iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I have tried many of these tools, but none yet produce very robust understanding of a complex change for me, even though I am an experienced engineer. But I expect these will improve…

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It's ironic (and troubling?) that with AI, that long-sought individual autonomy might be achieved without any of the understanding or expertise, and in fact by making the black box much bigger and blacker.

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In computing, that's often interpreted as a quest to spread liberatory understanding: everyone should be able to create and mold software; and/or programming should be made accessible to all. End the dependence on centrally-produced commercial software, etc.

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 12/09/2026

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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These are fantastic! Thank you so much for sharing

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 11/09/2026

I'd love to see a photo of one of your "lab notebooks" if you're willing to share!

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Andy Matuschak @andymatuschak.org · 11/09/2026

Oh, the element-wise interaction is a nice accelerator!

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Oh, no, that's very interesting! The closest I've experienced is this intense Sherlock board game. Each session of play is one mystery, but you keep all the clues and ephemera from session to session, and new sessions can depend on insights from old sessions' materials.

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Full res image: andymatuschak.org/files/Creati... Original paper: arxiv.org/abs/2606.04308 by @blue-phia.bsky.social, Sarah Abowitz, Yijun Liu, Sarah Sterman, @sh1m.bsky.social, @maxkreminski.bsky.social. My favorite HCI paper of the year!

andymatuschak.org

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Marginalia feel too subordinate to the text's structure. A separate precis feels too decontextualized. I want to see the whole without leaving the parts behind. And a material I can work with over time, as my interpretation evolves. Ideally it can somehow represent my aesthetic experience.

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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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One thing I've long found really fascinating about games, specifically, is how they're usually specified by a combination of procedure (untap, upkeep, draw…) *and* rules (if this card is in play, skip the upkeep phase…). That interplay seems really relevant to interfaces and, I think, underexplored.

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YouTube video by Ink & Switch

Oh, totally, and I'm not complaining in the least about the flood of great stuff! I'd be particularly excited to learn more about the hierarchical behavior extension cards/toolkits shown at youtu.be/4UxGijnuXEs?.... Have been thinking a lot about those topics (andymatuschak.org/tat/#composa...)

youtu.be

Introducing Patchwork-26

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* position your cursor and press Return twice to split the transcript, so you can interleave normal Markdown

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With these transcripts, you can: * hold Command and click anywhere in the transcript to start playing the audio file from there * delete regions like ordinary text; audio playback will skip those segments * copy and paste regions like ordinary text, preserving playback support

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

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So funny you mention—that's exactly what I was trying today!

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* Some very wild demos of UI composition that I definitely don't understand! * All versioned, branchable, local-first, import/exportable, offline syncable, etc Watching this feels like watching a lot of dreams (Smalltalk, Webstrates…) playing out live. Just beautiful stuff.

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* Same data, bidirectionally editable in different representations via lenses! (!!!) * All in a composable hierarchy which itself can be molded! * Demos of a hierarchical composable behavior system that I don't yet understand!

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YouTube video by Ink & Switch

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

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

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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Elaborates some earlier work by Nakai et al [1] and Mazzei et al [2]. [1] buff.ly/KQN3aZC [2] buff.ly/K91uDjB

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

It's stimulating (and very cool that it's possible), but I think it's conceptually wrong. Encourages a "write-only" stance: no good way here yet to continue "working with" this markup in context. Will keep noodling.

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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 · 07/09/2026

Yes! The Leica app supports background transfer of low-res copies over BTLE. So I added another app that runs a background activity watching the album for new photos. It transmits them over BTLE to the Instax.

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Also great, in this particular case: connecting two proprietary devices that definitely don't want you messing with them, or to talk to each other. Adversarial malleability.

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Or: between $10 ESP32s/XTEINKs/etc and coding agents, Weiser's ubiquitous computing dream starts to look both more appealing and more tractable.

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This was made possible by coding agents, of course, and it represents a role for them that I really like: enabling a world of many small, focused, connected, improvisatory, personalized devices—rather than a single slippery abstracted Everything Machine.

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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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