighter (well, by two minutes)
- Fond of mini index cards for outlining and synthesizing. Each is big enough to hold a real chunk, but small enough that I can get a lot on the table and "see it all" at once. Cards are nicer than stickies for this: gotta rearrange and stack.
- A mnemonic for the univariate normal PDF, to the tune of My Favorite Things: One over square root of two pi times sigma E to the negative one half times z squared
- After the critical failure of Merrily…, Sondheim thought about quitting music to make video games. I’ve wondered what they would be like. Today I found this email exchange—apparently, didactic?! Hard to imagine. www.nypl.org/blog/2022/07...
- Was David Lynch describing the jhanas in his account of transcendental meditation? (from Catching the Big Fish)
- Alan Kay once said: "Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must only work on great ideas, not good ones." Inspiring, and exasperating. I've been grappling with it for years, on and off.
- This is an appreciation thread for EuterPen, a multimodal music notation system by Vincent Cavez et al. It aims to support the non-linear process of exploration during composition. It's the most sensitive and imaginative academic HCI design work I've seen in quite some time!
- This was a nice anthology of brief interviews with artist collaborators and collectives. I've been curious to learn more about these scenes as I noodle on how I want to structure collaborations in my own work. Some excerpts below…
- We oil our butcher block countertop every few months. Over ~8 years, it's soaked up ~12 liters of mineral oil. That's a lot of volume! Where does it go?
- Striking how much this case can be made through verbatim quotes from OAI execs. notforprivategain.org Steelmanning that the proposed restructuring advances the non-profit's mission, the best I've got is "race dynamics—gotta up the stakes and win… so we can ensure things go well!" 👎 Got better?
- Probably like most people here, I get too much email, and especially too many invitations for meetings. One tactic I like for cold inbounds like "I'm working on X! Want to meet?" is: "Send me memos/designs/prototypes to get the conversation started?"
- For a few years, I've had weekly 2-3hr readings for a course. It's a startling barometer: if I'd spent a while on X/YouTube/etc in the prior 48 hours, I'll want to distract myself every few minutes. But if I've been scrolling-free, it'll be easy to settle in for an unbroken hour!
