📝 With the clock came the atomization of time through the invention of the minute. With LLMs comes the atomization of computation through the concept of the "token." Some quick thinking out loud on the parallels and differences. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

Adding to the reading queue. I work with a few designers. Do I actually want to know how they think? We shall see ... 😉

📝 New post: What started as a 60-day life habit experiment learning and writing about philosophy became something else—neither hobby nor work, but "serious leisure." Also ... polished up my site design, including better typography for long-form reading. seanvoisen.com/blog/not-a-h...

Took the day off. If you need me, I'll be over here at the local coffee shop, polishing up my personal site's design & typography, and (hopefully) finish some neglected drafts of new essays.

Excited to dig into my copy of "Context Window" by @scottboms.bsky.social. Awesome little book with thoughts on computing and quotes from Wendell Berry, Lewis Mumford, the Unix philosophy—just my kind of thing. Came with a bunch of cool stickers and riso prints too.

📝 New in my ongoing "philosophy for designers" series, some design interventions for "lingering" and contemplation, inspired by Byung-Chul Han's "The Scent of Time." seanvoisen.com/blog/design-...

📝 The third post in my ongoing series on "Philosophy for Designers" is now up. A little bit of a side quest here, looking at what the post impressionist painter Cézanne might have to teach us about philosophy and design. seanvoisen.com/blog/cezanne...

📝 Happy Sunday! New post in my Philosophy for Designers series is now up. Continuing down the phenomenology rabbit hole, looking at how the "structural form of parts and wholes" might be useful in UX design. seanvoisen.com/blog/parts-w...

📝 Just posted the first in my series on "Philosophy for Designers," which is my attempt to read, learn and share about philosophy and design in the open. A quick primer on the school of philosophy called phenomenology, written for anyone who designs digital things. seanvoisen.com/blog/phenome...

📝 Just published my monthly personal update, with a few recommended reads. seanvoisen.com/blog/recentl...

A former colleague and I have started engaging in a practice he calls "pair reading" and it's been really great. He describes it as "pair programming for intellectual exploration." Basically, it's a book club of two people. Pick a book, read it together, and talk about it as you go. That's it.

📝 Sharing my current project for after hours self-studies, a little something I'm calling "Philosophy for Designers." seanvoisen.com/blog/introdu...

📝 A quick note inspired by Frank Chimero's recent blog post reflecting on his sabbatical. seanvoisen.com/stream/2025-...

Pro tip for anyone working in a large organization: Be kind to executive assistants. Use the words please and thank you.

📝 Kicking off my second life habit experiment: "self-directed study." seanvoisen.com/blog/habit-e...

📝 Well ... it's been 30 days and life habit experiment №1 "analog evenings" has concluded. I wrote a brief follow-up and reflection on how it went. seanvoisen.com/blog/habit-e...

New (used) book haul. Continuing my autodidactic philosophy of technology studies.

📝 What do we lose when we try to measure and track everything we do? What do we gain by letting some things go unrecorded? seanvoisen.com/blog/the-imp...

🗒️ Ruminating on AI as a programmer clairvoyant seanvoisen.com/stream/2025-...

📝 Trying to get back into the habit of writing (semi) monthly personal updates. Here's a longish one, including books I've been reading (mostly philosophy), and links to a few other things I've enjoyed recently. seanvoisen.com/blog/recentl...

📝 Note: Multitasking as antiprogress. seanvoisen.com/stream/2025-...

Thanks to Byung-Chul Han, now lost in conjecture about what it would mean to live in a slow, leisurely society dominated by scent-based media instead of visual imagery.

I've been reading much more since starting my "analog evenings" habit. Added several new books to my bookshelf page. Donald Robertson's "How to Think Like Socrates" was a recent favorite. Great blend of philosophy, practical psychology, and ancient Greek history. seanvoisen.com/bookshelf/

📝 How might Socrates use ChatGPT? Some brief thoughts inspired by the recent MIT Media Lab paper on AI and cognitive debt. seanvoisen.com/blog/socrati...

📝 I'm trying a thing. Here's personal habit experiment №1: "Analog evenings." seanvoisen.com/blog/habit-e...

📝 Dear AI, help me do less seanvoisen.com/stream/2026-...

