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:

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

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