There Is No Sound Of The 2020s. Yet.

A very long read, sometimes a bit hard and full of insider words, but I feel there is something that can be said about general culture here.

Flash Boys 2.0

I am coming back and back again to this paper when I think about agent coordination. The order of events will happen a lot more and it opens up a massive space for novel markets.

Shader based Website

Earlier this year I had some exploration around shader based ui, they made it....

Designing Programs

Thinking a lot about typography lately, so pulled that one from the library again.

How to render the Sky

I live for those types of blogs. Nerdy and you learn something.

Running on Railroad Time

Someone asked me to clarify my argument why Agents will rely to learn from Cryptos past and so I started to argue time again. This a great short piece on how standarization created productivity.

On Kits

I have been thinking about tractors a fair bit, but it did not occur to me the Kit industry, which I can't unsee know. Hacking comes before Productivity Growth as a measurement.

Tasteslop

I was just a few days ago thinking again abut Emilie Segals essay on Umami and how much it fits the taste discourse, well she just released this amazing follow up.

I Was an Enthusiastic Early Adopter of AI Scribes. Here’s Why I Stopped

This is a great read. What I took away and I see in my own practice too is that the medium is the message becomes the mode of thinking. I have seen that myself this is my I am actually trying more and more going back to manual thinking labor.

Social Phenomena in Text Based Virtual Realities

Probably something I should read deeper?

How to make fighting games work.

I am exploring again and again the idea of what is collaboration or better how to make collaboration work and it makes me think a lot about how much awesome thinking goes into fighting games.

The Rise of the Systemic Game

Great intro into the concept of systemic games overlaps nicely with Jaymos Hard World ideas, but also agent harnesses

Cycles of Subculture

Have this currently in an open tab after glancing over it.

Withered Technologies

File Over App is one of my favorite mantras, in terms how I think about longevity. And it overalps nicely with Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawas Supernormal. This is another take on it from Nintendo how using existing cheaply available battle tested technology reimagined can be an innovation engine.

AI solving Puzzles as Entertainment

Frank Lantz (genius behind one of my favorite games (Paperclip)) wrote a blog post about making a puzzle for AI to solve. And he mentioned one of my absolute favorite Youtube Channels Cracking the Cryptic, which is the most wholesome way of someone solving the most amazing Sudokus. Which really made me think how much entertainment is in observation of doing a hard task.

The Houshing Theory of Everything

I haven't fully digested this one but I think there is a version of this that would make a great artefact if it would be rewritten about the state of the internets social spaces.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I am just starting reading this book but the more I look at the current shape of some of our digital spaces I kind of have a feeling we have an urban planning challenge that is largely unaddressed.

Commit Mono

I know we all love Berkeley Mono but damn I like this one too.

AI should be collaborative.

Maggie Appleton with another banger. I have been thinking about this too but they actually are working on it. Absolutely loving it. Great read.

Creative Explosion

Stumbled upon this paper and really like how it leans in to my favorite aspect in the past of working collaboratively in Figma. The sprawling mess of just going forward in a messy way.

Math

I definitely had a window seat in school and I need to relearn a ton of stuff lately. Also I feel AI has been a massively humbling experience. I just dont understand many things well enough. So I just saw this online which is just an absolutely beautiful site on math. Need to learn more math again.

Farnsworth House

One of the things I struggle continously right now is that I seem to design the same thing over again, while parts of that are great learning, I do think on the infrastructure side its just dumb, so just on my run today I started to think about the Farnsworth House by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and it made me think what if there is a bit more of this approach to my code generation project. Like what if I can simply have "Farnsworth Structure" ready to use. Probably it already exists.

Third Spaces and Third Brains

I was just prototyping a bit around just another markdown editor and I got thinking okay I have my primary brain, and its really en vogue to have a second brain Obsidian, but what about a third brain. What if third brains are a bit more like public squares or third spaces.

Typesetting for real online

This github library is going fairly viral right now for allowing you to set type better. Need to look more into it but looks very promising.

Antimemetics

Had this book this morning in my hands again. Honestly a lot of it could have been an essay, but its a fast read. Core idea that is worth thinking after it a lot about is real though. Why do certain ideas spread and others don't? I think about is a lot lately, especially when you star to see how ideas propagate online. Someone posts a good idea, and it gets adopted left and right. Makes me wonder whats the concept of ownership at all. =)

Anti Fashion Manifesto by Li Edelkoort

I got this even in printed form. But I was thinking about this morning again as I feel more and more digital things are just fashion fashion by now. So probably a worthy read with a lens shift towards digital product design.

WhomadeWho

Need to focus a bit so here is a great set to clean up your desktop.

Veritaserum: ASML EUV Machines

I was watching yesterday to fall asleep this video again, and I am in this awe about how we could manage to create such a complex machine, the science and thought that had to get into this, and the naive belief to pull it off. I kind of think EUV Lithography is kind of a world wonder. That said reflecting on my current "vibe coding" journey I see this friction on myself to really struggle to see something through to the really end. Wonder how we get this flaw out of our system.

Garrys Mod

Kind of wild how I never dove deeper into Garrys Mod. Garrys Mod was a Source Engine editor to just mess around with, but just going down that rabbit hole its a wonderful example how a minimal playground with a few distinct rules / boundaries can spark many new approaches, communities etc.

Adventure Playground Zine

Found this older zine or magazine about adventure playgrounds. The part that made me most curious was actually a piece about the "play workers" the adults in the room and their rule as "supervisors" but also how they are should not be to prominent. That part was rather clear to me, I did though liked the idea of play workers as an act of maintenance a lot. The other thing this made me think on my quest to understand the concept of digital adventure playground was with agents is my role to be the one of the play worker or shouldn't an agent be in the role of the play worker.

The Politics of Playground - A History

Okay this is a fun short read on the history of the playground, if you squint at it you almost can see the AI debate we have to do, also need to read up on the McDonaldisation of the Playground.

The History of Adventure Playgrounds

I am deeply obsessed with playgrounds right now, and part of that is learning more about the history of the junk or adventure playgrounds so I found this quote here “Children at the ages or 4 and 5 years should not be imprisoned in a dirty airless schoolroom, at such a young age they should have play and movement, especially in the fresh air”. And it makes me wonder how do I design tools and spaces for the digital worlds that feel like adventure playgrounds.

The California Ideology

To be honest I need to reread this again, so right now it's just an open tab among many, but I think it is worth revisiting as I found it in the past a great provocation to understand some of the evolution of Silicon Valley.

Are you an anarchist.

Another good one from Graeber about his own definition of Anarchy. Which frankly is quite nice framing.

What's the point if we can't have fun.

I have a sweet spot for the work of David Graeber especially on the concept of Bullshit Jobs and his provocation that before coinage the world was not an uncoordinated place, and that debt and credit systems existed way before coins. That said this is probably one of my favorite ones of him. Wondering do animals play? I had lately a couple of really fascinating conversation around what does conciousness in terms of AI means with people way smarter then me, but it made me think about this, does AI play, and if so could we even recognize it.

Thoughtless Acts

To be blunt it was not Change by Design that made IDEO interessting to me but Jane Fulton Suris book Thoughtless Acts, the small ways how people use, abuse, or hack their environment to make it work for them. Think the chair wasn't designed to hold your clothes (except if you are Simone Giertz), but works super awesomely well for that. Sadly the examples are not there in this PDF, but thats just a recommendation to get a copy. But since I was chatting with someone today about digital transformation and AI adoption I had to think a bit about the reality that there must be 100s of really smart small AI uses that never bobble up, because they are to obvious.

Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang

Found a .PDF of this short story of Ted Chiang and I find it amazing source of inspiration around the agentic hype we are going through right now. Short, bitter sweet. Recommended.

A Book of Lenses

Have been asked lately what are great books on Game Design and I think Pete introduced me to this one and its a great book to read, it's also a great book to think about Systems Design too. But I mean I see them very much as the same thing. =)

Google Fonts selected by Smith and Dixon

Typography is something I can have an opinion on but are really not the best out there to select them. That said when working on free things, I often default for free and opensource fonts and because I don't know better I often end up just choosing Inter, which is lazy as fuck. So love this file here, that gives a bit more option.

Umami Theory by Nemesis

It's kind of annoying to be in social media these days and have every few months the taste debate to appear again, we can message in DMs, about this but I do think there is something about this wonderful memo by Nemesis about the concept of Umami and memetics that is worth to think about.

Supernormal

This is a book based on an exhibition for Salone Del Mobile in Milan by Jasper Morrison and Naoto Fukasawa. It's one of my go to recommendation when asked about favorite books on design. The concept is rather simple in theory but opened up quite a bunch of good question for me through the years. Their thesis is that over time designed objects seem to collapse to what they call a supernormal state. It's design objects that are so common we do not consider them design anymore. I have been thinking about this a lot lately how do you design things that are initially as memetic as possible to catch on but then rather easily dissolve into becoming supernormal.

Nolen

This is one of my favorite you can do really cool things that nobody did so far prototypers out there. Lots of small game and play experiences that add a twist on tools or concepts around us.

On Sidewalks

Okay today I learned that sidewalks are actually older than cars, kind of makes sense. But that their purpose has shifted from a communal are to a space for pedestrian walking only. Great article... "As automobiles proliferated in the early twentieth century, newspaper editorials blamed pedestrians for accidents because they defied the rules of the road and walked into moving vehicles. “The dumb pedestrian really is pretty dumb,” a columnist from Westways magazine wrote in 1937. “As a pedestrian the average man is not ver y bright…. As an incorrigible individualist, the pedestrian is intellectually inferior to the motorist in his traffic conduct.” As early as 1912, urban infrastructure trade magazines such as American City advised widening streets at the expense of sidewalks. Pedestrians were banned from streets to make room for cars, and a myriad of activities were banned from sidewalks to make room for pedestrians. "

Jaywalking

I am currently down a rabbit hole, where I am exploring the thought that the impact of agents might have some resemblance on the introduction of the car. So I got lost at the rabbit hole around Jaywalking. It's quite fascinating how cars became the primary user of roads. Which makes me think a lot about how agents became the primary users of our digital roads.

Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary

We went yesterday to see Project Hail Mary based on the same name book by Andy Weir. The movie was great, cut obviously a bit of the book but not in the worst ways. It's not like Arrival level of amaze amaze but its surprisingly good and definitely capture the optimistic vibe of the book. I randomly picked this book some time last year and went through way to fast. The reason why I like the book and this movie is probably just down to the fact that I don't really remembered when I read a Sci-Fi story that kind of left me optimistic. Also man Gosling is a perfect casting.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

I read not enough fiction these days but this one is one of my all time favorite.

Websites as Narrative

I absolutely adore those types of web experiments, not much to say than just click through it. Also love the visuals.

Great Single Purpose Website to see every single picture the Mars Rover Curiosity since 2012 by Saint Laurent Del Rey.

iAWriter Quattro

Probably my favorite go to font to use day by day. Also still one of the best designed tools out there but the font with variable weights is just such a nice one to use for any productivity tool.

Why People Play Alone in Multiplayer Spaces

A great talk about how to design single player experiences in multiplayer environments.

Late Night Youtube Rabbit Holes

There is something very comforting about this channel, and I absolutely love sudoku, especially once I realized there is high overlap to the wave function collapse function there, anyway this Sudoku and the youtuber itself are absolutely amazing and it's just a joy to watch someone solves a problem.

Wave Function Collapse Algorithm

Sometimes I feel there is this thing about the creative process where at the start you are in this quantum like state where ideas, thoughts, early experiments, insights, hunches all coexist equally, and then through play / interaction over time it collapses into its final form. Which to my surprise is not that much different from the wave function collapse function that is heavily used in some games to create maps and dungeons. Anyway great video how to explain it here.

Paperclips

I finished this game more than once. You probably shouldn't it takes depending on your choices a bunch of hours or you could look yourself into an annoying loop. Paperclips though is probably one of the greatest way to experience some of the AGI acceleration fears.

Steve Ruiz / tldraw

I am a big fan of the work of Steve Ruiz, to be honest I have not really used tldraw yet, but I think it is in a couple of tools I have played around with. But I absolutely love the way he / his team is continuously prototyping in public. There is something about the usually lightweight but still complex and for me thought provoking smaller ideas they publish that make my head spin. I love this kind of what if, maybe, oh look we made it vibe.

