iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026

Here’s a stupid question I’ve recently become obsessed with: Why the heck does Cookie Monster seem to appear so frequently in tech culture and major tech “marketing moments”? 🧵 (1/7)

A black and white photograph from the 1970s showing Alan Kay in a laboratory setting, holding up a grid-patterned microchip design card. Behind him is a Xerox Alto, an early personal computer with a display screen showing an image of Cookie Monster.

Larry Clark, Chuck Thacker, Alan Kay, and Ed McCreight in front of the Xerox ALTO in 1973.

Screen grab of the Cookie Monster virus that appears in the 1995 movie Hackers.

Cookie monster in IBM’s “Coffee Break Machine”

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 31/07/2026

Scenes from today's hike.

A sweeping coastal landscape view looking down a grassy hillside valley toward a pristine beach and turquoise ocean. A dramatic rocky sea stack rises from the water in the distance, with rolling golden grassland-covered ridges framing the vista under a clear blue sky.

Four elk grazing on a coastal hillside covered with dried grasses and brush, with the turquoise ocean visible behind them under a clear blue sky.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/07/2026

My copy of "The Psychology of Software Teams" by @grimalkina.bsky.social just arrived. Already read the first few pages and can tell it's gonna be a good read.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026

A philosophical meditation on the importance of the physical, tangible world, and how our dwelling in the "infosphere"—the world of digital objects and "non-things"—has caused us to lose touch with that which matters most. Classic Han; short, accessible, but meandering.

Book cover for "Non-things" by Byung-Chul Han, held in someone's hand in front of a blurred bookshelf. The cover features a photograph of the New York City skyline at sunset with warm orange and pink light illuminating the buildings against a dusky sky. The title "Non-things" appears in elegant serif font at the top in black text on a cream-colored background.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026

Re-visited The Dispossessed for the first time after at least a decade. Enjoyed it even more during my second read; remains one of my favorites by Le Guin.

Book cover for "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K. Le Guin, 50th Anniversary Edition, held in someone's hand in front of a bookshelf. The cover features bold abstract artwork with geometric shapes in red, blue, and green, depicting stylized human silhouettes against a dark background with radiating lines. The author's name appears in red at the top, the title in gold text in the center.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026

I first encountered the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen on the Dialectic Podcast and immediately bought his book, The Score. Loved it—a philosophy of games that gets you rethinking how you make choices and measure your own success in life. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF1-...

Book cover for "The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game" by C. Thi Nguyen, photographed on a wooden surface. The cover features a bright blue sky background with white clouds. Three white circles are arranged vertically down the center, containing the title, subtitle, and author name in white text.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026

Very behind on maintaining this thread. Here's a giant batch update ... Rise of the Machines: Comprehensive history of cybernetics and its influence on modern computing. While I was familiar with much of this history already, it was a welcome refresher. Worth a read if cybernetics is new to you.

Book cover for "Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History" by Thomas Rid, photographed on a wooden surface. The cover features a black background with large white sans-serif title text. At the top is a glowing yellow-green orb against the black. Below the title is a small waveform icon. The subtitle appears in golden yellow text.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/03/2026

Babel-17 is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dramatized as space opera. Since I've been on a linguistics kick I thought I'd try it, but I honestly didn't care for it. It's 60s new wave era with sexism and a bit of Asian fetishism tossed in. Flat story. I finished it because it's short, but ... meh.

Book cover of 'Babel-17' by Samuel R. Delany on a gray textured surface. The cover features a black background with 'Winner of the Nebula Award' in orange text at the top. The title 'Babel-17' appears in large white italic lettering in the center, with the author's name 'Samuel R. Delany' in orange below. A geometric abstract design in orange and gold fills the lower portion of the cover, consisting of interlocking angular maze-like patterns that suggest complexity and linguistic structure.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 23/02/2026

"Embassytown" features an alien species who only understand language with sentience behind it. A world in which LLMs would be meaningless. Speech is thought; linguistic "ladder of reference" as absolute. I read it simultaneously with "Language Machines" and it was a great fiction/non-fiction pair!

Book cover of 'Embassytown' by China Miéville on a wooden surface. The cover features a white upper section with the author's name in red text and 'New York Times Bestseller' at the top. Below is a gradient transitioning from grayscale to black, depicting a dense crowd of silhouetted figures, with an illuminated alien cityscape of tall spires glowing in gold at the bottom. The title 'Embassytown' appears in large white letters across the dark section. A quote from Ursula K. Le Guin reading 'A fully achieved work of art' is featured near the bottom.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 22/02/2026

Most thought-provoking book on modern AI I've read. Gets beyond the hype and nay-saying and debates about sentience and cognition to what LLMs actually are: machines of language, culture, ideology. I admit I only understood ~40% of the book, but enough for this to be a transformative read.

