iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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

Vibe-coded design jigs really hit different in physical computing. Something extra magical about so casually wiring up a bunch of enigmatic OEM hardware, controlling it from an improvised UI, producing tactile traces of fiddling with dozens of sliders…

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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 · 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

I don't understand it well enough, either. I wish I did! You've got me writing about it, trying to understand better. And yes, the workflow you describe with margin.at is totally doable!

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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

Inspired by Polaroid type 55, which produces both a print you can give to your subject and also a negative you can develop. It can feel extractive taking photos of people (esp strangers), much nicer to give them something on the spot.

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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 · 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 · 25/07/2026

I think this is a big gap in software design culture. There's lots of commentary on visual design and micro-interaction, but remarkably little explicating conceptual and structural design. This section from Magic Ink is lodged in my mind. buff.ly/Bl9JwTv

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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 · 03/06/2026

Yes, that's a great point. It's funny: by comparison, I really don't mind reading amateur/unskilled writing! Reminds me of this point: nooneshappy.com/article/appe...

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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 · 13/04/2026

I extend those architectural ideas to a sketch for a new system: a malleable reading environment, designed for idiosyncratic expert use. In the demo, I show how one system can freely combine ideas from half a dozen isolated augmented reading HCI papers.

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

I demo this with two intersecting Obsidian WYSIWYG editor plugins for reading: one which transforms spoken text references to book deep links; and another which presents audio transcripts as playable, editable text blocks. Both created without direct code supervision.

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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 · 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 · 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 · 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

Most recently, I thought about it when looking at this photo of me at age 3 playing with Kid Pix. So free! No need for the art to be great! The opposite of what Alan's talking about, and yet some of my happiest childhood memories. Anyway. How do you grapple with this quote?

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

Also supporting theme-and-variation: EtherPen can fuzzy-search for a selection (including only by pitch or duration). So if a sequence is repeated but transposed or doubled in time, that'll show up too. There's also a novel minimap representation.

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

Notes (both engraved and handwritten!) can be selected and directly manipulated in pitch and time. EtherPen also allows you to select only the pitches or durations of notes—useful for theme-and-variation. e.g. copy pitches and paste them over notes in a different bar without affecting their rhythm.

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

On the "main" staves, engraved notes, handwritten notes, audio files all co-exist in continuous playback. So you can capture one section by humming, one section by drawing, and one through formal notation. (You can also take a photo and anchor it to a measure, but it won't yet be OCR'd!)

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

EuterPen can interpret handwritten music (e.g. for playback or manipulation) *without* needing to replace your ink with engraved notes. In fact, you can non-destructively switch between handwritten and engraved representations. This lets composers visually indicate what's still work-in-progress.

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

Staves can be created within a pensieve, and they work just like in the "real" score: they can be played, manipulated, and copied into the main score.

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

EuterPen relaxes many of those constraints, but it also offers dedicated scratch spaces, "pensieves", for non-linear exploration. Pensieves can be global or spatially anchored below staves (using a SpaceInk-like gesture). The pensieve can hold ink, engraved music, audio files, imagery, etc.

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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 · 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 · 15/02/2025

Sunday's approach: it shines a very bright light *up*, at a large circular diffuser, which casts the light into the room. The diffuser has a coating which really does make it feel like the sky: it's vivid blue, and the spotlight's manipulated reflection looks like the sun. A visual comparison:

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

The main problem is that existing ultra-bright lights aren't great for home use. Options include: 1. industrial lamps (ugly, poor CRI) 2. 20+ high-CRI bulbs 3. film lighting (huge, often have fans) All these will make your space feel like a warehouse unless you add bulky soft boxes .

The 240W industrial lamps we used to light our work area

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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 · 13/12/2024

Funny enough, that's actually a figure in one of my favorite silent speech papers. www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 04/12/2024

Many striking things about Hiroshima's peace park, but most surprising for me was how much was very much in the now: hundreds of fresh flowers at the cenotaph, ever-accumulating millions of paper cranes from visitors, the ever-burning peace flame.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 17/11/2024

there's two of them, and they're hard to keep straight

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 23/09/2024

I like this musical representation of fury: playing a familiar theme, but in parallel tritones (with different periods!) From this very cool analysis: thesondheimhub.substack.com/p/beans…

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 11/09/2024

Did any of you ever use the MIT Remembrance Agent? If so: I'm curious to hear how it affected your writing / thinking experience. (more background at www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/rememb… and davidamerland.com/images/pdf/Rememb…)

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 09/09/2024

Exhortation-to-self is a potent medium! (crop from whiteboard photo in dynamicland.org/archive/2015/Lab_v2)

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 07/09/2024

Big vicarious joy: “I'd open up a text editor to make this web page, and I was like ugh…I don’t want to mess with CSS. … I realized I could make a hyperphoto … This enormous wave of relief and joy just flooded over me… Instead of using CSS, I could just use paper and tape.”

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 07/09/2024

In my work with adult learners, conversation usually focuses on materials, tools, techniques—but the key problem is often trouble actually siting down to study. Learners feel sheepish about it, but they're often hesitating for good reasons that should be fixed, not forced. What reasons am I missing?

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 06/09/2024

Thinking about dependencies in Mihály's list of "elements of flow". Presumably the first few of these are prerequisites, which ~produce the rest?

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