Kids home from school today so we’ve been making little robots all morning using a BBC micro:bit, MakeCode, servos, motors and a lot of cardboard. The hardware and software for this platform is so nice for kids to learn with and use. microbit.org

Micro:bit Educational Foundation

Inspiring every child to create their best digital future

microbit.org

Cartena is a #local-first research library I built for myself. Similar to Zotero but focused more on reading than on citation management. It got me thinking about the freedom of "personal software" and how it can be a platform for invention. seanvoisen.com/writing/pers...

Personal software as research platform

Small tools made by one person, for one person. Maybe this is where new interface ideas are born.

seanvoisen.com

Spent the morning at the Computer History Museum. (As one does when you're a nerd with a day off.) Was very cool to see an original Xerox Alto. I just wish it had been functional and running Smalltalk!

The new Firefox ad is gold. blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/c...

Firefox reunites meme royalty to ask what happened to the web | The Mozilla Blog

A group of familiar faces from the early web just got back together to ask an important question: What happened to the internet? Sure, there was a time whe

blog.mozilla.org

Wrote some thoughts about the weird ways working with AI changes the experience of time (mostly for the worse). seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

Lingering while the agent runs

On agentic development and resisting the pull of multitasking.

seanvoisen.com

I'm pretty sure one of the levels in Dante's Inferno involved sitting through corporate training videos on repeat.

Went to have my I-9 notarized today and the notary was required (by their employer) to use an AI chatbot to babysit them through the identification process. Why?! Completely unnecessary use of AI. Fortunately no PII went into the bot.

Just dropped my ballot in the local drop box. Vote early if you can!

Tuesday was my last day of work at Adobe, after more than 13 years total working on creative tools and design systems. It’s a bittersweet moment and I’ll dearly miss many of the people I worked with. I have a month off before my next adventure, which I’ll use to read, write, relax. (1/2)

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)

Great 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."

Wrote 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 🙂 https://seanvoisen.com/writing/design-system-ai-readiness/

What does design system AI readiness mean, anyway?

Maybe it's less about machine-legible artifacts and more about where humans stay in the loop.

seanvoisen.com

Some 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. https://moonpointing.org/blog/this-post-is-not-the-moon/

This post is not the moon

On Pierre Hadot and why it’s worth writing about what cannot be said.

moonpointing.org

RIP 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...

Wendell Berry on the benefits of writing without a computer

What do we lose when we default to crafting our written words using purely digital tools?

seanvoisen.com

Just 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.” https://moonpointing.org/newsletter/leisure/

№3: Leisure

Four fallow weeks, Aristotle's scholê, and leisure as a capacity rather than a quantity.

moonpointing.org

The 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. https://youtu.be/B7bfYkgotBM

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World | Official Trailer | American Masters | PBS

Official website: http://www.pbs.org/americanmasters | #AmericanMastersPBS #maryoliver #poetry #poem #writing Celebrate the life and career of Pulitzer Prize...

youtu.be

My 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: https://moonpointing.org/blog/in-praise-of-things/

In praise of things

On ukuleles, jukeboxes, and the joys of durable things.

moonpointing.org

Scenes from today's hike.

Starting 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.

Watching 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 🙂

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.

Best 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.

📝 AI has made it easier than ever to start things, and harder than ever to finish. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

Finishing

On perseverance and care as anti-slop.

seanvoisen.com

Remember 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.

How I explain Claude Code to non-techies: "It's a very expensive computer program for generating other computer programs."

Local 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...

tokenalysis and john henry

I 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...

backofmind.substack.com

This 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.

About 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.

Guess 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."

"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