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