iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

New Livelymerge lab note: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

@daningalls.bsky.social wanted an LLM inside his Morphic world. He'd put off writing a harness. Then he realized Livelymerge was already multi-user, so the agent could be just another user. An hour later, a morph saying "Hello from Grok 4.5!" appeared on his screen.

inkandswitch.com

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Reposted by Alex Warth

Ivy Reese @spiralganglion.com · 15/09/2026

here's a peak at what i've been doing for the past few years: building a calm, playful little space for thinking, doodling, journalling, and programming with materials like ink, paper, and… flux that spreads through your notes like a fluid wait what? www.youtube.com/watch?v=GurW...

youtube.com

PlayBook: A Programmable Paper Notebook

YouTube video by Ink & Switch

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Nearly every general-purpose programming language is Turing complete. So ask not what you can do with a language, but what a language makes worth the effort. A short note on "effective expressiveness": www.inkandswitch.com/malleable-so...

inkandswitch.com

Effective expressiveness

Everything is possible. What’s actually worth the effort?

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Dragging a morph in Livelymerge used to cost four Automerge ops per pointer move. At 30 fps, that's 120 ops/sec, bloating the document forever. Even worse, the morph's movement looked jerky to everyone else. Now it costs zero ops, and it's smoooooooth.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Forgot to include the link to the lab note! www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

inkandswitch.com

A Morphic Programming Kernel

Liveness and malleability

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

This week in Livelymerge, Dan Ingalls gives us a tour of Morphic: the scene graph, halos, text editing, and programming tools of the live, malleable kernel that lives inside an Automerge document.

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Ink & Switch @inkandswitch.com · 31/08/2026

Today we're officially sharing the "Introducing Patchwork-26" video from Lab Day at this year's @localfirstconf.com We bring you the first look at Patchwork-26, the latest in our ongoing effort to realize Malleable Software, Universal Version Control, and Local-First Software.

youtube.com

Introducing Patchwork-26

YouTube video by Ink & Switch

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

My monorepo is definitely on the spectrum!

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

We put a live programming system's entire heap inside an Automerge document — every object, class, method shared + persistent. It all worked, but it was sloooow. New lab note with Dan Ingalls and @pvh.ca on the optimizations that made Livelymerge 64× faster: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

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Alexander Obenauer @alexanderobenauer.com · 18/08/2026

Friends! Our next release: Ada Lovelace's Notes on the Analytical Engine, in a unique construction, with a new typesetting, and a facsimile of Note G's fold-out. Available in September. Sign up for an email notification at the link. More details below! buddybindery.com/products/ada...

buddybindery.com

Ada Lovelace's Notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine

This book is a new typesetting and construction of Ada Lovelace’s extensive notes on, along with her translation of, L. F. Menabrea’s Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. ...

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Tags could handle visibility, yes -- but the halo would still live in the doc: every write becomes an op in the append-only history, and it needs cleanup when my session ends (even if I crash). Local state gets the right lifetime for free, and the doc stays small enough to live in, Smalltalk-style.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Everything in Livelymerge is persistent and shared — yay! Then I cmd-clicked a rectangle, and my halo popped up on your screen — whoops! New lab note with Dan Ingalls and @pvh.ca on the need for local state, and the simple mechanism that supports it: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

We put a program's entire heap inside an Automerge document. Every object is persistent and shared: you and I can live in the same running program — and change it while it runs. New Livelymerge lab note, with Dan Ingalls and @pvh.ca: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

New Livelymerge lab note! Two users each make a valid edit to a linked list. Automerge merges them exactly as designed... and the result is either a truncated list or an infinite cycle 😬 The CRDT did nothing wrong, but convergence is not enough: www.inkandswitch.com/livelymerge/...

inkandswitch.com

Convergence Is Not Enough

Getting into trouble with data representations in Automerge.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

The 2nd lab note in my series about the local-first task framework I've been working on w/ @pvh.ca is out! Topics include distributed coordination, the router takeover protocol, offline resilience... check it out at www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/no...

inkandswitch.com

Implementing a Local-First Task Framework

Queues, workers, and routers, oh my!

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I've been working with @pvh.ca on a local-first task framework at @inkandswitch.com. It distributes computation across users' computers, keeps working while you're offline, and syncs results back to everyone when you reconnect. First lab note is up. www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/no...

inkandswitch.com

A Local-First Task Framework

Industrial research lab working on digital tools for creativity and productivity.

