The author is basically advocating that they want to be an executive with an secretary, but they want the secretary to be AI. I don't use secretary in a perjorative context, just meaning that the author seems to want someone/something that does simple tasks but lets them make decisions, as opposed to an executive assistant that has a little more self-agency to do things on their own.
They just want OpenClaw with printing and scanning privileges. Every morning OpenClaw prints out a task list or items that need action, the author writes notes/responses, and places it on the scanner. This is basically how my program director worked at my last job. Every morning the secretary would have his schedule printed out, he'd go to meetings and write notes, and would pass by his secretary and stick a note or two on her desk saying "set up a meeting with XYZ org/team within the next few days on ABC topic." The secretary would also print documents/presentations and he'd mark them up throughout the day with changes he wanted made, and he'd drop the documents off when he was done going through them, and the secretary would distribute the documents to their respective POCs to make the changes.
Basically the only thing the author hasn't mentioned that the secretary did is that the secretary also acted as a gatekeeper for access to the program director, either in real-time ("no, you can't go in, they are meeting with a higher level director") or would take a request for a meeting and have enough personal context on whether the director would want the meeting themself or want to see it go through a division chief first. Not sure if OpenClaw can do that, but just about everything else is totally do-able. Not sure if I really want to see someone wasting this much paper just to "feel analog" but I suppose it probably isn't a big deal since most people won't do it this way, and will stick to digital forms of communication with their OpenClaw secretary.
Paper Computing (great name!) is something I've been thinking about a lot to help my kids benefit from tech without exposing them to the brain melting addiction of screens. I sacrificed a few crazy nights of sleep to try to build a Paper Computer Agent prototype for a recent Gemini hackathon (only to disappointingly have submission issues right before the actual deadline) which my kids loved and keep asking me to set up permanently for them.
It's essentially a poor man's hacked up DynamicLand - projector, camera, live agent. There are so many things you could do if you had a strong working baseline for this. My kids used it to create stories, learn how to draw various things, and watching safe videos they could hold in their hand.
There's something weirdly compelling and delightfully physical about holding a piece of paper that shows a live rocket launch, with the flames streaming down the page. It could also project targeted pieces of text, such as inline homework advice, or graphs next to data. It doesn't take long to imagine any other number of fun use cases, and it feels a lot more freeing and inspiring than keeping everything bound to a screen.
R.I.P. to the Amazon Glow video calling device, killed before AI went mainstream. I'd love to hear how to get root on one... exactly the hardware your project could use most effectively and an amazing interface for playing games remotely with the grandparents.
this is really cool, I'd love to use something like this for my kids too. Maybe I'll try your project when I have some more free time. Would love to contribute but i'm not very skilled in python.
If you don't mind me asking, what hardware did you use? Especially for the project, I'm guessing it needs to have quite a strong bulb in order to be seen in broad daylight?
I think better phrasing such as "Have you considered the ramifications of exposing and normalizing AI for your children?" That is a lot more pleasant than verbally bashing someone with a club like a cave man (Though I get it. sometimes, "og want smash." but keep og in check.)
There is something incredibly valuable about forcing yourself to trace execution logic on physical paper. It builds a mental model of state changes and memory that you just don't fully develop when a modern IDE's debugger is doing all the heavy lifting for you.
> Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would work for that meeting; check a box to accept that invitation; etc.
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.
Don’t think of it as work, but of what a human would want to spend time doing. In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788736, a commentor describes how his kids love using the “paper computer” prototype he built. They are not working, they are playing and learning and experimenting and creating. Things that humans like to do.
To some degree, that's what one had w/ Apple's Newton Intelligence on the MessagePad --- it was "just" fancy pattern-matching, but mostly it worked, and the UI and implementation were quite good, and it kept me organized all through college.
