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The paper computer
21–30 of 97 posts
Re: The paper computer
#22Receive email, render page with the email and a reply section and a unique ID, print it out physically Human picks up all the sheets out of the printer, writes out replies with pen Human puts the stack of answered email sheets in a multi-page scanner Scanner physically scans them, agent transcribes them and matches them back to the incoming emails via the unique ID on each sheet, sends replies You could adjust this f…
I always wished I could throw my Pocketmod[0] in the scanner at the end of the day and have a nice new one with any notes I wanted to carry over to the next day freshly printed and waiting in the morning.
Re: The paper computer
#23How about hacking a remarkable e-ink tablet as an easy prototype? The remarkable is basically a "better paper" already.
This was my gut reaction as well as an eInk enthusiast, but I think the author is looking for something quite different. As much as the rM is a calmer, slower-paced device by design, it's still a device with a screen that doesn't have the same physical affordances and spatial flexibility as pieces of paper.
Remarkable is it though. where it wins, is that I can select an arbitrary region, and copy and paste and resize. Can't do that with pen and paper.
Re: The paper computer
#24Paper Computing (great name!) is something I've been thinking about a lot to help my kids benefit from tech without exposing them to the brain melting addiction of screens. I sacrificed a few crazy nights of sleep to try to build a Paper Computer Agent prototype for a recent Gemini hackathon (only to disappointingly have submission issues right before the actual deadline) which my kids loved and keep asking me to set…
This is lovely.
Re: The paper computer
#25The problem with screens is you can't get good at them, even after 18 years of them. Not like you could a sewing machine, a stick shift car, or a loom.
Re: The paper computer
#26https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/paper_computer.html
Also, check the spirograph too, among the slide ruler and any abacus.
Re: The paper computer
#27Reminds me of Paper Website from the Tiny Projects series, discussed back in 2021. https://daily.tinyprojects.dev/paper_website https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550812
I actually quite like this idea, especially if you could have an automated ingest system. It could be a good way to let isolated places have a voice online, even if it isn't necessarily very high speed. It's almost like http-over-post or something. You could even have a comments section, and post the comments to the website author
Re: The paper computer
#28> At least then you could mimic in software that thing you get from physical objects—which is that they are usually built to do one, and only one, thing well. My alarm clock, for instance, is just an alarm clock; and that's what I like about it!
UNIX Principle anyone ? Do one thing, and do it well - seems like in this 'age of AI' the industry is rediscovering by detour best practices, decades old, all over again.
But otherwise having 'interfaces' printed out to you and an LLM multi-modal later working from your notes on it sounds really interesting and less stressful than modern 'computing'.
The Office's Michael Scott would be proud - Paper may just be the future of Digital after all!
Re: The paper computer
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and it's really worth checking out https://dynamicland.org/ , because Bret Victor is actually doing this -- slash pointing the way to what such a world could look like. It just seems like now might be a good time for specific smaller parts of that vision to be carved off and developed further. I say that largely because of the advances in multimodal AI, which maybe haven't been fully applied yet in this area.
And a shout-out to https://folk.computer/ as well! They're not as far along in terms of feature parity, but they are open source, and exploring the space in other directions.
If you have any ins with this project would you mind asking them to add a line or 2 describing what it is about, or even a linked text in the start.txt file?
Just a simple:
> Folk Computer is a research & art project centered around designing new physical computing interfaces.
From ./notes/tableshots.txt with a link towards the top would imo be quite helpful.
(Sorry, this is just one of my pet peeves: needing to know what a project is about before being able to read about it is just terrible UX, although extremely common as we as humans tend to forget that we know things others don't)
Re: The paper computer
#30We are doing something related; taking the TipToi tech and getting it with our own pen to turn paper into interfaces that can control remote systems. See Https://papiro.press (the pages are still being redesigned, but we needed some placeholders to be able to talk to Chinese factories)