Andy Matuschak

Thank you!

HCI Seminar - Andy Matuschak - Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies | MIT CSAIL Abstract:One of the personal computer revolution’s grandest dreams was that we'd all have not only our own computers, but that we’d also create our own dynamic media, exquisitely tuned to our own…

Boston-area mutuals: I'll be giving the MIT HCI seminar this Tuesday at 4PM. I've got some open time on Wednesday morning—DM me if you'd like to chat! 👋

Every night this house is full-on blue and red inside. I like to imagine it’s like a cold-plunge sauna, where the occupants alternate between the rooms as needed to dial in their melatonin

Prototypers: do you still see a role for semi-high-fidelity modalities like Origami? Or just straight from sketchbook/mocks to vibecode?

Curious: why avoid? Is it just that "working in public" creates overhead, since it means doing more work along the way to make stuff legible to viewers without context? Or more that "saving it up" produces a stronger emotional impact?

Ah, I'm thinking not so much about the design of game UIs (though that exists) but more about the design of games in general, which requires both imaginative design work and also technical skill to experiment and iterate.

Right! Hm. I guess I'm thinking more about new representations: the non-linear timeline editor, constructive geometry in CAD, computational notebooks, bidirectionally editable audio transcripts, color grading…

Shouldn’t this be a problem for all design sciences, like architecture?

Confused: exciting new UIs seem rare in large part because inventing them requires both programming and imaginative design skills. It’s rare to find both in one person, and hard to coordinate in a dyad.

But then: why does this kind of invention seem more common in games?

That's part but not all of it—there's a periodic shift in phase between "solar noon" (i.e. when the sun is at the meridian) and 12:00PM, driven by axis tilt and orbital eccentricity. But I don't fully understand this!

I always forget this skew: the shortest day of the year is in a few days, but the earliest sunset was earlier this month! Afternoons are already getting brighter (well, by two minutes)

Braindumping possible themes for a talk; clustering and choosing a cluster; then developing an outline.

Fond of mini index cards for outlining and synthesizing. Each is big enough to hold a real chunk, but small enough that I can get a lot on the table and "see it all" at once. Cards are nicer than stickies for this: gotta rearrange and stack.

A mnemonic for the univariate normal PDF, to the tune of My Favorite Things:

One over square root of two pi times sigma
E to the negative one half times z squared

After the critical failure of Merrily…, Sondheim thought about quitting music to make video games. I’ve wondered what they would be like. Today I found this email exchange—apparently, didactic?! Hard to imagine. www.nypl.org/blog/2022/07...

Was David Lynch describing the jhanas in his account of transcendental meditation? (from Catching the Big Fish)

Most recently, I thought about it when looking at this photo of me at age 3 playing with Kid Pix. So free! No need for the art to be great! The opposite of what Alan's talking about, and yet some of my happiest childhood memories.

Anyway. How do you grapple with this quote?

It's useful sometimes as a sort of pump: is there a deeper, more powerful version of this idea I'm thinking about?

In what senses is the quote true or useful? One thing I like about it is that it takes for granted that the listener (me!) can work on great ideas, make a great contribution. Most work doesn't even try. But it's worth trying. The sentiment makes me want to set my sights higher.

It's also misleading: you can't "only work on great ideas" because you can't know ahead of time which seedlings will become great.

Held as a lens, it really has pushed me to work on projects that have felt a lot more meaningful, long-term. But it's also corrosive: it crowds out playful curiosity, tinkering, etc. Alan's own history is full of that.

Alan Kay once said: "Turn up your nose at good ideas. You must only work on great ideas, not good ones." Inspiring, and exasperating. I've been grappling with it for years, on and off.

BTW: I found this paper through Google Scholar alerts for SpaceInk, a paper with a creative marginalia design that I still really want in my reading software. buff.ly/Z6JK6wV

This paper shares two authors (Emmanuel Pietriga, Caroline Appert). I'm glad they're still thinking about these topics!

There's so much very thoughtful design work and writing in this paper! I really admire the commitment to modelessness, to informality, to the nonlinear realities of the creative process, to the expressivity of ink. I wish my reading and writing environments had half this thoughtfulness.

Also supporting theme-and-variation: EtherPen can fuzzy-search for a selection (including only by pitch or duration). So if a sequence is repeated but transposed or doubled in time, that'll show up too. There's also a novel minimap representation.

Notes (both engraved and handwritten!) can be selected and directly manipulated in pitch and time.

EtherPen also allows you to select only the pitches or durations of notes—useful for theme-and-variation. e.g. copy pitches and paste them over notes in a different bar without affecting their rhythm.

On the "main" staves, engraved notes, handwritten notes, audio files all co-exist in continuous playback. So you can capture one section by humming, one section by drawing, and one through formal notation. (You can also take a photo and anchor it to a measure, but it won't yet be OCR'd!)

EuterPen can interpret handwritten music (e.g. for playback or manipulation) *without* needing to replace your ink with engraved notes. In fact, you can non-destructively switch between handwritten and engraved representations. This lets composers visually indicate what's still work-in-progress.

Staves can be created within a pensieve, and they work just like in the "real" score: they can be played, manipulated, and copied into the main score.

EuterPen relaxes many of those constraints, but it also offers dedicated scratch spaces, "pensieves", for non-linear exploration. Pensieves can be global or spatially anchored below staves (using a SpaceInk-like gesture).

The pensieve can hold ink, engraved music, audio files, imagery, etc.