Mentioning the Newton may be anathema to the discussion (it seems to bring up the usual jokes, etc.) but I was thinking too that the Macintosh (or the Xerox Alto if you like, or the Mother of All Demos) tried to move us in that direction by "skeuomorphising" the computer interface—make it look like the more familiar "real world". The Newton pushed further. It seems to have been on the mind of at least a few people at Apple.
It sounds like the author is on the same track, has the same mindset. And I like.
I am also reminded of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. It is not exactly what the author describes but, if the book had a computer backend, it also divorces the user from the computer interface we have come to know. Perhaps for me some future (better) local LLM within such a book is what I want. A kind of companion I ask questions of…
(I mean I suppose I should just do what was posted a day or to ago to the Ask HN: and put a local LLM behind a messaging app and I could just converse with it wherever I am. Tangent: I am kind of fascinated by the idea of a personal LLM that has context stretching back to my earliest days—were I to have started conversing with this synthetic companion at a young age. Imagine the lifetime of context where the LLM knows my habits, how I've changed over the years. I suppose this is nightmare fuel for a number of you.)
Charles de Lint had an intelligent book in his fantasy novel _Jack the Giant Killer_ (or maybe its sequel) --- I've tried doing the conversing/chatting thing w/ an LLM a couple of times, but always got annoyed more than amused.
What's the point? LLMs tend towards the mean/average --- I want better in my life and interactions --- it's useful when I need an example DXF or similar rote task, but my current project is a woodworking joint which has no precedent.
Yes, the skeumorphism angle is an interesting one, and one which is surprisingly absent in the _ur_ description of a stylus equipped computing device, the slates/tablets from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ --- this sort of thing seems to be coming back around --- a recent Kindle Scribe firmware update add shape recognition. I'd be _very_ pleased if my new Kindle Scribe Coloursoft could fully become a replacement for my Newton....
I think you're right that the use case for an LLM is still rather niche. It's perhaps still worth exploring though as they may well improve over time.
Regardless, I have still found them useful. Diagnosing the problems with a car is maybe an esoteric example but is still useful.
For many months now I have been working through learning about and implementing a hobbyist analog computer with LLM as engineer-confidant. I already knew the basics of op-amps and analog computing but was surprised at a lot of the new things I discovered only by way of the LLM saying (for example), "Hey, here's a nice way to get your reference voltages…" and the project benefited from it (and I learned about a new chip/device/technique).
Yes, they do work well as a stand-in for the "competent technician with skill in the pertinent art and and fully aware of all prior art" (to use wording like to the patent application standard).
But it's only going to allow you to avail oneself of prior art/techniques.
I've been thinking along these lines too! My idea here is to use a receipt printer + scanner. In the morning the system prints a receipt with various widgets like weather, calendar, etc. The scanner takes in the marked up receipt at EOD to update the digital data and prepare for tomorrow's receipt.
I actually quite like this idea, especially if you could have an automated ingest system. It could be a good way to let isolated places have a voice online, even if it isn't necessarily very high speed. It's almost like http-over-post or something. You could even have a comments section, and post the comments to the website author
Receive email, render page with the email and a reply section and a unique ID, print it out physically
Human picks up all the sheets out of the printer, writes out replies with pen
Human puts the stack of answered email sheets in a multi-page scanner
Scanner physically scans them, agent transcribes them and matches them back to the incoming emails via the unique ID on each sheet, sends replies
You could adjust this flow for anything where human input is just one part of a larger sequence: just add print -> write -> scan into your flow where you'd normally have a human type. It's kind of a rebirth of faxing
On one of my first qualified jobs, my manager (a lovely older lady) did exactly this. All incoming emails were printed and put into a binder. Then she would go home, write an answer with a pen on the back side of every single one, and on the next day write a new email to the recipient. 10-15 % of all emails she sent this way would bounce because she had written the address incorrectly.
When I showed her the reply button in Eudora (this was in 2001), she was so happy that she bought me a cake.
She struggled with IT but was tack sharp otherwise. So far she's the only boss I've ever really liked.
