an elegy for the pencil

Our interfaces have lost their senses

We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.

Ink

Handwriting and drawing directly between paragraphs using a digital pen, stylus, or Apple pencil.

The Soul of a New Machine

The computer revolution brought with it new methods of …

Tinkered Thinking

Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine

Computer: A History of the Information Machine is a history of computing written by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray first published in 1996. It follows the history of "information machines" from Charles Babbage's difference engine through Herman Hollerith's tabulating machines to the invention of the modern electronic digital computer. A revised 2nd edition published in 2004 included new material on the Internet and World Wide Web, while the updated 3rd edition published in 2013 includes contributions from historians Nathan Ensmenger and Jeffrey Yost. The 3rd edition extends the story to include recent phenomena such as social networking and revises the discussion of early history to reflect new insights from the literature.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

A mere fifteen years ago, computer nerds were seen as m…

supernote-cli: pen, paper, and a pipe

A recent  NYT piece  argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI. It's an efficient one-two punch. If you're not brainrotting on short form video content, you're outsourcing all of your thinking to an LLM. The result is a kind of cognitive strip-mining. What's left requires active defense. For me, one way of defending that capacity for deep work is with a pen on e-ink. Whether it's annotating a paper or starting a sketch from scratch, I'm intentionally making room for focused thought. My army of clawed Claudes and Codexes will just have to wait.

Notes from my Beginner Computer Literacy Class Part 1 - Alex’s Writing Journal

Helping the uninitiated navigate this brave new digital world

How ‘Automation’ Made America Work Harder

Computers were supposed to reduce office labor. They accomplished the opposite

The rise of Whatever

This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.

under the hood

This week I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for a new generation to make things with computers. When we were talking in Berlin, Luce made a point that...