Andy MatuschakVerified account

@andy_matuschak

Wonder, blunder, salve, solve! Working on tools that expand what people can think and do. Past: led R&D ; helped build iOS .

San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2007

Media

  1. A ceiling-mounted retractable solution is appealing, but it seems hard to get the rigidity you'd need. Switchable glass seems promising. It's available as an aftermarket film @ ~$50/sqft. But it'd feel obtrusive to leave writing up for days, though, which is no good. …AR? :/

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  2. Replying to and
  3. Not yet, but here you go.

  4. Replying to

    Congrats, Slim!! I really like the set of choices y'all made for filters. A graceful basis. AND of ORs!

  5. Relatedly, there are lots of fun attempts at simultaneously showing the forest and the trees in dense graph visualization. The general approaches alone don’t seem to be enough, but maybe combined with some domain-specific semantics... This is a nice one:

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  6. In September we added a "retry" step to Quantum Country. If you forget something, you'll review it again later that session. Other systems do something like this, and interviews suggested that readers needed to feel seen+supported when forgetting. Does it help accuracy? (con't)

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    Someone else recommended it on this thread, and I think it was probably the most interesting reference that emerged! From my notes on it:

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    Indeed! That’s one mechanism behind the “serious use” principle, I think.

  9. A good aspiration!

  10. Roam's certainly trying! I'm curious about approaches which maintain object permanence. Most approaches, incl Roam's, are heavy on "switching the primary focus" as a core operation. I want to see more unusual ideas! Most attempts here are so boring. Here's a weird prototype:

  11. Most systems barely support multiple windows, but even if I can open multiple windows, it’s awkward to arrange them into the spatial relationships I might naturally use for physical index cards. Rather than peripheral vision, it’s like I’m wearing horse blinders and mittens.

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  12. The primary “unit” in such systems is a single highlight or note, but that’s not how I think. Marginalia have fuzzy boundaries, and I often think of a page’s markings as a single unit. LiquidText is a lovely counterexample: it works hard to display annotations in context.

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  13. Peripheral vision offers context. If I mark up a physical book then later flip through to see my margin notes, I’ll always see them in the context of the surrounding text. By contrast, digital annotation listings usually display only the text I highlighted, removed from context.

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  14. Peripheral vision emphasizes the concrete. Unread digital books and papers live in some folder or app, invisible until I decide that “it’s reading time.” But that confuses cause and effect.

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  15. Software interfaces undervalue peripheral vision! (a thread) My physical space is full of subtle cues. Books I read or bought most recently are lying out. Papers are lying in stacks on my desk, roughly arranged by their relationships.

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  16. A delightful way to visualize experimental data on subjects' long-term verbatim recall of prose passages. Rubin, D. C. (1977). Very long-term memory for prose and verse. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(5), 611–621.

  17. In a recent chat with and me about , suggested that the mnemonic medium is a new kind of catechism. We laughed, but… that's a pretty interesting lens! (thread)

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  18. All major ebook formats and viewers are unpleasant and unimaginative, but one little joy: Google Play's ebooks are (usually) viewable in both the typical shapeless "flowing" mode and *also* original page layouts. Better: they have page mappings, so you can switch back and forth!

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  19. (It's surprisingly challenging to tell a coherent story when readers will reach different "beats" at different times, or sometimes not at all! We're finding ourselves needing something like the Inform 7 skein!)

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  20. Most people feel they've "finished" a book when they read the last page (for better or for worse!). They know what it means to be "halfway done." What does it mean to "finish" a mnemonic essay? We've been working on a progress mechanic that's coupled with a storytelling system.

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