I will say scanners are somewhat unergonomic, but if you had a high enough definition camera, you could photograph the document in its "natural environment". Granted, it's harder to get an evenly lit picture that way, but I think it's a nicer interface.
Scanners with automatic feeders are ergonomic when you have to scan more than a page or two. Just place your stack of paper in the feeder and press start. I had a job where I used to do that routinely, and no way a camera would have been more convenient.
Fair enough, I actually have been thinking about this topic lately since I have to generate and print and fill out and sign a lot of paper vouchers in my job. I would prefer having a dedicated scanner to just throw them into in a stack with a server/cron job/bash script always watching for new incoming documents rather than a more complex camera setup but yeah something like a camera over your shoulder on your desk could pick up documents too
I always wished I could throw my Pocketmod[0] in the scanner at the end of the day and have a nice new one with any notes I wanted to carry over to the next day freshly printed and waiting in the morning.
There’s a strong argument for paper computer, in the sense that we have evolved to think in space and with our body (Barbara Tversky’s work springs to mind). The cognitive load of parsing our thoughts, collaborating on ideas through digital interfaces is not insignificant, and changes the nature of the kind of combinatorial thinking required to externalise and socialise ideas, organise thoughts and structure work. I think AI created a huge opportunity for this kind of ambient association with computational power that over time can make the interface recede into the analogue rather than require us to engage with the digital.
I question the idea of pastoralism though, I would argue this is another kind of construct. Laurel Hatcher Ulrich’s ‘age of homespun’ talks about this in detail, and how handcraft revivals were an expression of fear or anxiety about the radical changes brought about by industrialisation, and became a sort of myth making device for the rejection of technological overlords.
In any case, Paper Computer charts neat reformulation of the personal computer into something more interesting. If all individual computing tasks become distributed back into real spaces, objects and physically manipulable media it becomes more of an interpersonal computer, and distributed computing power can be pushed to things that don’t ordinarily engage with computational tasks such as wind or plants or anything within the shared working environment.
If projects like this and DynamicLand interest you, it's worth checking out https://folk.computer/ - they've been working on this much more recently than DynamicLand and share their code as open source.
I've been following someone on X building a "Screenless Phone" that can scan to get inputs and print on receipt paper to provide output - very interested in how these types of experiments evolve!
Since I have a laptop, I threw away all paper support, focusing on the keyboard as primary information interface.
Using paper and space to organize ideas is nice, but that's a niche use-case. And in any case, you'll have to digitalize it anyway afterwards, so better start on the digital version immediately, and be good at it. Everytime I start a new project, I'm tempted to take a pencil and paper, but then I refrain and use draw.io or the like because I know it will be winning on the longer run.
For the rest, you can easily customize your phone / browser / anything to be less distracting.
As for using AI just for convenience, this looks like very expensive in terms of resource.
Maybe you should interrogate that temptation to reach for physical interfaces? It sounds like you're ignoring your own psychology and shaping yourself to the machines around you instead of thinking of how the machines could be shaped to you.
Not that I haven't done exactly the same thing as you, I never keep paper around and my handwriting has gotten terrible. I'm saying this to myself and others as well.
When dealing with humans irl, I try to stick to paper interfaces (note books etc). I feels super distracted/anti social when I am taking notes on my computer or phone.
This is why I was glad to purchase a Newton MessagePad (and before that an NCR-3125 running Go Corp. PenPoint), and all my devices since have had styluses (even my MacBook has a Wacom One display).
> At least then you could mimic in software that thing you get from physical objects—which is that they are usually built to do one, and only one, thing well. My alarm clock, for instance, is just an alarm clock; and that's what I like about it!
UNIX Principle anyone ? Do one thing, and do it well - seems like in this 'age of AI' the industry is rediscovering by detour best practices, decades old, all over again.
But otherwise having 'interfaces' printed out to you and an LLM multi-modal later working from your notes on it sounds really interesting and less stressful than modern 'computing'.
The Office's Michael Scott would be proud - Paper may just be the future of Digital after all!
