Hi - my name is Kilian • I run product for a London start-up building a cross-lingual dubbing system using synthetic speech - www.papercup.com • I am a frustrated computer user and dream of better things. This community newsletter has been a source of inspiration on that side for a while • I wrote my first blog on why now is the time to pay attention to human-computer interaction recently. In short, all of the pieces for a new computing paradigm of the size of desktop -> mobile are now in place. Except whereas the shift to mobile made computing ubiquitous, I think the next shift will make computing 10x better

I think you're in the right place! I have some opinions on your blog post: • The primary (and extremely difficult) problem is one of incentives. Particularly incentivizing people (today's "end users") to think harder about their decisions around computers. Because decisions on computers have huge non-linear effects. Most people don't get the benefits of a computer as a tool for thought. They mostly care about whether it plays Netflix or Fortnite. It steals my location but hey the pixels look great. I'm culpable here as well. And if end users are susceptible to short-sighted decisions that affect them directly, that creates much stronger incentives for products and companies to serve them in short-sighted ways that gradually grow exploitative. (It's worth considering government regulation to compensate for end-user decisions, but that's still difficult and also introduces more noise, because bureaucracies now have new incentives to operate in their interest rather than end users.) • As a corollary, if you want to build tools but also have them be hugely popular, you're going to fall into many of the same traps of incentives as everyone else before you. (On the other hand I went a different way and got zero adoption, which doesn't help either. I'm still reflecting on this.) • You can't improve human computer interfaces in isolation. The surgery has to go deeper, into what we colloquially call the backend or the OS. A lot of the projects here aren't concerned with giving people a "business as usual" experience. They're slightly uncomfortable, need work to learn. And that seems like a good thing. The trick is requiring some learning but not too much, that's where we all seem to fail at the moment. • Check out Ivan Illich, "Tools for conviviality" (1973)

Amazing notes Kartik. I think I would echo a lot of what you said. • On incentives I think you are exactly right. I think the company who is best positioned, in the short-term, to release transformative hardware is Apple. However their track record for building supportive business models to developers is not strong (outside of games, bigtech). I hope this will change. Potentially the web itself could be a valve for this pressure without requiring the company to change (like Windows back in the 90s) • Illich is definitely on my syllabus. I am tangentially familiar with some of his work via LM Sacasas’ newsletter The Convivial Society • Your work on see-through bicycles for the mind really resonates with me. I will have to go through the paper in more depth, but increasing legibility/comprehensibility is definitely key. Maggie Appleton’s work on visualising programming concepts has been very inspiring to me here as well Very much appreciate you taking the time to read the blog post 🙂