📝 "It takes a village" Just went through one of the most challenging weeks I've ever endured in my adult life. Still processing everything, but I jotted down a brief reflection on the necessity of friendships during hard times. seanvoisen.com/stream/2025-...

Using #JuliaLang to replicate the algorithm used in Rough.js for "hand-drawn" sketched lines that have a natural bowing effect. Trying out different curve fitting approaches: Blue is Catmull-Rom, Red is cubic B-spline. Think I prefer the B-spline. shihn.ca/posts/2020/r...

Good day for a gravel ride.

📝 My "stop doing list." seanvoisen.com/stream/2025-...

"I think a lot of where our good stuff comes from is actually from how the act of making the art changes us as individuals." Great interview with @jackrusher.com. A must read for anyone involved in creative technology, creative tool building or the arts. thecreativeindependent.com/people/multi...

Woke up early to bake a Mother’s Day bagel breakfast. Hand seeded by my kids.

Weekend creative coding explorations: Messing around with sketchy "hand drawn" style hatching of Voronoi tessellations using #JuliaLang with Luxor.jl

Bantam Tools releases the first edition of a magazine dedicated entirely to machine arts. Please take my money. 💸 bantamtools.com/products/mac...

In which I accidentally continue a "Vibe coding our way ..." series on my blog. This time looking at how designers are using LLM-based programming tools for prototyping, what what it might mean for "design engineers." seanvoisen.com/blog/vibe-co...

This has been an educational side-project: vectorizing scans of handwriting in #JuliaLang. From top to bottom: scan, skeletonized, path extraction, SVG fitting simplified curves with Catmull-Rom splines. Still some refinement to make on that last step.

Current reading: I haven't found many books with an art historical framing of computer-generated art, but this is one of them. Outside the work of Vera Molnár, I was unaware of the history of early computer art (1960s-70s) or clashes between engineering and art worlds. bookshop.org/p/books/when...

Strange asemic writing explorations in #JuliaLang this morning. Starting to build up my own little library of utilities for making pen plotter art. Fortunately, Julia's excellent Luxor library is so good and full-featured already.

Spent the past week camping with my family. Completely disconnected from the flood of the current news cycle, roasting marshmallows, playing on the beach, building "fairy houses" with my kids. Sometimes, the best thing you can do to recharge and gather strength is just get outside.

I'm #hiring! Our team at Adobe Design is hiring a Staff Design Engineer (aka "UX engineer", aka "design technologist") to join our Prototyping team in helping us invent the future of user experiences across Adobe's many products and tools. US-based, Pacific time zone. adobe.design/jobs/job-pos...

Some #JuliaLang learning sketches this morning. Good ole' circle packing with my own quadtree. And starting to explore asemic glyphs inspired by @inconvergent.net's earlier work. (Delaunay triangulation, toss out the longest edge of every triangle. Now I need to traverse the graph as spline.)

It's been several hours since I first watched this clip of billionaire Howard Lutnick ruminating about Social Security, and I still can't believe it. It's a rub-your-eyes-in-disbelief moment.

Current reading: Lev Manovich's "Software Takes Command" There are many books on the history of computing and augmenting human thought. This is one of the few that historically situates *creative computing* and new media. It's also free as open access! www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?do...

📝 New post thinking out loud about my own experiences with the UX design of AI-generated apps. seanvoisen.com/blog/vibe-co...

18F was dissolved because it saved money. We pushed back against contractors who tried to screw American taxpayers. We showed how cheap and good government software can be. Musk hates that. writing by Dan Tangherlini via @donmoyn.bsky.social

📝 New post about AI and programming and what it all means to just enjoy an honest day's work writing code. (Ironic for me, I know, since I haven't actually written code for work in two years. But I still do it for fun!) seanvoisen.com/blog/program...

Hi Friends, we're hiring Prototyping interns @adobe this summer, looking for talented web developers with a passion for creating amazing experiences. Apply here: adobe.design/jobs/job-pos...

Not work as "not work." A brief thought on keeping side projects fun after reading @davatron5000.bsky.social's “My little games workshop”. sean.voisen.org/notes/2024-1...

Resuming my relentless pursuit of the "perfect loaf."

A little reading roundup: The three best books I read in 2024. sean.voisen.org/blog/three-b...