Just the other day, I noticed my thinking was so hijacked by distractions while building something (with AI help) that I started writing in a notebook to stay on track. The last time I'd written in the notebook was 3 years ago; in this case writing stuff down in it really helped to get me unstuck.
I'm excited to imagine workflows that could make computing a more physical activity. Thanks for writing and sharing this.
The best way to predict the future is to look at the past. Humans have been living and working in the 3-D world since the dawn of time, we’ve worked with paper for thousands of years, we’ve only been working at screens for about 40 years. Technology to remove technology, such as this, is brilliant.
Unfortunately, I don’t this will work until we have robot secretaries that can automate updating paper wall calendars and documents and books scattered around a room.
The only compromise would be a limited area like a physical desktop that had affordances like an overhead camera and some form of paper output.
The idea of writing a draft on paper, or cutting out squares to prototype layouts on a table, sounds like a nightmare to me. But I never did like pen and paper much and have lived and breathed computers since I was young. My ideal method of writing is a full screen monospaced terminal
That said, I do much prefer reading on paper, or at least on e-ink, for many of the same reasons outlined in the post. Computers and phones are just too distracting, and too dynamic.
And I'd love some way to write down shopping lists or appointments, and have them available wherever, without having to pull out the phone. Our current method is a whiteboard + a photo whenever we need it, which doesn't quite cut it.
We are doing something related; taking the TipToi tech and getting it with our own pen to turn paper into interfaces that can control remote systems. See Https://papiro.press (the pages are still being redesigned, but we needed some placeholders to be able to talk to Chinese factories)
This was my gut reaction as well as an eInk enthusiast, but I think the author is looking for something quite different. As much as the rM is a calmer, slower-paced device by design, it's still a device with a screen that doesn't have the same physical affordances and spatial flexibility as pieces of paper.
I agree, absolutely love my reMarkable for those reasons, as well as not needing to manage the _annoying_ physical properties of paper (storage, organization) any more
> they have the problem that they make it difficult to just use your calendar, todo list, or map—or even just respond to a friend's message—without encountering something else along the way, like a social network, short-form video, Slack, the news, or some other notification.
I see this seemingly everywhere. People are looking for these extreme solutions to solve the problem of getting distracted by an app like Instagram or TikTok on their phone. Wouldn’t uninstalling the app, and going a step further, deleting the account, be the more pragmatic solution here? We control what is installed on our devices, what accounts we have, and which notifications we receive. If someone has enough agency to move to a pen and paper, surely they can uninstall some apps?
While I like the idea of having a magic paper notebook that would somehow interact with computer systems, that idea seems like mostly science fiction without having significant levels of technology all around you (cameras, projectors, etc) which would kind of defeat the purpose imo.
I watched the first video on Dynamic Land and I think I’d feel very uncomfortable in a room like that. Look the wrong way and catch a projector’s light in the eye, and once big tech gets into the game, who knows what happens with all the data from the cameras. I’ve grown rather paranoid.
A phone with just utilities installed, no social media, or going a step further to something like an e-ink tablet (something like Remarkable), seems like it would get most of the way there and actually work today. The biggest concern then becomes the web browser, but the big tech companies do most of the work for us by making sites insufferable to use while logged out and without an app.
Something might be able to get rigged up with RocketBook as well, for an actual pen on paper experience, but having to take a picture of the pages is kind of a pain. I have one and the novelty wore off very quickly; it has sat in a drawer for years now.
I’ve struggled with this idea a bit myself, as I sometimes romanticize the idea of using analog tools, but when they exist alone on an island, that seems to come with some considerable downsides in the modern world.
Apple Notes can be good for some of this too. Instead of using ChatGPT, Apple Notes can use the phone camera to do live OCR on text and add it into a note. I’ve used it a couple times and it’s pretty handy, when I remember it.
Emacs, and technologies built on it, such as org-mode, come somewhat close to ideas expressed here by having plain text in a buffer be the unifying data format. You can organize stuff by just moving snippets of text around.
