Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026And all this is just from some cursory web searches. Maybe there’s more. After reading through everything, though, I still don’t know why the Xerox team chose Cookie Monster. (Alan Kay seems pretty active on Quora and I’m very tempted to ask .) (7/7) 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026What is going on? Turns out, there’s an article by Lucy Hunter for CLOT magazine documenting the entire cookie monster + tech phenomenon with some pretty solid cultural analysis. clotmag.com/oped/why-cookie-monster… (6/7)clotmag.comWhy Cookie Monster is the mascot of Big TechBefore eating cookies, Cookie Monster devoured computers. Contributor Lucy Hunter explains the relationship of the cookie monster with technology 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026Just this month The New Yorker published a new satirical article about AI featuring, you guessed it, Cookie Monster! www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/10/… (5/7)newyorker.comCookie Monster Tries to Meet His A.I. MandateMe confused. Me know cookie inside and out! Now me has to use A.I. for cookie work? 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026Cookie Monster also appears in the 1995 movie Hackers as the face of malware. And in a 2016 ad for Apple’s Siri. And in a Sesame Street song about computers called the Cookie Computer Song. www.youtube.com/watch?v=148Rm-KcP2k (4/7)youtube.comClassic Sesame Street - Cookie Computer SongFrom 1984. Even back then, cookies and computers went hand-in-hand. 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026Soon I learned this wasn’t even Cookie Monster’s first appearance with big tech. That happened 6 years earlier in 1967, as part of a goofy internal ad for IBM called “Coffee Break Machine”. muppetmadness.com/jim-hensons-1967-… (3/7)muppetmadness.comJim Henson's 1967 IBM Coffee Break Film: An Explosive Dark SatireExplore Jim Henson's 1967 IBM Coffee Break training film! Watch a proto-Cookie Monster consume a talking computer and explode in this rare corporate satire gem. 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026I started digging into it the other day when I learned that in 1973, when the Xerox team working on the Alto (the first PC) flipped the switch to turn it on for the very first time, they were greeted with a bitmap of the muppet’s grinning mug. I couldn’t help but wonder: Why?! (2/7) 101
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 03/10/2026Here’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) 110
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 02/10/2026I've been researching Smalltalk and adjacent history for a side-project in the evenings and stumbled on this gem in Kay's "Early History of Smalltalk." worrydream.com/EarlyHistory...worrydream.comThe Early History Of Smalltalk 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 02/10/2026Great shower thoughts in the history of computing: Alan Kay's idea for overlapping windows (invented at PARC for Smalltalk): "It occurred to me (in a shower, my favorite place to think) that FLEXtype windows on a bit-map display could be made to appear as overlapping documents on a desktop." 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 26/09/2026Wrote a few words on AI and design systems. The TL;DR is something like: “you need humans.” But in my usual way I had to pull in high-minded bullshit like cybernetics, Ashby’s Law and invisible design ledgers. Sorry, not sorry 🙂 seanvoisen.com/writing/design-syste…seanvoisen.comWhat does design system AI readiness mean, anyway?Maybe it's less about machine-legible artifacts and more about where humans stay in the loop. 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 13/09/2026Some writing only works if we let it do its work on us, the readers. New short post on Moonpointing about reading, writing, philosophy, Pierre Hadot, and words spent trying to describe the ineffable. moonpointing.org/blog/this-post-is-…moonpointing.orgThis post is not the moonOn Pierre Hadot and why it’s worth writing about what cannot be said. 022
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 01/09/2026RIP Wendell Berry, one of the world's great writers, champions of the environment, and exemplar of slow living. A few years ago I wrote about analog vs. digital tools, inspired by his "Why I Will Not Buy a Computer" which felt appropriate to revisit this morning. seanvoisen.com/writing/wend...seanvoisen.comWendell Berry on the benefits of writing without a computerWhat do we lose when we default to crafting our written words using purely digital tools? 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 31/08/2026Great write-up, thanks for sharing! We're wrestling with very similar issues (of course) at Adobe on Spectrum, and I recently built an internal tool that is very similar to your DS agent tester. Checking yours out now to compare notes :) 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 30/08/2026Just published my latest newsletter over at Moonpointing, which is a bit of a meditation coming out of a recent sabbatical on the purposes of sabbaticals, vacations, rest, and what exactly we should mean when we use the word “leisure.” moonpointing.org/newsletter/leisuremoonpointing.org№3: LeisureFour fallow weeks, Aristotle's scholê, and leisure as a capacity rather than a quantity. 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/08/2026The other night my wife and I watched the new Mary Oliver documentary and were moved to tears. I have one of her books (Devotions) and enjoy reading from it now and then, but something about hearing her poetry read out loud really hits differently. Highly recommended. youtu.be/B7bfYkgotBMyoutu.beMary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World | Official Trailer | American Masters | PBSOfficial website: http://www.pbs.org/americanmasters | #AmericanMastersPBS #maryoliver #poetry #poem #writing Celebrate the life and career of Pulitzer Prize... 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/08/2026My mini sabbatical is coming to its end. After a month spent doing lots of reading and hiking, I’ve started writing again. Here’s a new essay on a new, dedicated domain for my personal newsletter and philosophical musings: moonpointing.org/blog/in-praise-of-…moonpointing.orgIn praise of thingsOn ukuleles, jukeboxes, and the joys of durable things. 011
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 24/07/2026Starting today I'm off work for an entire month! (Mini sabbatical). Plans: Head to a cabin, read a lot of books, wander the local trails, journal and maybe blog a bit. Mostly focus on being a human being instead of a human doing. 1110
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 10/07/2026Watching my 9-year-old make a game in PICO-8 by painstakingly copying Lua code character by character from examples. Just like how I learned to code when I was a kid. He knows AI exists, but doesn't know it can write code, and I'm not telling him yet 🙂 260
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/07/2026My 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. 3242
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 06/07/2026Good question, haven't tried that! Definitely haven't gone through a process of making it robust enough to release in the wild. 110
