Andy Matuschak

Working with blips: our second system

Taylor Rogalski and I have continued our work (first described here) on… what to call it? A new programmable attention system? A garden for glimmers of interest? Taylor's striking phrase, "a prosth...

Augmenting scholarship: a proto-proposal

Thank you all for your kind notes these past months as I've supported my mother through her final stages of cancer. She passed away a few weeks ago, and I'm glad that I was able to be with her to make her final days as meaningful as possible.

I'm still very much recovering. I expect I will be for some time. So I felt deeply disoriented whe...

Trough: a plugin-generating Obsidian plugin

A few months ago, I wrote A startling glimpse of malleable software: LLM-generated Obsidian plugins. That essay demonstrated that idiosyncratic personal Obsidian plugins could be generated by Claude Code. It's janky, yes, but it's an interesting prototyping context w...

"Reading group" this Friday: examining Earth Primer as exemplar of simulations for understanding

Hi, all. Some other human-computer interaction researchers are trying to create a community for people thinking about dynamic abstractions. That is, interactive and computational representations. I think of that as things like CAD and digital audio workstations, Mathematica, etc.

One of the organizers asked me to host a session of their re...

Preparatory notes for a manifesto

A personal note: my mother has a rapidly advancing cancer, and I've been quite distracted these past few weeks coordinating her care. I ask your patience with slow(er than usual) responses and inconsistent access to audio recording gear.

I've been spending a lot of time recently trying to articulate the perspective at the center o...

A malleable reading environment

Inspired by last month's letter, I recently wrote this grant proposal for a new project to begin late this year. I decided not to submit it after all, at least in this form, but I thought you all might it stimulating, despite its brevity. (The grant had a very tight ...

A startling glimpse of malleable software: LLM-generated Obsidian plugins

One of the great dreams of the personal computing revolution was that we’d all have not only our own computers, but also our own software, exquisitely tuned to our own purposes. Instead, we got the application model. Software is expensive to build, so developers try to capture as large a market as possible, creating one-size-fits-all packages....

Tools for "tools for thought"

This talk gives a high-level overview of my work on tools for thought, and some of my design principles for working on such tools. It's adapted from an "overview" talk of sorts I was invited to give last month for a local group.

Much of the work shown here will likely be familiar to those who have followed my work for years; for those who ...

Interviewing Joe Walker about his interview research learning process

Joe Walker has a wonderful podcast doing deeply-researched interviews, mostly with people who haven't done long-form interviews before. To prepare for one of these interviews, Joe will spend hundreds of hours reading, studying, and writing. Then, a few weeks later, he'll s...

Design-in-action: book markup grid

Something a bit different this month: a look inside a piece of my design process. In this video I talk through of a recent design for looking at an overview of all my annotations on a book. I discuss its influences, criticize it, and show an iteration.

Highlights from 2024

Since many of you are new here (hello! thank you!), and since Patreon's navigation is quite cumbersome, I thought I'd gather my big 2024 projects in one place. In roughly descending order of fidelity:

• How Might We Learn?, a vision talk—on making it possible t...

  2025-01-12 08:07:06 +0000 UTC View Post

Invention, influence, and impact

A few months ago, at a conference dinner filled with academics and founders, my table-mates were gamely trying to understand my work. One asked: what am I aiming for with my output? Am I trying to influence others—e.g. by publishing, like the academics? Or am I working towards practical impact—e.g. by making ideas directly usable, like the f...

(Audio) A primitive for enabling environments; early work on machine-generated prompts

I was traveling during publication of November's letter, without my recording equipment. Now that I'm back home, I've recorded the audio version.

Kyoto is very beautiful in the fall.

2024-12-08 02:07:15 +0000 UTC View Post

A primitive for enabling environments; early work on machine-generated prompts

(audio version here)

I want to create a new kind of spaced repetition system—a new kind of enabling environment—with a different central primitive.

The need for a new central primitive

The central primitive of...

Towards scalable blip cultivation

I’ve been collaborating with my friend Taylor Rogalski on an experimental new programmable attention system. Our work is still quite early, so in lieu of screenshots and p...