The Wild Web of Brocoli

I am currently deep back into the world of video game mods. Think how Warcraft 3 is a starting point for the entire moba genre. So I find it quite fascinating the way we have breed plants over the years is surprisingly similar to the way we think about mods and forks, etc.

Vera Molnar on Randomness

I don't know how often I have referenced this video but for me this is one of my favorite ways how to think about designing with digital tools. Vera Molnar talks about her practice and the importance of randomness, what a great mind.

100 Game Mechanics

I generally think that the Jesse Schells Book of Lenses is probably one of the best starting point for game design. That said I stumbled upon this video on Youtube by Game Maker's Toolkit which is a phenomenal channel itself, that captures a lot of great thought starters for ideating game mechanics and concepts.

How to work better

One thing I love to do when playing with AI I think i did that even before skills became a thing was writting manifestos. But to be honest there are not many that I like as much as the one from Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Best part is when I take the train to the airport I actually drive by it.

Yumiko Iihoshi

I kind of have a sweet spot for beautiful pottery and I found Yumiko Iihoshi while traveling Japan this cup is probably my favorite right now.

Serpetine Flow

Something darker but how to design a more humane slaugther house.

A great essay on time.

I have been thinking a lot about how online there is no time in theory, but we continuously invent industrial systems to change that. One of the most persistent thoughts I keep coming back lately is that the reason why blockchains are so alluring is because they enable consequential time systems in non linear non local spaces. Worth a read.

Design Noir

I remembered when I first read this book I was deep into design is what Dieter Rams says. Ten principles is all you need. But reading this book was kind of eye opening first in how design can be a tool for conversation but also how we develop relationships with objects. There is a story in there about a table, if I remember correctly that wants to be aligned with satellites, and it becomes a beautiful anecdote about how we suddenly start to care about the tables connection to their satellite, so we might even end up moving it outside, just so it has it a little bit easier for a moment.

Athmosphere

This is one of my all time favorite books on design. It's a fairly short read with essentially a few lenses how to design atmospheres. How lights, textures, etc. all are equal and part of it. It's like cozy reading where you walk away inspired.

Great Mind

Really love Maggie Appletons work. Some really great thoughts that deeply resonate with me. Recommend Dark Forest as a starting point.

Why Modding Matters

A great recap on how the ability to mod WarCraft 3 allowed entire new game genres to emerge. I remember working on a project in 2020 when we talked a lot about Adversarial Interoperability a concept that Cory Doctorow was talking about back then. But I think games are a prime example to showcase the power if someone can engineer on top or beyond an existing tool. League of Legends and DOTA are offsprings of WarCraft 3 which makes me think a lot about how do we engineer systems and playgrounds that allow for this type of emergence. It kind of fits into my belief that Games emerge from Playgrounds and if successful surpass the initial playgrounds impact.

1500 Archers

Age of Empires 2 is still by far on of the best games ever. So I love every time I find out more and more about its technical lore. This is some great thinking about the multiplayer challenges for RTS games. Which I feel is also a great analogy to coordination challenges in multi-agent systems. It seems relevant to me to look more into the different pros and cons of P2P communication and the switch we witnessed through centralized servers. Somehow I feel thats exatly one of the question that we are currently explore with agentic systems. Is there a centralized coordination / sequencer or is it a P2P coordination question.

How to order events.

It's wild to me that one single mind has started to great movements that can't stand each other. Leslie Lamport both is a source of inspiration to the local first movement with this paper that I feel is a fundamental piece on the concept of CRDTs and his writting on the byzantine problem became a foundation for blockchains. I mean yeah both are coordination problems. But still great paper. This also sparked a lot of my thinking around the fact that Blockchains are essentially just industrialized time machines for the digital realm.

Protocols not Platforms

Honestly this paper has become an essentially node in my concept of design. How do we balance the powers of platforms and protocols. How do we introduce the accessibility of platforms to the potential of protocols? At the core it's about how do we open social media from locked controlled algorithms but if you squint a bit it's a great blueprint to think about anything coordination and communication related.

Shapeshift by Silicon Jungle

I love the exploration of Silicon Jungle and his side project shapeshift. I can't really pinpoint why but there is some slightly different approaches to generative , procedural design with AI that I love a lot.

