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Tools for Thought Reading List

Here are some folks working in the broader tools-for-thought / human-computer interaction / novel computing space that I like reading:

  • Omar Rizwan (@rsnous)
  • Maggie Appleton
  • Tom Critchlow
  • Matt Webb’s Interconnected
  • Linus Lee (thesephist.com)
  • Hillel Wayne
  • Andy Matuschak
  • Fernando Borretti
  • Robin Sloan’s lab newsletter
  • Michael Nielsen
  • Spencer Chang
  • Stephen Ango (@kepano from Obsidian)
  • Alexander Obenauer (WonderOS)
  • Simon Willison (Datasette)
  • Metamuse (podcast from Muse)
  • Tools & Craft (podcast from Notion)

And some essays I find particularly rich:

  • “A Rant About ‘Technology’”, Ursula K. Le Guin
  • “An app can be a home-cooked meal” / “A year of new avenues” / “The slab and the permacomputer”, Robin Sloan
  • “The Magic of Small Databases”, Tom Critchlow
  • “Dunbar’s number and how speaking is 2.8x better than picking fleas”, Matt Webb
  • “Clues for software design in how we sketch maps of cities”, Matt Webb (particularly the section “Your memory resets when you walk through a door”)
  • “Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects”, Maggie Appleton
  • “Notational intelligence”, Linus Lee
  • “Always bet on text”, Graydon Hoare / “Against ‘text’, Omar Rizwan1
  • “How can we develop transformative tools for thought?”, Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen
  • “Giving Names to Things”, Hillel Wayne
  • “How to make memory systems widespread?”, Michael Nielsen
  • “Large Language Models as a Cultural Technology”, Alison Gopnik / “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, Ted Chiang / “Reverse Outlining with Language Models”, Maggie Appleton / “New thing! Browse the BBC In Our Time archive by Dewey decimal code”, Matt Webb / “Phase Change”, Robin Sloan
  • “Basic HTML Competency Is the New Punk Folk Explosion!”, Zach Mandeville
  • “Datasette is my data hammer”, Jeremia K
  • “Homoiconic spreadsheets: What, How & Why”, Eli Parra
  • “Stop Writing Dead Programs”, Jack Rusher / “What a good debugger can do”, Andy Hippo
  • “Cursed Problems in Game Design”, Alex Jaffe

Footnotes

  1. There’s no anchor links in Future Text Publishing, so you’ll have to search for find Omar’s essay. ↩