What can malleable software learn from Realtalk?

A 1994 interviewer asked Alan Kay what he’s found most surprising about technology in the classroom. He complained that “computers are treated much more like toasters, [with] predefined functions… or running packaged software, and less as...

[Recording] Discussion: Dynamicland archive

(Please don't share this video publicly.)

Thank you all for a lovely discussion today! I feel that I understand a notch better after our chat.

Here are links from the chat transcript:

00:20:22.523,00:20:25.523 Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose: https://varv.projects...

Discussion: new Dynamicland archive; Sunday, September 15th @ 9AM PDT

Links: Google Meet and 2024-09-11 04:36:42 +0000 UTC View Post

On sitting down to study independently

I’ve spent a lot of time these past two years talking with serious adult learners. That is, people independently studying technical subjects (e.g. physics) in support of some creative or professional project they really care about (e.g. their startup). I’ve noticed a surprising pattern to these conversations. We’ll spend quite a while disc...

Five years of evergreen notes

Last month, I published an essay that I'd started writing five years earlier. When I began it in 2019, I knew I didn't understand the topic nearly well enough to produce the work I wanted. I still wanted to make progress, though—to articulate and refine what little I...

[Preview] Latticework: unifying annotation and freeform text editing for augmented sensemaking

Longtime patrons may remember the research fellowship I launched at the start of 2023. I spent a year working with the winner, Matthew Siu, on a new sensemaking tool. Today I'd like t...

Exorcising us of The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Now publicly available here.

If you want to make an educational technologist’s eyes sparkle, just mention “The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”. It’s a futuristic interactive schoolbook, described in Neal Stephenson’s 2024-06-06 04:32:18 +0000 UTC View Post

(Recording) Discussion/Q&A: "How Might We Learn?"

Thanks to all who joined!

(As always, please don't share this recording publicly.)

Discussion / Q&A for "How Might We Learn"; Sunday, May 19th @ 9AM PDT

One of the great things about publishing a big talk or paper is that you can use them to create high-context conversations. Instead of rambling at your conversation partner about your ideas, you can direct them at a talk which compresses several months of thinking into 40m!

So: let's discuss "2024-05-17 00:38:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Talk: How might we learn?

(Talk starts at 4:05. Sorry, Patreon doesn't let me embed videos with a starting timestamp!)

When people talk about the most rewarding high-growth periods of their lives, two themes commonly emerge.

First: they learned a lot, but learning wasn’t the point. Instead, they were immersed in some purpose with real personal meaning—lik...

A spring flood of projects

I’ve devoted the last few months’ letters to conceptual essays, so I’ll return this month to updates on my various projects. Things are happening!

“How might we learn?”

Haijun Xia and 2024-05-01 05:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post

What’s worth learning if we have AGI?

GPT-4 recently reached its first birthday. Yet I confess I’ve still not metabolized the changed world we live in. I keep stumbling into plans and beliefs I formed in a pre-LLM world. Rather than the piecemeal updates I’ve been doing, I’d like to step back and understand: what transformational enabling environments become possible in a worl...

(Recording) Discussion: What is "spatial computing" good for, and what does it want to become?

Thank you all for a very interesting discussion!

Please don't share this recording publicly.

And here's the chat transcript with some links which were mentioned:

00:12:09.188,00:12:12.188
Fabien (Utopiah): ref to the VUB research I mentioned 2024-03-04 03:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post

What does spatial computing want to become?

I spent February trying something new: a creative holiday of sorts, occasioned by the Apple Vision Pro’s release. I gave the month over to experimentation in this new medium. To free myself to play, I made a rule that I wasn’t allowed to work on any past ideas or projects. Very coarsely, I wanted to know: what new questions and ideas does th...

Discussion: What is "spatial computing" good for, and what does it want to become?; Sunday, March 3rd @ 9AM PST

As you'll see shortly in this month's essay, I've spent the month experimenting with the Vision Pro, trying to understand the spatial computing medium and what it might want to become.

I thought it would be nice to create a space here for us to discuss observations and possibilities. What questions and ideas does it provoke for you? Or, if...