Thinking Surface

What is this?

This site is a kind of personal computing tool built in the lineage of Notion and Jupyter notebooks: a system of blocks for thinking, connecting, writing, and coding all in one. Think of it like the eccentric notebook of a designer, where each page is an expression of my curiosity—rather than expertise.

Great ideas are unintuitive at first

I was on a walk earlier, thinking about a weird idea i’m working on at Notion. in the back of my mind, I was also thinking about Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of the link. He’s been on my mind, as of late.

In the 80s, the internet existed, but there was no web. Information lived on different computers, in different formats, behind different commands. You had to know where to look for, and how to get there.

At the time, Tim proposed something strange, and unintuitive. What if you could collapse all the steps to get to some piece of information behind an address? In other words, what if you could link directly to anything? When he proposed it at CERN, the idea of linking to "anything" was incomprehensible to many.

"...but link to what?" they’d ask. "You're asking the wrong question,” he’d say. It doesn't matter to what. the point is that you can link to anything.

His boss wrote “vague, but exciting” on the proposal and let him build it. Here we are today.

It dawned on me that this is a pattern I subconsciously seek in everything I do. I aspire to find ideas that will seem unintuitive at first, but become entirely obvious in hindsight. Like doorhandles, so obvious and familiar we forget they exist.

This is not easy.

Thinking about it further.

There are many more more unintuitive like the link:

The computer: the idea that a machine reading symbols on a strip of tape, one at a time could, in principle, compute anything any other machine could. In the 30s, a "computer" was a person doing arithmetic by hand. Turing proposed a tape and a read-head. that's it. Nearly 100 years later, we all carry a universal machine in our pockets.

Unix: the idea that programs should be small, each do one small thing, and pass the result as plain text to the next program. This, at a time when serious, grown-up software was monolithic. It became the substrate for most of computing.

Git: the idea that every developer should have the entire codebase on their machine, with full history of it's change. At the time, version control meant a central server and you checked pieces of it out, like library books. When Linus Torvalds released Git in 2005, the reaction was confusion. It didn't look like version control. It looked like a weird filesystem. but it turns out that giving everyone made branching nearly free, which made the whole modern workflow possible.

The browser: an application whose job is to render other applications, fetched from someone else's computer, anytime, anywhere. Again, what? A program that's mostly a window for other programs. aA a time when the obvious assumption was that software lived on your machine. You bought it, installed it, ran it. Its like the universal application.

Notion: it's a page. a document. but you can put a database in it. and a database is made up of more pages. which can also contain more databases. the statement "just add a database to the page" still gives me pause today. I say it so often and yet, how strange it is. the idea that a word document could become the best surface for visually composing software.

Note: Yes, I work at Notion and no, this is not a propaganda piece. I genuinely believe Notion is a piece of historic software.

ChatGPT: the idea that a text-completion model could be packaged as iMessage; that a prompt isn't a piece of writing for the model to complete, but a message awaiting a reply. In other words, a conversation. 100 million people showed up in two months.

More modern, unintuitive ideas.

Figma: a design tool, but in the browser. At a time where native apps were the dominant paradigm.

Twitter: it's like a blog, but you can only type 140 characters. Wait what? A lesser blog?

AirBnb: the idea that strangers can stay at your place.

Even bigger ideas.

Heliocentrism: completely unintuitive to our own passive observation, the idea that we rotate around the sun. Even though, to our senses and observational capacity, we see the sun rotate around us.

Relativity: the idea that there isn't a force pulling the apple down to the ground. Instead, that mass bends space toward it, and bodies fall toward each other along that bend.

Two quotes.

This in turn majes me think of two quotes.

The first is from Joan Didion, reporting on the Manson murders and stating that "the truth doesn't have to make sense; only a lie does." In our hunger for patterns, we seek things that fit what we've already seen. But the truth, from everyday events to physical phenomena at their most essential, doesn't have to make sense.

The second is from Marvin Minsky, in his lecture Introduction to The Society of Mind at MIT who, responding to colleagues who criticized him early in his career for making up concepts, said "you can't look for something until you have the idea of it." Genius. what an incredibly astute observation.

One final example.

More recently, i was listening to Sequoia's 2026 ASCENT opening keynote. In it, Konstantine Buhler talks about the notion of an alien idea. That as we collaborate with AI to invent new things, we're going to stumble upon ideas that simply don't look like anything a human would have proposed on their own.

He used the example of NASA's ST5 mission.

NASA needed an antenna with a challenging set of radio properties: wide beamwidth, circular polarization, wide bandwidth. Instead of designing it by hand, they ran an evolutionary algorithm.

The result was a small, bent, asymmetric shape that looked like a crumpled paperclip. No human engineer would have drawn it. and it outperformed its predecessor antenna the contractor had designed by hand. It flew on three spacecraft in 2006.

It was the first evolved object in space.

Thinking Surface

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Surfaces:

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About me:

What is this?

Surfaces:

Thoughts:

About me: