This font (and site) are so, so good! You don’t often see a pixel font with old-style numerals. https://departuremono.com/

Has anyone written about how textual generative AI feels strangely close to toxic masculinity in some respects? The absolute confidence in everything stated, the lack of understanding of the consequences of getting that confidence wrong for important questions, the semi-gaslighty feeling when it “corrects” itself when you call it out on something. It so often feels like talking to someone one would despise and avoid in “real life.” I’m curious if anyone did some writing on this.

“Of course I like to read nontechnical books, although I read very slowly. Here are some that I heartily recommend.”—Don Knuth

😳

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html

This aesthetic – huge, proportional fonts, rendered via thick pixels without antialiasing, and using green on black – is very interesting to me and kind of beautiful?

(The font on the second photo is also pretty unique.)

A book idea: “Life before software.” All of the amazing mechanical and electromechanical solutions to what today would be software: Old pinball machines, Backspace on a Selectric, tons of a/v stuff, Linotype, Comptometer, phone relays, probably a million other things. Beautiful drawings and great stories.

Guess who finished the index for his book today!!!

Last week, I had a chance to visit @hypertalking’s (James’s) excellent collection of Mac-related stuff. He’s particularly interested in collecting 1990s Macs, which is the era of Apple history I don’t have a lot of personal experience with, so it was doubly exciting.

Here are some 100 photos from that visit:

I did something fun this week: I made a typewriter simulator!

It ended up being more complex than it seemed. You can overtype, rotate paper, set margins, use Wite-Out, change ribbons… Let me know what you make!

(Desktop only so far.) https://shifthappens.site/typewriter/

To celebrate the Kickstarter for Shift Happens going well, I thought I would show you 50 keyboards from my collection of really strange/esoteric/meaningful keyboards that I gathered over the years. (It might be the world’s strangest keyboard collection!)

My book about keyboards, Shift Happens, is now on Kickstarter!

There is all sorts of new information about it, and a video, and what I think are very cool tiers and rewards on top of a very cool book.

Please back and spread the word!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mwichary/shift-happens?ref=cr61wq