Book cover of 'Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism' by Leif Weatherby held in a hand, displayed against a bookshelf. The cover features a cream background with a minimalist design of two gold/mustard-colored oval shapes connected by vertical line patterns. The author's name appears at the top, the title 'Language Machines' in large serif type in the center, and the subtitle below. The background shows a partially visible bookshelf with various colorful book spines including blue, orange, and red titles.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/02/2026

After finishing "A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" I figured I'd keep going. The sequel is less space opera and more bildungsroman / phenomenology of AI (somehow I unintentionally keep reading books about AI experiences). Enjoyed this one too, but a very different kind of book from the first.

Book cover of "A Closed and Common Orbit" by Becky Chambers, laying at a slight angle on a wooden table. The cover features two silhouetted figures against a cosmic backdrop with a large orange planet and distant star.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 06/02/2026

My journey through the Calvino oeuvre continues. "If on a winter's night a traveler" is absolute genius: You get 10 novels for the price of one, a kind of labyrinthine, playful metafiction exploring the form of the novel and the very experience of reading itself. Loved it.

A hand holds a minimalist paperback edition of Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" against a bookshelf background. The cover features a geometric design: a dark metallic pentagon or hexagon with thin radiating lines suggesting light or pages fanning outward. The author and title are handwritten in elegant script. The Mariner Classics imprint appears at bottom.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/02/2026

Finished in January but forgot to add it. Everything I’ve read by Becky Chambers is fun SF that makes you feel optimistic for the future of humanity. "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" is no exception—great story, rich world building, likable characters, tackling issues of politics & gender.

Book cover of 'The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' by Becky Chambers on a wooden surface. The cover features a dark space background with a glowing planet in the upper left and an illustration of a spacecraft in the center-right. Bold yellow-green lettering displays the title across the cover. A yellow circular badge in the upper right indicates it is a "Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series." A quote from Ann Leckie praising the book as "Great fun!" appears near the bottom.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 18/01/2026

Continuing my Calvino kick with "Invisible Cities." Reads like a dream; beautiful and strange, like looking at an N-dimensional polyhedron through prose. Each chapter is a tiny poetic glimpse into a new world. Feels like it may have inspired Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." Will have to revisit.

Holding my copy of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" in front of my bookshelf. The cover is plain white with a single bird in flight, drawn in the distance as a small line art "V". The title and author's name are written in simple black cursive.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 11/01/2026

Calvino's "The Complete Cosmicomics" Wild and imaginative short stories that retell scientific phenomena (e.g. formation of the moon, expanding universe, mitosis) in the first-person perspective of an always extant-being named Qfwfq. Especially loved The Distance of the Moon and The Light Years.

The cover of Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics features a simple line drawing of planets in elliptical orbit inside a gray, irregular circle. The text is in hand-written cursive on a white background.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 06/01/2026

Whenever I sit down to write, I always discover I don't know what I thought I knew. Writing is both a process of thinking and of learning, that's the pain of it. Italo Calvino, from his essay "Why Do You Write?" in which he called writing a "violence against myself."

It’s not the desire to teach others what I know or think I know that makes me want to write but, on the contrary, the painful awareness of my incompetence. So would my first impulse be to write in order to pretend a competence I don’t have? But in order to pretend, I have to somehow accumulate information, notions, observations, I have to succeed in imagining the slow accumulation of an experience. And this I can do only on the written page, where I hope to capture at least some trace of a knowledge or wisdom that I just touched in life and immediately lost.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/01/2026

First up: "Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro A beautiful and poignant phenomenology of AI in a dystopian future. I loved it more than "Remains of the Day" to be honest. This is the second novel in a row I've read that features AI as narrator (the other one was "We Computers" by Hamid Ismailov).

The cover of Klara and the Sun is a bright orange red with a square cutout that reveals a teal page underneath featuring a single, offset yellow sun.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 28/12/2025

Suzuki Roshi with some words of wisdom that I always feel are very apt this time of year. If you're planning a new habit, taking on a new practice, going for some resolution in the new year, do so with your "whole body and mind." "Burn yourself completely."

... when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 24/12/2025

My reading stack for the holidays: Continuing through Yuk Hui’s “A Question Concerning Technology in China,” revisiting Borges, and hoping to crack the cover on Frederic Gros’ “A Philosophy of Walking.”

A stack of the aforementioned books on a wooden table, along with a plain journal and a Rotring Isograph pen.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 10/12/2025

I already gave my book recommendations for 2025, but if I could add 1 more it would be this: "We Computers" is an Uzbek novel about a French programmer-poet who writes an AI system for generating Persian poetry. Beautiful Eastern literary perspective on tech mostly dominated by Western discourse.

