Spreadsheets are particularly useful for thinking through financial models, budgets, or any situation that involves considering lots of possible scenarios. Instead of laboriously redoing a bunch of math, you can quickly ask “what if?” questions and see the effects.

Very nice work by Litt and the Ink and Switch crew. Wondering if there’s a way to combine Ambsheets v1 and v2 to have both a nice interactive grid and clear formulas when you need them.

80% of the people only need 20% of the features.

Keeping scrollbars easy to acquire even in large files.

On inboxes as application-specific todo lists.

I invented a new instrument: The Qweremin is a qwerty theremin.

The hamburger button, so named for its unintentional resemblance to a hamburger, is a button typically placed in a top corner of a graphical user interface. Its function is to toggle a menu (sometimes referred to as a hamburger menu) or navigation bar between being collapsed behind the button or displayed on the screen. The icon which is associated with this widget, consisting of three horizontal bars, is also known as the collapsed menu icon.

One of our central beliefs at the lab is that premature formality is the root of all evil.

Computers are great at doing things formally with explicit structure. Programs are formal descriptions of what the computer should do. But while using formalisms can be great, forcing people to be explicit about everything often gets in the way.

Users often struggle with cloud file-sharing applications. Problems appear to arise not only from interface flaws, but also from misunderstanding the underlying semantics of operations like linking, attaching, downloading, and editing. We argue that these difficulties echo long-standing challenges in understanding concepts in programming languages like aliasing, copying, and mutation.

via: https://blog.brownplt.org/2025/08/25/cloud-sharing.html

via: https://kevinlynagh.com/newsletter/2025_07_flatpack/

There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don’t think is mentioned enough.

The whole point of Rust is to use the borrow checker, but when you frequently need to do something the borrow checker doesn’t like… should you really be using the language?

How would it feel if you could scribble on top of your Google Calendar events?

Mark Weiser gets it. He understands exactly why the current gen AI/LLM moment is so frustrating to me. We should be building better software, not creating more software to control our existing mid software for us.

For example: being alerted of a potential collision

• agent: “collision, collision, go right and down”
• ubicomp: background presentation of airspace information for continuous spatial awareness, as in everyday life. You’ll no more run into another airplane than you would try to walk through a wall.

Damn; he’s even anti-racist:

It obsessively fascinates

• the human-like machine to which we give life
• the perfect, all-powerful, slave
• be careful when appealing to ancient prejudice

via: http://geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-we-need-ai-huds.html

Funny how Litt takes away a totally different message from this slide deck than I do.

Today we’re excited to announce the first pre-alpha release of our new software CatColab 0.1: Hummingbird. CatColab is software for making models of the world together.

Autocomplete formally specified.