I think it's difficult in practice to design data manipulation interfaces based on real-world objects because atoms are heavy and bits are not. Data is just much more malleable and transformable than real world objects, at least at the pre-Diamond Age tech level we're at. But maybe ML will help make this easier by allowing computers to track and scan the objects more easily.
Yeah, and it's really worth checking out https://dynamicland.org/, because Bret Victor is actually doing this -- slash pointing the way to what such a world could look like. It just seems like now might be a good time for specific smaller parts of that vision to be carved off and developed further. I say that largely because of the advances in multimodal AI, which maybe haven't been fully applied yet in this area.
And a shout-out to https://folk.computer/ as well! They're not as far along in terms of feature parity, but they are open source, and exploring the space in other directions.
If you have any ins with this project would you mind asking them to add a line or 2 describing what it is about, or even a linked text in the start.txt file?
Just a simple:
> Folk Computer is a research & art project centered around designing new physical computing interfaces.
From ./notes/tableshots.txt with a link towards the top would imo be quite helpful.
(Sorry, this is just one of my pet peeves: needing to know what a project is about before being able to read about it is just terrible UX, although extremely common as we as humans tend to forget that we know things others don't)
The problem with screens is you can't get good at them, even after 18 years of them. Not like you could a sewing machine, a stick shift car, or a loom.
They just want OpenClaw with printing and scanning privileges. Every morning OpenClaw prints out a task list or items that need action, the author writes notes/responses, and places it on the scanner. This is basically how my program director worked at my last job. Every morning the secretary would have his schedule printed out, he'd go to meetings and write notes, and would pass by his secretary and stick a note or two on her desk saying "set up a meeting with XYZ org/team within the next few days on ABC topic." The secretary would also print documents/presentations and he'd mark them up throughout the day with changes he wanted made, and he'd drop the documents off when he was done going through them, and the secretary would distribute the documents to their respective POCs to make the changes.
Basically the only thing the author hasn't mentioned that the secretary did is that the secretary also acted as a gatekeeper for access to the program director, either in real-time ("no, you can't go in, they are meeting with a higher level director") or would take a request for a meeting and have enough personal context on whether the director would want the meeting themself or want to see it go through a division chief first. Not sure if OpenClaw can do that, but just about everything else is totally do-able. Not sure if I really want to see someone wasting this much paper just to "feel analog" but I suppose it probably isn't a big deal since most people won't do it this way, and will stick to digital forms of communication with their OpenClaw secretary.
It's essentially a poor man's hacked up DynamicLand - projector, camera, live agent. There are so many things you could do if you had a strong working baseline for this. My kids used it to create stories, learn how to draw various things, and watching safe videos they could hold in their hand.
There's something weirdly compelling and delightfully physical about holding a piece of paper that shows a live rocket launch, with the flames streaming down the page. It could also project targeted pieces of text, such as inline homework advice, or graphs next to data. It doesn't take long to imagine any other number of fun use cases, and it feels a lot more freeing and inspiring than keeping everything bound to a screen.
Github - https://github.com/Pugio/Orly (hacky minimal prototype that did the thing)
Video Pitch - https://youtu.be/-9l1x7GnmxU (filmed an hour before the deadline on an old phone with no sleep)
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/20/23415167/amazon-glow-sup...
If you don't mind me asking, what hardware did you use? Especially for the project, I'm guessing it needs to have quite a strong bulb in order to be seen in broad daylight?
This reminds me of those predictions from 1900 about the year 2000, when they thought we'd all live in enormous skyscrapers and get around by flying cars. Instead we moved out to suburbs because improved logistics systems meant we could buy things from suburban shopping centres rather than having to go into city centres. Revolution, not evolution.
Surely the real advantage of an 'actually good AI' would be getting the AI to do the work itself, rather than just allowing the work to be done in a format with which the human is more comfortable. The underlying problem is that there are too many things vying for our attention.