The cover of Hamid Ismailov's "We Computers" features a Persian poet with a bright pink computer framing his head.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 17/11/2025

Adding to the reading queue. I work with a few designers. Do I actually want to know how they think? We shall see ... 😉

The cover of the book "How Designers Think: The Design Process Demystified" by Bryan Lawson. The cover is solid red with the title in white all caps lettering, and the subtitle in black all caps lettering.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/11/2025

Excited to dig into my copy of "Context Window" by @scottboms.bsky.social. Awesome little book with thoughts on computing and quotes from Wendell Berry, Lewis Mumford, the Unix philosophy—just my kind of thing. Came with a bunch of cool stickers and riso prints too.

Cover of Context Window by Scott Boms sitting on an ash-colored wood plank background. The booklet features the words "Context Window" printed twice vertically in black and white, with the white background disintegrating towards the bottom into a series of falling square blocks.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 06/08/2025

New (used) book haul. Continuing my autodidactic philosophy of technology studies.

3 books laid out on a wooden backdrop: Technology and the Lifeworld by Don Ihde, The Whale and the Reactor by Langdon Winner, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life by Albert Borgmann.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 20/07/2025

Thanks to Byung-Chul Han, now lost in conjecture about what it would mean to live in a slow, leisurely society dominated by scent-based media instead of visual imagery.

A scent is slow. Thus, as a medium, it is not adapted to the age of haste. Scents cannot be presented in as fast a sequence as optical images. In contrast to the latter, they can also not be accelerated. A society dominated by scents would probably also not develop any inclinations towards change or acceleration. It would live off its recollections and its memory, off those things that are slow and long-lasting.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 26/05/2025

Using #JuliaLang to replicate the algorithm used in Rough.js for "hand-drawn" sketched lines that have a natural bowing effect. Trying out different curve fitting approaches: Blue is Catmull-Rom, Red is cubic B-spline. Think I prefer the B-spline. shihn.ca/posts/2020/r...

Two horizontal lines drawn roughly by offsetting endpoints, the midpoint and three-quarters point and then fitting different curves to get a not-quite-straight line that looks hand drawn.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 26/05/2025

Good day for a gravel ride.

A view from my bike, looking out across the handlebars. A very straight rutted gravel road extends to the horizon under a cloudless blue sky in Marin County, California. Green and brown fields border both sides of the road.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 11/05/2025

Woke up early to bake a Mother’s Day bagel breakfast. Hand seeded by my kids.

A round plate with six seeded and plain sourdough bagels sitting on a walnut wooden table.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 04/05/2025

Weekend creative coding explorations: Messing around with sketchy "hand drawn" style hatching of Voronoi tessellations using #JuliaLang with Luxor.jl

A smoothed Voronoi tessellation inside of a rough circle, where each polygon in the tessellation is filled with imperfect (sketchy) black hatch lines at different angles.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 18/04/2025

This has been an educational side-project: vectorizing scans of handwriting in #JuliaLang. From top to bottom: scan, skeletonized, path extraction, SVG fitting simplified curves with Catmull-Rom splines. Still some refinement to make on that last step.

The handwritten word "would" in different processes of vectorization.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 12/04/2025

Strange asemic writing explorations in #JuliaLang this morning. Starting to build up my own little library of utilities for making pen plotter art. Fortunately, Julia's excellent Luxor library is so good and full-featured already.

Lines of black "scribbles" that appear to look like cursive handwriting in an indecipherable language.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 12/04/2025

Spent the past week camping with my family. Completely disconnected from the flood of the current news cycle, roasting marshmallows, playing on the beach, building "fairy houses" with my kids. Sometimes, the best thing you can do to recharge and gather strength is just get outside.

A green tent glows from inside against a deep purple sky at dusk.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 22/03/2025

Some #JuliaLang learning sketches this morning. Good ole' circle packing with my own quadtree. And starting to explore asemic glyphs inspired by @inconvergent.net's earlier work. (Delaunay triangulation, toss out the longest edge of every triangle. Now I need to traverse the graph as spline.)

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/03/2025

Current reading: Lev Manovich's "Software Takes Command" There are many books on the history of computing and augmenting human thought. This is one of the few that historically situates *creative computing* and new media. It's also free as open access! www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?do...

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 24/12/2024

Resuming my relentless pursuit of the "perfect loaf."

Fresh-baked sourdough batard sitting on a wooden cutting board on a walnut wood table.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 22/12/2024

Rainy day hike was just what I needed to clear my head and think through some personal challenges. Long, meandering walks remain the best “tool for thought.”

A foggy overlook of some lichen-covered oak trees and rolling hills.

A trail leads to a wooden bridge over a small creek in the woods.

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Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/12/2024

From “Augmenting Human Intellect,” Engelbart on augmenting human intelligence as a form of artificial intelligence. I’d argue this should be the only point of AI—to augment, not replace.

In amplifying our intelligence, we are applying the principle of synergistic structuring that was followed by natural evolution in developing the basic human capabilities. What we have done in the development of our augmentation means is to construct a superstructure that is a synthetic extension of the natural structure upon which it is built. In a very real sense, as represented by the steady evolution of our augmentation means, the development of "artificial intelligence" has been going on for centuries.

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