iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 25/09/2026

Made a Printer Friend which quickly transcribes speech onto little slips of paper. Very nice for card sorts, quickly capturing open loops, discursive notes in books, etc. The speed of thermal printers and their auto-cutters is so satisfying! And dedicated mechanical key! Mm!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 15/09/2026

✍️ Playing with programmable highlighters, e.g. * green highlight on a citation -> finds and prints the cited paper * orange highlight on a claim -> prints a skeptical fact-check

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 14/09/2026

Reflecting on Illich's recent centenary: he wanted "tools for conviviality" which prioritized individual/local autonomy and situated improvisation over centrally controlled technology which could only be modified by professional elites.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 10/09/2026

I want weirder representations of "readings"—the trace/artifact produced by a reader's interaction with text(s). Here playing with a cut-up "poster-ification". Cumbersome in many ways, but interesting.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 09/09/2026

Made an Obsidian plugin that turns audio files into interactive editable transcripts embedded within ordinary Markdown documents. 🔈✏️ buff.ly/iZEVkpm

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 09/09/2026

Outstanding new work on a composable and collaborative malleable computing environment from @inkandswitch.com!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UxG... * Same data, collaboratively edited in different tools! * Same tools, themselves collaboratively edited! (cont)

youtube.com

Introducing Patchwork-26

YouTube video by Ink & Switch

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 08/09/2026

Been tinkering with annotation "fusion": annotate a paper with ink; take a photo; markup is segmented, turned into structured data, and re-super-imposed on the clean original PDF.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 05/09/2026

Rigged my camera to automatically produce instant prints, via phone (locked in pocket) as BTLE client. Also has a mode where it only prints when I "star" a photo in the camera's playback interface. So I basically get a "print" button directly on the camera.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 03/09/2026

What are your favorite unusual elements of your studio/study/office? Drown me in inspo please! I'm renting a little space for myself as an experiment: never had a creative space of my own, always a shared office or tiny corner of a shared bedroom. Excited to see what it does to my practice.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 01/09/2026

Extremely luxurious to go to the library, make a beeline for the oversize shelves, and wallow in endless gorgeous, impractical books

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 20/08/2026

Mesmerized by Dennis Hlynsky's overlapped timelapses of starlings, crows, fish…https://vimeo.com/dennishlynsky/videos/sort:plays/format:thumbnail

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 13/08/2026

Weird advantage of writing by hnad: because it's so slow, I experience stuckness less. Before I reach the end of a sentence, l've had lots of time to think about the next one. When typing I often hit a period, then stop dead, which makes the sometimes aversive not-knowing feeling way more overt.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 20/06/2026

Of friends who use coding agents heavily, the happiest seem to fall into two camps: a) Controlled: 1-2min cycles, no context switching, still in control of the code, using the agent "to type faster" b) Delegated: Vibed in the background, while something else (eg design) is their primary focus

x.com

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 19/06/2026

Delightful interactive tour through dozens of tiny muscle-memory-and-flow-promoting interface details: aresluna.org/show-your-ha...

aresluna.org

Show your hands honor for the strange power they bring you

On designing finger-friendly interactions

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 17/06/2026

Could I possibly nerd-snipe anyone into polishing something like this non-modal update flow into an official UI for Sparkle? weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/04/28/u...

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 12/06/2026

Thinking about "creative time density": how many person-hrs/yrs went into this specific artifact/place/experience? It's a reliable awe trigger for me. Performers spending 100s of hours prepping a few minutes of material for a show, a scholar spending a decade on a book, a Ghibli film, cathedrals.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 03/06/2026

A distressingly high % of the prose I see online is now AI-generated. It feels like I'm playing a coordination game in which a rising fraction of the world is defecting? Then there's also a sense of insult—like, "did you think I wouldn't notice?" And: "wait, do others not notice?" It's not subtle!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 19/05/2026

Intense vertigo thinking about @nanr.bsky.social's numbers. Based on current pledges/valuations, AI philanthropic giving would saturate an additional 300+ Arc Institutes, i.e. an extra 80K employees. Or 5,000 Institutes for Progress demanding 200K employees! nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-...

