On creating the closest bond between music and image:

“When a really difficult thing is being worked on and you get synergy from the small team in just the right way, you can’t describe it.” —Alan Kay

One thing they do really well is they have a way of observing the good, true, and beautiful in people very precisely and conveying it to them and to others, so everyone starts to see that in each other. Attention has a very “moral” quality, and also a story-telling quality

This development happens in a sequence of stages that result in “dramatic differences in ability to apprehend, generalize and predict” factors of causality

Picking this back up again! This section gets into the specs of the Dynabook, focusing on its portability, display, and storage: 1) no larger than a notebook, not to exceed 4 lbs; 2) visual display must be at least 4000 characters with contrast ratios close to that of printed text — Kay was likely looking to address eye strain here; 3) removable local file storage of 1M characters or greater (~500 pages) with options to tradeoff against audio files I adore how each spec requirement is actually written in terms of a *physical* book 📖 – at San Francisco, CA

Form-fit tools:

I quite like the framing of “collaborating with the context” via gradual adjustments by creating a feedback loop

Brother asking me what’s my ideal Christmas present 🧐 🤔🎄 💝

Reading — “The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine” by Stewart Brand

"The magic happens when the contextual needs drive the tool."

products that possess an “aesthetic grace” reflected in the architecture of information flows that govern how they work:

Knowledge construction isn’t a clean-cut model for a child, but is based on hunches and ad hoc experiences These are not consistent, but a collection of strategies, contradictory algorithms, way-finding/way-making, which eventually congeal into logic

Kay innocuously slips the term “active interface” but it becomes more interesting if you substitute it with “co-agentic interface” —

feeling the weight of a file (Alan Kay)

an essential part of being happy is to remember to do things that don’t scale — and if you’re only thinking things worth doing are at scale and generalizable, you’re missing out on a type of attention that is one-of-a-kind and alive and not easily abstracted away

Computer aided intuition >> Computer aided instruction

“…speaking to you in a way you never knew possible, and making you conscious in a new way.”

Adding more Product Values: proportionality; hospitality; personal jurisprudence; and friendly optimism