a blank cursor
The cursor blinks at approximately sixty times a minute — a small, anxious heart. I have spent more hours watching it than I care to count. This is a note about that, and about why I think writing tools have been thinking about it all wrong.
A file unsaved is a thought unfinished. But autosave, done carelessly, is its own kind of violence — it makes impermanence invisible without making it safe.
Every button in a toolbar is a question the software is asking you to answer before you've had a chance to think. I stopped asking.
Hillis manages to explain computation the way a good woodworker explains joinery — not as a trick, but as a natural consequence of paying close attention to materials.
Western typography has centuries of accumulated opinion on kerning. Chinese type designers largely ignored letter-spacing as a variable until screens made it unavoidable. Now everyone has a take, and most of them are wrong.
I wanted an RSS reader that felt like opening a newspaper, not like processing a queue. These are the notes from the first two weeks of thinking about it.