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

A really wonderful practice to “fully charge” your attention from the thousands of contextual shift papercuts: pick a book, decide you will follow the author’s intentions to the very end, and proceed to read it in one sitting

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."

“...children asked if computers were alive, if they had difffrent ways of thinking from people, and what, in the age of smart machines, was special about being a person.”

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