Sean Voisen

The new Firefox ad is gold. blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/c...

I'm pretty sure one of the levels in Dante's Inferno involved sitting through corporate training videos on repeat.

Went to have my I-9 notarized today and the notary was required (by their employer) to use an AI chatbot to babysit them through the identification process. Why?! Completely unnecessary use of AI. Fortunately no PII went into the bot.

Just dropped my ballot in the local drop box. Vote early if you can!

Wrote a few words on AI and design systems. The TL;DR is something like: “you need humans.” But in my usual way I had to pull in high-minded bullshit like cybernetics, Ashby’s Law and invisible design ledgers. Sorry, not sorry 🙂 https://seanvoisen.com/writing/design-system-ai-readiness/

Some writing only works if we let it do its work on us, the readers. New short post on Moonpointing about reading, writing, philosophy, Pierre Hadot, and words spent trying to describe the ineffable. https://moonpointing.org/blog/this-post-is-not-the-moon/

RIP Wendell Berry, one of the world's great writers, champions of the environment, and exemplar of slow living. A few years ago I wrote about analog vs. digital tools, inspired by his "Why I Will Not Buy a Computer" which felt appropriate to revisit this morning. seanvoisen.com/writing/wend...

Just published my latest newsletter over at Moonpointing, which is a bit of a meditation coming out of a recent sabbatical on the purposes of sabbaticals, vacations, rest, and what exactly we should mean when we use the word “leisure.” https://moonpointing.org/newsletter/leisure/

The other night my wife and I watched the new Mary Oliver documentary and were moved to tears. I have one of her books (Devotions) and enjoy reading from it now and then, but something about hearing her poetry read out loud really hits differently. Highly recommended. https://youtu.be/B7bfYkgotBM

My mini sabbatical is coming to its end. After a month spent doing lots of reading and hiking, I’ve started writing again. Here’s a new essay on a new, dedicated domain for my personal newsletter and philosophical musings: https://moonpointing.org/blog/in-praise-of-things/

Scenes from today's hike.

Starting today I'm off work for an entire month! (Mini sabbatical). Plans: Head to a cabin, read a lot of books, wander the local trails, journal and maybe blog a bit. Mostly focus on being a human being instead of a human doing.

Watching my 9-year-old make a game in PICO-8 by painstakingly copying Lua code character by character from examples. Just like how I learned to code when I was a kid. He knows AI exists, but doesn't know it can write code, and I'm not telling him yet 🙂

My copy of "The Psychology of Software Teams" by @grimalkina.bsky.social just arrived. Already read the first few pages and can tell it's gonna be a good read.

Best thing I've built for myself with Claude Code: An Apple Watch app I use for capturing ideas while out on long walks. I talk to my watch, it takes transcription, runs it through LLM, and spits out a cleaned up version in Markdown. Saves to iCloud. All on-device AI using CoreML.

📝 AI has made it easier than ever to start things, and harder than ever to finish. seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

How I explain Claude Code to non-techies: "It's a very expensive computer program for generating other computer programs."

Local inference remains largely ignored. You can run 35B Qwen on an M5 Max today, and consumer hardware will improve. I suspect in a few years the default will be local-first inference with escalation to frontier models as needed. Anyway, worth a read: backofmind.substack.com/p/tokenalysi...

About half-way through "On the Calculation of Volume" (Book I). Quiet, slow, meditative, repetitive, deep focus on seemingly mundane details ... a welcome reprieve to the pace of *everything else* in the world right now. Great way to wind down an evening.

Guess I need to write a blog post about why "prototyping in production" using AI is not the panacea everyone seems to think it is for the supposed problem of "designer-developer hand-off."

"Building things is easy. Evaluating what you build is hard. It requires lots of attention. Therefore, build things that you want to pay lots of attention to." Never has this been more true in software. akkartik.name/post/tmol

Turned 45 today. It's been a little quiet on my blog, so in honor of the day, I made a little list of 45 things I have enjoyed in my life, and feel more people should try or know about. seanvoisen.com/writing/fort...

Me to every LLM: Say “it's not just a ___, it’s a ___” one more time. I dare you. I double dare you.

Been increasingly curious how writers and academics manage reading and sources across long projects. Heard everything from "pristine Zotero libraries" to "a folder of PDFs I'll organize someday." If juggling sources is part of your work and you're up for it, I'd love a 15-20 min chat.

📝 Snow, rest, and the strange drug of ungrounded, non-sentient language. Plus a few links and things. Just sent my latest newsletter (published monthly) to my subscriber list. seanvoisen.com/moonpointing...