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 15/04/2026

Trying to form a theory for the widespread rise of daylight-blue and mismatched color-temp bulbs in commercial lodging. Feels like more than half the time I travel now, even at nice hotels, I flip a switch, yelp at the light, turn it back off again. That was less common 5+ years ago. Why?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 14/04/2026

HCI folkS: I'll be in Barcelona this Thu-Sun for CHI. Ping me if you'd like to hang!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 13/04/2026

⭐ New talk! Watch / read / visually skim here: andymatuschak.org/tat Coding agents might help us finally break out of two cages: the app model, which traps computing in one-size-fits-all silos; and programming as a specialization, which has crowded out cultures of imagination and domain insight.

andymatuschak.org

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

On coding agents, malleable software, and the future of interface invention

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 30/03/2026

Underrated "feature" of AIM / IRC: you could only send people messages if they were online! Sort of built-in backpressure. If you're busy, you won't sign on much, so you won't end up with a "big unread count". Feels so quaint now, like a little village. Say hi to your friends during passeggiata…

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 20/03/2026

I've often complained that interface design lacks great textbooks—still mostly taught through apprenticeship and trial/error. Interface Craft is shaping up to be a great resource, particularly for polish and craft. interfacecraft.dev The step-by-step UI crit/redesigns are a really nice format.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 11/03/2026

Yes, yes, outstanding buff.ly/8gbKvke Skimming through the figures, I saw… "IHOP Transgression". Wh—what is IHOP Transgression? Apparently their omelettes (and burritos??) contain pancake batter! As for the dark abyss: wouldn't popovers go there? (1:1:1) Or choux pastry, at 2:2:1 milk:eggs:flour?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 09/03/2026

When I'm using coding agents and LLMs extensively in some tasks, I feel way more resistance to grappling with difficult, uneven problems in others. As if I get recalibrated to expect ease, effortlessness, velocity in everything. Not good! Curious how you deal with this, if you feel it too.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 02/03/2026

Every night this house is full-on blue and red inside. I like to imagine it’s like a cold-plunge sauna, where the occupants alternate between the rooms as needed to dial in their melatonin

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 22/02/2026

Prototypers: do you still see a role for semi-high-fidelity modalities like Origami? Or just straight from sketchbook/mocks to vibecode?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 22/01/2026

Confused: exciting new UIs seem rare in large part because inventing them requires both programming and imaginative design skills. It’s rare to find both in one person, and hard to coordinate in a dyad. But then: why does this kind of invention seem more common in games?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 17/12/2025

I always forget this skew: the shortest day of the year is in a few days, but the earliest sunset was earlier this month! Afternoons are already getting brighter (well, by two minutes)

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 16/12/2025

Fond of mini index cards for outlining and synthesizing. Each is big enough to hold a real chunk, but small enough that I can get a lot on the table and "see it all" at once. Cards are nicer than stickies for this: gotta rearrange and stack.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 02/12/2025

A mnemonic for the univariate normal PDF, to the tune of My Favorite Things: One over square root of two pi times sigma E to the negative one half times z squared

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 28/08/2025

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...

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 05/08/2025

Was David Lynch describing the jhanas in his account of transcendental meditation? (from Catching the Big Fish)

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 05/08/2025

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.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 19/06/2025

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!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 17/06/2025

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…

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 02/06/2025

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?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 24/04/2025

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?

notforprivategain.org

Not For Private Gain

We write in opposition to OpenAI’s proposed restructuring that would transfer control of the development and deployment of artificial general intelligence (AGI) from a nonprofit charity to a for-profi...

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 21/04/2025

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?"

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 19/04/2025

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!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 09/03/2025

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

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 09/03/2025

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

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 23/02/2025

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?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 15/02/2025

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.

Standing under Sunday, a strange new kind of light.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 08/02/2025

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?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 04/02/2025

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??"

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Reposted by Andy Matuschak

pvh @pvh.ca · 18/01/2025

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

A sign that reads "All I want is to be someone that makes new things and thinks about them."

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