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 …

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

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...

All that is solid melts into code

More computer, rather than more human.

Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy

An impassioned guide to how computers can fundamentally change how we learn and think.Andrea diSessa's career as a scholar, technologist, and teacher has b

The Making of Cursor's Icons

A year of drawing, testing, and shipping a complete icon system for the world's favourite coding agent.

The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution

This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.