It sounds like the author is on the same track, has the same mindset. And I like.
I am also reminded of the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: in Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age. It is not exactly what the author describes but, if the book had a computer backend, it also divorces the user from the computer interface we have come to know. Perhaps for me some future (better) local LLM within such a book is what I want. A kind of companion I ask questions of…
(I mean I suppose I should just do what was posted a day or to ago to the Ask HN: and put a local LLM behind a messaging app and I could just converse with it wherever I am. Tangent: I am kind of fascinated by the idea of a personal LLM that has context stretching back to my earliest days—were I to have started conversing with this synthetic companion at a young age. Imagine the lifetime of context where the LLM knows my habits, how I've changed over the years. I suppose this is nightmare fuel for a number of you.)
What's the point? LLMs tend towards the mean/average --- I want better in my life and interactions --- it's useful when I need an example DXF or similar rote task, but my current project is a woodworking joint which has no precedent.
Yes, the skeumorphism angle is an interesting one, and one which is surprisingly absent in the _ur_ description of a stylus equipped computing device, the slates/tablets from Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ --- this sort of thing seems to be coming back around --- a recent Kindle Scribe firmware update add shape recognition. I'd be _very_ pleased if my new Kindle Scribe Coloursoft could fully become a replacement for my Newton....
Regardless, I have still found them useful. Diagnosing the problems with a car is maybe an esoteric example but is still useful.
For many months now I have been working through learning about and implementing a hobbyist analog computer with LLM as engineer-confidant. I already knew the basics of op-amps and analog computing but was surprised at a lot of the new things I discovered only by way of the LLM saying (for example), "Hey, here's a nice way to get your reference voltages…" and the project benefited from it (and I learned about a new chip/device/technique).
But it's only going to allow you to avail oneself of prior art/techniques.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wa3nm0qcfM [1] https://dynamicland.org/
https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/paper_website
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550812
Human picks up all the sheets out of the printer, writes out replies with pen
Human puts the stack of answered email sheets in a multi-page scanner
Scanner physically scans them, agent transcribes them and matches them back to the incoming emails via the unique ID on each sheet, sends replies
You could adjust this flow for anything where human input is just one part of a larger sequence: just add print -> write -> scan into your flow where you'd normally have a human type. It's kind of a rebirth of faxing
When I showed her the reply button in Eudora (this was in 2001), she was so happy that she bought me a cake.
She struggled with IT but was tack sharp otherwise. So far she's the only boss I've ever really liked.
[0] https://pocketmod.com/
I question the idea of pastoralism though, I would argue this is another kind of construct. Laurel Hatcher Ulrich’s ‘age of homespun’ talks about this in detail, and how handcraft revivals were an expression of fear or anxiety about the radical changes brought about by industrialisation, and became a sort of myth making device for the rejection of technological overlords.
In any case, Paper Computer charts neat reformulation of the personal computer into something more interesting. If all individual computing tasks become distributed back into real spaces, objects and physically manipulable media it becomes more of an interpersonal computer, and distributed computing power can be pushed to things that don’t ordinarily engage with computational tasks such as wind or plants or anything within the shared working environment.
https://x.com/daviddorg/status/2037050583274954882
https://x.com/daviddorg/status/2033937383012635065
https://yearunplugged.com/newsletter
Using paper and space to organize ideas is nice, but that's a niche use-case. And in any case, you'll have to digitalize it anyway afterwards, so better start on the digital version immediately, and be good at it. Everytime I start a new project, I'm tempted to take a pencil and paper, but then I refrain and use draw.io or the like because I know it will be winning on the longer run.
For the rest, you can easily customize your phone / browser / anything to be less distracting.
As for using AI just for convenience, this looks like very expensive in terms of resource.
Not that I haven't done exactly the same thing as you, I never keep paper around and my handwriting has gotten terrible. I'm saying this to myself and others as well.
