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!

I wonder how it feels to be the marketer hired to work on this campaign.

It’s not an official holiday, but the first day of daylight savings time is my personal favorite holiday of the year. 😌☀️

On our block in SF, ground-floor commercial has really struggled the last decade: lots of multi-year vacancies and revolving storefronts. But! There are three gyms within a block, opened across several years, all apparently thriving. Are the economics of a gym much friendlier than, say, retail?

Some notes on sundaylight.cc, a sort of… artificial skylight? It feels good to spend the day in daylight. But that doesn’t happen when I’m working inside. Especially in the winter. So, for years, I’ve used super-bright LEDs while I work. They quite noticeably improve my energy and mood.

How would you actually pull off this HyperCard brochure’s interactive map case study? Make 2^n different cards, and have the filters navigate? Could you actually implement the filters via HyperTalk?

Lots of email clients adding little "Sounds great!" autocomplete suggestions to the reply composer, but where's the client that goes "Hey, decline this! I've seen your journals complaining about wanting to take less meetings like this! What are you thinking??"

The Signal. #sutro @illuminatethearts.bsky.social #photography

Still thinking about this sign spotted at the @inkandswitch.com get-together:

I know many software designers are fond of Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Has anyone ever actually applied CA’s analytical hierarchical graph partition to a UI project? It strikes me as more useful in concept than in practice, but Appendix A implies he really used it.

I’d like to learn more about collectives (in arts, science, letters). Myths and stories, but also boring operational details. How to effectively create 1+1=3 while supporting creative sovereignty? Best books/articles? I liked Collaborative Circles. For current examples: tell me unusual stories!

Sunscreen sold in Hawaii now has to be mineral-based, to protect reefs. Which effect is bigger?: 1. It’s easier to see when others are wearing sunscreen because of the white cast, so more people will wear it. 2. Mineral sunscreen is mildly more annoying, so fewer people will wear it.

What’s the smallest number that feels to you like it *should* be prime, but isn’t? (Answer before looking at replies please!)

Recently served on a jury for the first time (assault with a deadly weapon, etc). Some surprises: 1. I knew that conviction requires unanimity. But acquittal requires unanimity! We couldn't agree; the result is a mistrial; the DA can re-try the case if they want.

I'm in the midst of a multiday jury selection process. It's inefficient and obnoxious and often dull, but also… quite beautiful. So many earnest questions, such time investment, all to provide an impartial jury, for just one trial. It's an amazing small-huge thing humanity has committed to attempt.

AI impacts have been frustrating: I feel both responsible and pessimistic. I'm grateful for @michaelnielsen.bsky.social's work on an optimistic reframe—alignment as ongoing problem for civilization; coceleration as agentic aspiration; pluralism as aim.

Many striking things about Hiroshima's peace park, but most surprising for me was how much was very much in the now: hundreds of fresh flowers at the cenotaph, ever-accumulating millions of paper cranes from visitors, the ever-burning peace flame.

Nothing quite like the delusional optimism of hoarding a zillion PDFs before travel, so many PDFs that it would take much longer to read them than the total hours of the trip.

As an experiment, I've been using Buffer to cross-post here and on the other networks. The UI is annoyingly enterprise-y (designed for social media marketers? 😬 ), but it's unexpectedly nice to be able to write posts without being distracted by the timeline.

What are the best books on the culture and history of Kyoto? (fiction or non-fiction)

I've been noodling on: what is my "field" anyway? (Well, it's a proto-field, if anything). I recently attended a conference with a bunch of Ink & Switch and unusual HCI people and felt a strong kinship there, even though our work seems quite different on its surface. What unites us?

A friend asks: after a hiatus of a few months, how to apologize to an Anki deck? It feels "angry" now! I wrote: I totally get you. Here's the thing: the Anki deck has been mistreated—but not by you!

As We May Think frames its proto-personal-computer as a defense against rising specialization—that investigators need augmentation to keep up and to build bridges between fields. Am I wrong that in hindsight, this doesn't really seem among its primary impacts?

I like this musical representation of fury: playing a familiar theme, but in parallel tritones (with different periods!) From this very cool analysis: https://thesondheimhub.substack.com/p/beans-beans-and-nothing-but-beans

Did any of you ever use the MIT Remembrance Agent? If so: I'm curious to hear how it affected your writing / thinking experience. (more background at https://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/remembrance.html and https://davidamerland.com/images/pdf/Remembrance-Agent-MIT-Labs-Experiment.pdf)

Exhortation-to-self is a potent medium! (crop from whiteboard photo in https://dynamicland.org/archive/2015/Lab_v2)

Big vicarious joy: “I'd open up a text editor to make this web page, and I was like ugh…I don’t want to mess with CSS. … I realized I could make a hyperphoto … This enormous wave of relief and joy just flooded over me… Instead of using CSS, I could just use paper and tape.”

In my work with adult learners, conversation usually focuses on materials, tools, techniques—but the key problem is often trouble actually siting down to study. Learners feel sheepish about it, but they're often hesitating for good reasons that should be fixed, not forced. What reasons am I missing?

Thinking about dependencies in Mihály's list of "elements of flow". Presumably the first few of these are prerequisites, which ~produce the rest?

Curious: for which papers (not involving you) do you have Google Scholar Alerts set to notify you for new citations, and why? It's an interesting signal of meaningfulness: wants to be used on papers which aren't cited much, and for which you're likely to miss citations.

Request: cross-posting service for Twitter->Bluesky. I’m probably not going to post actively in both places, but would love to crosspost here to help bootstrap chatter (I do for Mastodon).