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A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design
worrydream.com ↗
Bret Victor's takedown of 'pictures under glass' and a plea to design interfaces for capable hands, not just one numb fingertip.
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As We May Think - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Bush's 1945 memex sketched hypertext, associative trails, and the personal knowledge machine decades before the hardware to build one existed.
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Attention Is All You Need
arxiv.org ↗
The 2017 paper that threw out recurrence for pure attention and became the architecture underneath every large language model since.
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Beating the Averages
paulgraham.com ↗
Graham's Blub paradox and the case that a more powerful language was Viaweb's real competitive weapon against better-funded rivals.
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Cloudflare Workers AI
developers.cloudflare.com ↗
Cloudflare's pitch for running model inference at the edge, next to your users instead of in one distant datacenter, and why latency is the product.
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Computer latency: 1977-2017
danluu.com ↗
Dan Luu measures keystroke-to-screen latency across decades and finds a 1977 Apple II beating most modern machines, worse-is-better made empirical.
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Computing Machinery and Intelligence - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Turing trades 'can machines think?' for a concrete imitation game and pre-answers nine objections we are somehow still raising in 2026.
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Conway's law - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Organizations ship their own communication structure as software architecture, so if you ignore the org chart the org chart wins anyway.
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Douglas Engelbart - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
The man who spent a whole career on augmenting human intellect, and whose one demo set an agenda interface design is still working through.
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Dynabook - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Alan Kay's 1972 spec for a personal computer for children of all ages, the template every tablet and laptop is still quietly chasing.
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Language Models are Few-Shot Learners
arxiv.org ↗
GPT-3's few-shot results made scale itself the headline: capability arriving from parameter count, not architecture novelty.
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Sketchpad - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Sutherland's 1963 thesis invented interactive computer graphics and constraint-based drawing, the direct ancestor of every CAD tool and GUI.
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The Bitter Lesson
incompleteideas.net ↗
Sutton's blunt case that general methods riding raw compute keep beating hand-crafted human knowledge, the essay every scaling argument eventually cites.
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The Mother of All Demos - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Engelbart's 1968 demo unveiled the mouse, hypertext, windows, video conferencing, and live collaborative editing in a single 90-minute sitting.
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The Mythical Man-Month - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Brooks' law, adding people to a late project makes it later, and the enduring lesson that software effort does not parallelize like brick-laying.
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Unix philosophy - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Small programs that each do one thing and compose through text streams — the design philosophy that keeps outliving its obituaries.
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Worse is better - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
Richard Gabriel's uncomfortable argument that a simpler, uglier design that ships will beat the 'right thing' that never quite does.
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Xerox Alto - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org ↗
The 1973 machine that already had the GUI, mouse, Ethernet, and WYSIWYG editing a full decade before the industry got around to copying it.