New on Constraint Systems:

Branch - a collaborative collage of tree and branch photos. Take a photo and trace the flow to add to a branch.

by N.K. Jemisin

I moved a little slower through this one, mostly because I found a lot of the Nassun chapters tough (not in a bad way, just in an "I'm nervous for her" way).

There was a lot of lore to get through and resolve since it's the conclusion. Sometimes it felt like it was speeding through things, but by the end I was really happy with the full picture. Most of my questions were answered. it's still very small slices/vignettes from a much larger history. There's a world where I would have been interested to read more chapters from more perspectives, including more slice-of-life stuff, but that's also a different book.

Today I started in on blog revamp. Partly because I wanted to experiment with Matt Pocock's LLM skill workflow in a relatively conventional app (not a weird Constraint Systems experiment). Also because I've been feeling the edges of my current setup. Overall I'm thinking about how I want my software and computer to work in a world where LLMs make adding features/cheap.

Surface area

In the wave of LLM-assisted demos I think a lot about surface area. Adding features adds surface area. Particularly when the features are just kind of additional nice-to-haves. It can feel different if the features grow out of the center of the idea. That's like a tree growing out of a core. A bunch of ad-hoc features is a loosely connected collection of graphs, floating and tangling up into eachother.

Experimenting with mini-browsers limited to specific urls or domains. Clicking on external links saves them to a list (that possibly you then feed into a different mini browser?). Recorded some thoughts on youtube.

Thinking about making a browser feel more like a place (thinking of Interface Studies' video). Also thinking of the satisfaction and clarity of plugging a cartridge/disk into a system.

Put together a prototype writerdeck with the modos dev kit. Direct sunlight does work. It's a bit bulky and I should probably use one of my minimal low-profile keyboards, but I do love typing on the kinesis the most. In some other world I'd cut up and mod the kinesis body directly.

The currrent prototype.

The pieces laid out.

Experimenting with putting the embedded texts from Cosine into UMAP and then fitting to a grid. Not as glanceable as images would be but I think there's probably some interesting moves to make here.

by Durrell Bishop via Matt Webb's Filtered for that which motivates form. Described as the seed for the tangible user interface movement. I'd love to make some stuff like this.

Wikimedia concepts embedded and then mapped to a sphere with UMAP. Trying out topic clusters as continents. Not sure where it's all going.

More sphere work

by N.K. Jemisin

I'm trying to spread out the series I read so it is a testament to how good The Fifth Season is that I jumped into this immediately.

The dedication is "For those who have no choice but to prepare their children for the battlefield" and you feel that all the way through the book. The relationship between Essun and Nassun is so well developed on both sides. Clear-eyed in the pain caused eac hother but also the reasons for it. It always feels like it is reporting, rather than pleading any one character's case.

Putting together a personal RSS reader that shows the original articles. With vim-style navigation.

I saw the bowls (clinamen v.11 by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot). A perfect generative piece because you can immediately understand how it operates but the results are no less magical. It feels very like something from nature in that way.

It was nice to be around a bunch of other people who decided it was something worth making the effort to see.

by N.K. Jemisin

The first time I read this I hadn't read much fantasy. Having read and enjoyed a bunch now this still stands out. I also hadn't read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. Having that context - that the conversation about "who are you willing to sacrifice" has this history of being explored through sci-fi - added another layer.

The standout things for me are the world-building and the main character.

Experimenting more with tiling at different levels-of-detail on a sphere. Trying to make a little world.

Testing

Trying out the small Modos Paper Monitor dev kit on an overcast day at the park. The high refresh rate is impressive and seems great for writing and coding. Screen is glossy though.

I've held off on writerdeck builds for a while but it's really tempting to try and put something together with this.

Working on a branch concept

Thinking about how our computers can support intentional work

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by Jordan Ellenberg

I always feel mixed about reading popular surveys of a topic. They're never as exciting as reading something more targeted and idiosyncratic. It's a lot like listening to a greatest hits album - you sort of miss the rhythm and groundedness of living with an album or targeted investigation.

But it does give you a big picture that can help orient and bridge future reading. This book helped me connect graphs (of topics, of ideas) to the origins of geometry - and to think about how it's built on spatial intuition that we abstract out of the physical world. That is fun to think about in terms of how to represent knowledge in a spatial interface.

Video preview

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