Brian Eno and Will Wright have a conversation.

A wonderful conversation by two favorites of mine talking about procedural and generative world. Ambient creation, and time. I mean seriously what do you want more.

The PIG book

This one was one of Julies white whale book. Took me forever to find but it's an amazing book that explores how any part of a pig is actually used somewhere. Think beyond bacon, where do parts of pigs show up. It's kind of wild how easy it is sometimes to forget how well oiled our machine already and how hidden so much from our common understanding of reality is too.

The Toaster Project

I had the luck that Thomas Thwaites teached a master class in Kolding 2014 at the designskole so that's how I heard the first time about this project. The toaster project was a project of him where he wanted to make a toaster from scratch. Source everything the materials, make the tools etc. I often think about this project as a major thing that pushed my craft and my mindset. How much of a process is inaccessible to us through further and further abstraction. Also damn I wish I could convince myself to a project like this too.

LEGO Rules

If you love LEGO this is a good one. Some of the internal rules how to build with LEGO. The rules are mostly to not stress the plastic material to much. So essentially its about quality control. That said I love thinking about protocol through a lens of what rules need to be in place. The thing that this makes me think about often is that like those LEGO rules they are more like social etiquette rather restrictions but require shared common ground to stick to them.

Procedural Animation Tutorial

What a lovely tutorial about procedural animation. First kudos to Argonaut for such a great explanation that is easy to follow.

Tears of Kingdom GDC Talk

I can't count how often I have shared this talk lately. First Nintendo rarely does GDC talks, and I don't think there are enough conferences like GDC where the purpose is to share learnings and lift the hood and share learnings. Now this one is one for the ages. If you know me you probably know that I consider Tears of Kingdom as one of the greatest games of the last 10 years. While the story, characters are rarely the true power of Nintendo. The mechanics are amazing. What makes TotK so outstanding is their approach to physics that they lay out so nicely here. The TLDR is their concept of multiplicative play. Essentially everything has forces, weight, material and the world is based on physics. Which means everything else follows the physical laws of the world. This unlocked Ultrahand the best game play mechanic ever. If you haven't played it TotK always you to fuse anything to gather, build boats, weapons, etc. but because its almost open ended it allows for wild combinations. One thing I have to say about this that goes beyond the talk is that when I played TotK so much the experience was driven by discovery what other players are building online. Which I feel is something that we should consider more when we design creative tooling. How might we help surface whats possible?

Shanzhai - Deconstruction in chinese

This was the first book that put Byung-Chul Han on my radar. It was one of those accidental purchase on a sunday that I devoured in an afternoon. The core idea that stuck with me was that there might be a fundamental different concept of reference and therefore ownership between eastern and western cultures. Where one side considers reference as copyright infringement where another might see it as a reference. In times where anything is a meme I really start to think that our concept of intellectual ownership might need a reframing.

The Overprotected Kid

A great exploration about the concept of playgrounds. This one looks at "adventure playgrounds" where kids have some exposure to danger and are free to roam. I have been thinking a lot about the concept and our definition of playgrounds. Especially what would playgrounds for adults look like? There was a trend / might still be true to overengineer playgrounds towards kids safety but than essentially locks imaginary and play potential. Which sometimes I feel thats a lot how I feel about digital tools too? Which makes me think lately a lot how do we design "playgrounds" for grown ups that lost the capability to play?

Addicted by Design

One thing I like doing every once in a while is reading a book but through a different perspective. This one is one of my favorite books on deceptive design. Natasha Dow Schüll writes about the design of slot machines and if you read it with a lens on contemporary vibe coding tools like Claude, ChatGPT it becomes quite obvious that they have very very similar characteristics. One of the more hard parts of the book is that once gambling becomes addiction its less about the wins but more about the feeling about playing that hooks you. Which really resonated with me when I am zoom out a little bit and look at my experience with AI. Am I actually productive or do I love the feeling of being productive.

The Future Mundane

Probably still one of my favorite blog posts ever. Dives into the idea that futures don't exist in siloes and the past coexists with futures. And the most interesting spaces are the moments of overlap. Also great source how to imagine more realistic futures.

Hello world.

This is the first post. No content. Just a test.