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 06/07/2026All the processing is on the phone, so I need to have my phone with me for any of it to work. 110
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026Best thing I've built for myself with Claude Code: An Apple Watch app I use for capturing ideas while out on long walks. I talk to my watch, it takes transcription, runs it through LLM, and spits out a cleaned up version in Markdown. Saves to iCloud. All on-device AI using CoreML. 271
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026A 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. 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026Re-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. 120
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026I 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-... 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/07/2026Very 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. 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 25/06/2026📝 AI has made it easier than ever to start things, and harder than ever to finish. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...seanvoisen.comFinishingOn perseverance and care as anti-slop. 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 20/06/2026Of course, most tools bake in *some* kind of service to justify a subscription. But a lot of tools can be "bring your own service." E.g. Obsidian, where you can pay for sync, or just use Dropbox or iCloud. Small, local-first, well-built software you *own*—I hope we see growth in that space. 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 20/06/2026Could be wishful thinking, but my hypothesis is that AI changes the economics of software production such that for any app which is mostly fixed cost (i.e. no service dependency) one-time licensing per major version release is viable (albeit not as attractive to makers). 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 20/06/2026Remember when you used to pay a one-time license fee for great software, and then owned it for life? Wondering if we'll see a resurgence of that pricing model in the coming years. 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 20/06/2026I find myself wanting tight loops on design and UX, where I need to "feel" the work as it proceeds. But willing to delegate long-running technical work once I have detailed plans. Feels like oscillating focus between deep planning in batches and kicking those off, then jumping back into design. 040
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 19/06/2026How I explain Claude Code to non-techies: "It's a very expensive computer program for generating other computer programs." 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 19/06/2026Local inference remains largely ignored. You can run 35B Qwen on an M5 Max today, and consumer hardware will improve. I suspect in a few years the default will be local-first inference with escalation to frontier models as needed. Anyway, worth a read: backofmind.substack.com/p/tokenalysi...backofmind.substack.comtokenalysis and john henryI have a few things to write about, but am now conscious of what ought to be going here and what ought to be going into the manuscript… so, instead of more stuff about governance and the problem facto... 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 10/06/2026AI can be an amazing tool for improving software quality. But instead, what I often see going to market are slop imitations and excessive new features nobody asked for. The pursuit of speed over quality is going to bite us. 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 10/06/2026This should be a golden age of robust, reliable software. But so far that doesn't seem to be happening. I pointed Fable 5 at a personal Rust project last night. It identified 2 possible crashes and a few points of possible failure related to data corruption and DB writes I hadn't even noticed. 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 06/06/2026About half-way through "On the Calculation of Volume" (Book I). Quiet, slow, meditative, repetitive, deep focus on seemingly mundane details ... a welcome reprieve to the pace of *everything else* in the world right now. Great way to wind down an evening. 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/06/2026Guess I need to write a blog post about why "prototyping in production" using AI is not the panacea everyone seems to think it is for the supposed problem of "designer-developer hand-off." 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 05/06/2026This was great. Made a note to preorder. (Also I do manage software teams so I'm excited to read it.) 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 26/05/2026"Building things is easy. Evaluating what you build is hard. It requires lots of attention. Therefore, build things that you want to pay lots of attention to." Never has this been more true in software. akkartik.name/post/tmol 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/05/2026Thank you! Sorry, I just fixed my DM settings. Sent you a message. 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/05/2026I would love to talk to more academics who use these tools daily for real work. I built this tool for myself—to scratch my own itch as someone who loves reading research papers. But I'm hoping to shape it into something *you* would use. DMs open if you'd be willing to chat & want a demo. 100
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 21/05/2026Hello #AcademicSky #ResearchSky, I'm building a new, local-first library/citation manager (for fun). Zotero is great, but I've long wanted something more modern. I have a lot working: auto metadata hygiene, local LLM, full-text search, semantic similarity, plugins. But, I'm not a researcher! (1/2) 110
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 15/05/2026I use Claude Code with Obsidian for brainstorming and rough outlines (I don't like really strict outlines). Since my Readwise highlights are also in Obsidian it helps make all kinds of connections between my own thoughts and material I've highlighted previously. 010
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/05/2026Turned 45 today. It's been a little quiet on my blog, so in honor of the day, I made a little list of 45 things I have enjoyed in my life, and feel more people should try or know about. seanvoisen.com/writing/fort...seanvoisen.com45 thingsA list, in no particular order, of things I think more people should try or know about. 150
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 27/04/2026Me to every LLM: Say “it's not just a ___, it’s a ___” one more time. I dare you. I double dare you. 020
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 17/04/2026I’ve been doing exactly this. Would be happy to share and chat if interested. 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 27/03/2026Been increasingly curious how writers and academics manage reading and sources across long projects. Heard everything from "pristine Zotero libraries" to "a folder of PDFs I'll organize someday." If juggling sources is part of your work and you're up for it, I'd love a 15-20 min chat. 000
Sean Voisen @seanvoisen.com · 07/03/2026Babel-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. 110