UNIX Principle anyone ? Do one thing, and do it well - seems like in this 'age of AI' the industry is rediscovering by detour best practices, decades old, all over again.
But otherwise having 'interfaces' printed out to you and an LLM multi-modal later working from your notes on it sounds really interesting and less stressful than modern 'computing'.
The Office's Michael Scott would be proud - Paper may just be the future of Digital after all!
Just the other day, I noticed my thinking was so hijacked by distractions while building something (with AI help) that I started writing in a notebook to stay on track. The last time I'd written in the notebook was 3 years ago; in this case writing stuff down in it really helped to get me unstuck.
I'm excited to imagine workflows that could make computing a more physical activity. Thanks for writing and sharing this.
(My blog post btw if you’re curious https://bhave.sh/make-humans-analog-again/)
The only compromise would be a limited area like a physical desktop that had affordances like an overhead camera and some form of paper output.
It’s fantastic that computers can be so effective at this read-only work but so much of what I do needs write feedback from the machine.
That said, I do much prefer reading on paper, or at least on e-ink, for many of the same reasons outlined in the post. Computers and phones are just too distracting, and too dynamic.
And I'd love some way to write down shopping lists or appointments, and have them available wherever, without having to pull out the phone. Our current method is a whiteboard + a photo whenever we need it, which doesn't quite cut it.
I see this seemingly everywhere. People are looking for these extreme solutions to solve the problem of getting distracted by an app like Instagram or TikTok on their phone. Wouldn’t uninstalling the app, and going a step further, deleting the account, be the more pragmatic solution here? We control what is installed on our devices, what accounts we have, and which notifications we receive. If someone has enough agency to move to a pen and paper, surely they can uninstall some apps?
While I like the idea of having a magic paper notebook that would somehow interact with computer systems, that idea seems like mostly science fiction without having significant levels of technology all around you (cameras, projectors, etc) which would kind of defeat the purpose imo.
I watched the first video on Dynamic Land and I think I’d feel very uncomfortable in a room like that. Look the wrong way and catch a projector’s light in the eye, and once big tech gets into the game, who knows what happens with all the data from the cameras. I’ve grown rather paranoid.
A phone with just utilities installed, no social media, or going a step further to something like an e-ink tablet (something like Remarkable), seems like it would get most of the way there and actually work today. The biggest concern then becomes the web browser, but the big tech companies do most of the work for us by making sites insufferable to use while logged out and without an app.
Something might be able to get rigged up with RocketBook as well, for an actual pen on paper experience, but having to take a picture of the pages is kind of a pain. I have one and the novelty wore off very quickly; it has sat in a drawer for years now.
I’ve struggled with this idea a bit myself, as I sometimes romanticize the idea of using analog tools, but when they exist alone on an island, that seems to come with some considerable downsides in the modern world.
Apple Notes can be good for some of this too. Instead of using ChatGPT, Apple Notes can use the phone camera to do live OCR on text and add it into a note. I’ve used it a couple times and it’s pretty handy, when I remember it.
Emacs, and technologies built on it, such as org-mode, come somewhat close to ideas expressed here by having plain text in a buffer be the unifying data format. You can organize stuff by just moving snippets of text around.
I think it's difficult in practice to design data manipulation interfaces based on real-world objects because atoms are heavy and bits are not. Data is just much more malleable and transformable than real world objects, at least at the pre-Diamond Age tech level we're at. But maybe ML will help make this easier by allowing computers to track and scan the objects more easily.
Although the cardboard implementation is kind of the point, I think it's cool that someone made an FPGA version (dead link though, RIP drdobbs.com).
Just a simple:
> Folk Computer is a research & art project centered around designing new physical computing interfaces.
From ./notes/tableshots.txt with a link towards the top would imo be quite helpful.
(Sorry, this is just one of my pet peeves: needing to know what a project is about before being able to read about it is just terrible UX, although extremely common as we as humans tend to forget that we know things others don't)
Also, check the spirograph too, among the slide ruler and any abacus.