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Reposted by Alex Warth

OhmJS @ohmjs.org · 16/06/2025

One of the biggest production users of Ohm that we know of is Shopify. They used Ohm in the Liquid HTML parser that powers their prettier plugin & VS Code language server — as well as the Shopify Admin's CodeMirror-based editor. www.npmjs.com/package/@sh...

npmjs.com

npm: @shopify/liquid-html-parser

Liquid HTML parser by Shopify. Latest version: 2.8.2, last published: 2 months ago. Start using @shopify/liquid-html-parser in your project by running `npm i @shopify/liquid-html-parser`. There are 8 other projects in the npm registry using @shopify/liquid-html-parser.

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Reposted by Alex Warth

Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt.com · 22/04/2025

what if you could model a problem in a spreadsheet, and then instantly start applying powerful *filters* to explore your space of options? that's the idea @alexwarth.bsky.social and I have been exploring recently at @inkandswitch.com ... 1/

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Reposted by Alex Warth

el @elliot.website · 26/03/2025

Last week I finished my research residency at @inkandswitch.com. Here's some rough documentation of what I worked on during that time vezwork.github.io/polylab/dist...

vezwork.github.io

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Curious to learn more? We're publishing a series of notes about our experiments. Our first note introduces how amb values work and why they improve on existing spreadsheets: www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/

inkandswitch.com

Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for exploring scenarios

Ambsheets is a research project about new kinds of spreadsheets for exploring possibility spaces and making better decisions.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

What if a spreadsheet cell could hold multiple values at the same time? That's the idea behind Ambsheets, a project I've been working on w/ @geoffreylitt.com at @inkandswitch.com. It's a new spreadsheet that makes it easier for you to explore many possibilities simultaneously. 1/2

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

So exciting on both counts!!! The book is a beauty!

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

I spent about 45 minutes making this. After I showed it to Alan, he gave me an internship at VPRI, working on the STEPS project. A couple of months later, he would be co-advising my Ph.D. Best ROI *ever* on writing a computer program. 3/3

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

The hero of this story is Etoys' "color sees" tile. When the wire's red sensor sees the color yellow, the wire turns yellow. Otherwise, it turns black. You can make AND, OR, NOT gates the same way -- it's nothing that a 5th-grader would have trouble making on their own. 2/3

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Logic Game, 2005. I made this logic circuit simulator to learn Etoys, Alan Kay & co.'s programming language for kids. I represented the state of the wires and logic gates with their "costumes" -- there is no hidden state. This makes the behavior of the circuits visible. 1/3

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

@chrisshank.com My Sketchpad triggers haptic feedback in the Pencil when the cursor snaps to a line / point / etc. and it's quite tasty! Doing it via the I&S wrapper for now... it will be cool when that functionality is available via browser APIs.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

It's a recreation of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad that I've been working on. It's not quite ready yet, but I'm making progress! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RyU...

youtube.com

Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad

YouTube video by Animation History

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Market research for a new business venture? :p

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Reposted by Alex Warth

pvh @pvh.ca · 18/01/2025

Used my Ohm JS harness to design & implement a little programming language for Finite Cellular Automata and then shipped it as a toy into Patchwork. It's really cool to be able to work on a little programming language and pop out to change the syntax without even reloading my browser.

A screenshot of a grid with rules describing Conway's Game of Life in a custom programming language alongside.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Love this!! Thanks for giving us a look behind the curtain, super interesting @rob-sheridan.com :)

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

We tried all kinds of things, but my memory is fuzzy. At some point I found a bug report and this, and the OP was told that it wasn't a bug :/ Anyway, if you can simultaneous touch and pencil interactions working in the web browser (maybe in a tiny demo?) we'd love to se it!

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

We get around this by capturing the touch and pencil events in the wrapper application (which is a native iPad app written in Swift so it doesn't have this limitation) and sending them (as JSON objects) to the JS code that's running in the WebView. cc @spiralganglion.com

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

IIRC, the browser (even when it's running in a WebView) purposely ignores pencil events when touch events are going on and vice-versa. There's no technical reason for this -- the people in charge decided that interfaces like the one you see in my video would be too confusing / error-prone.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Sketchpad running on the iPad! (This is my plug for the @inkandswitch.com wrapper, check it out at github.com/inkandswitch...)

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Fellow technologists: next time you use 'incredibly' in a sentence, consider omitting it altogether. You'll be *incredibly* glad you did.

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 21/01/2025

Constraint-Based Spreadsheet, 2014. An attempt to make spreadsheets more powerful and user-friendly by replacing one-way formulas with multi-way constraints. Check out the source code (@ohmjs.org inside!) and play with the live demo at github.com/harc/constra...

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Alex Warth @alexwarth.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

In this prototype, I also experimented with a purely textual way to bind the values of different number "tokens" to each other. All you had to do was type a variable name immediately after the number. Numbers with the same name would have the same value.

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