Sean Voisen

Book cover of 'Babel-17' by Samuel R. Delany on a gray textured surface. The cover features a black background with 'Winner of the Nebula Award' in orange text at the top. The title 'Babel-17' appears in large white italic lettering in the center, with the author's name 'Samuel R. Delany' in orange below. A geometric abstract design in orange and gold fills the lower portion of the cover, consisting of interlocking angular maze-like patterns that suggest complexity and linguistic structure.

Babel-17 is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dramatized as space opera. Since I've been on a linguistics kick I thought I'd try it, but I honestly didn't care for it. It's 60s new wave era with sexism and a bit of Asian fetishism tossed in. Flat story. I finished it because it's short, but ... meh.

Moonpointing №2: Sabbath Snow, rest, and the strange drug of ungrounded, non-sentient language.

📝 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...

Book cover of 'Embassytown' by China Miéville on a wooden surface. The cover features a white upper section with the author's name in red text and 'New York Times Bestseller' at the top. Below is a gradient transitioning from grayscale to black, depicting a dense crowd of silhouetted figures, with an illuminated alien cityscape of tall spires glowing in gold at the bottom. The title 'Embassytown' appears in large white letters across the dark section. A quote from Ursula K. Le Guin reading 'A fully achieved work of art' is featured near the bottom.

"Embassytown" features an alien species who only understand language with sentience behind it. A world in which LLMs would be meaningless. Speech is thought; linguistic "ladder of reference" as absolute. I read it simultaneously with "Language Machines" and it was a great fiction/non-fiction pair!

I highly recommend it. It would've helped if I had some linguistics and semiotics background, but at least I now have a long list of follow-up reading on Saussure, Chomsky, Derrida, and others if I want to go deeper.

Book cover of 'Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism' by Leif Weatherby held in a hand, displayed against a bookshelf. The cover features a cream background with a minimalist design of two gold/mustard-colored oval shapes connected by vertical line patterns. The author's name appears at the top, the title 'Language Machines' in large serif type in the center, and the subtitle below. The background shows a partially visible bookshelf with various colorful book spines including blue, orange, and red titles.

Most thought-provoking book on modern AI I've read. Gets beyond the hype and nay-saying and debates about sentience and cognition to what LLMs actually are: machines of language, culture, ideology. I admit I only understood ~40% of the book, but enough for this to be a transformative read.

Programming in the swamp Umwelts, oozification and the changing experience of programming at the hands of AI.

📝 My contribution to the discourse on the software industry's favorite topic du jour.

seanvoisen.com/writing/prog...

Book cover of "A Closed and Common Orbit" by Becky Chambers, laying at a slight angle on a wooden table. The cover features two silhouetted figures against a cosmic backdrop with a large orange planet and distant star.

After finishing "A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" I figured I'd keep going. The sequel is less space opera and more bildungsroman / phenomenology of AI (somehow I unintentionally keep reading books about AI experiences). Enjoyed this one too, but a very different kind of book from the first.

A hand holds a minimalist paperback edition of Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" against a bookshelf background. The cover features a geometric design: a dark metallic pentagon or hexagon with thin radiating lines suggesting light or pages fanning outward. The author and title are handwritten in elegant script. The Mariner Classics imprint appears at bottom.

My journey through the Calvino oeuvre continues. "If on a winter's night a traveler" is absolute genius: You get 10 novels for the price of one, a kind of labyrinthine, playful metafiction exploring the form of the novel and the very experience of reading itself. Loved it.

Book cover of 'The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet' by Becky Chambers on a wooden surface. The cover features a dark space background with a glowing planet in the upper left and an illustration of a spacecraft in the center-right. Bold yellow-green lettering displays the title across the cover. A yellow circular badge in the upper right indicates it is a "Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series." A quote from Ann Leckie praising the book as "Great fun!" appears near the bottom.

Finished in January but forgot to add it. Everything I’ve read by Becky Chambers is fun SF that makes you feel optimistic for the future of humanity. "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" is no exception—great story, rich world building, likable characters, tackling issues of politics & gender.

Most talk about agentic coding is about technics and productivity, not enough about how it changes the *feel* of the work—the phenomenology of coding. But productivity is a 2nd-order effect of flow state, not just pure capability. Amazing post about exactly this.

neonvagabond.xyz/articles/the...

Moonpointing №1: Gestures Introducing my new newsletter: moon gazing, reading strategies, recommended books and e-ink typewriters.

Moon gazing, reading strategies, book recommendations, DIY e-ink typewriters.

Moonpointing is my new monthly newsletter with personal updates, things I'm reading, links and other fun things I don't often put on my blog. Check it out if you like that kind of thing!

seanvoisen.com/moonpointing...

Every single day in the U.S. is infuriating.

What to do: Know your neighbors; invite them to dinner. Contact your senators. Bear witness. Get a whistle. Attend a protest. Vote every congressperson who funded this out of office. Give your distracted coworkers some patience and grace. Abolish ICE.

Holding my copy of Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" in front of my bookshelf. The cover is plain white with a single bird in flight, drawn in the distance as a small line art "V". The title and author's name are written in simple black cursive.

Continuing my Calvino kick with "Invisible Cities."

Reads like a dream; beautiful and strange, like looking at an N-dimensional polyhedron through prose. Each chapter is a tiny poetic glimpse into a new world. Feels like it may have inspired Lightman's "Einstein's Dreams." Will have to revisit.

Fun read! (Heads up the art directed posts link at the end is broken. Links to localhost.)

PikaPods - Instant Open Source App Hosting Run the finest Open Source web apps from $1.20/month, fully managed, no tracking, no ads, full privacy. Self-hosting was never this convenient.

I mostly gave up on self-hosting things last year because all the maintenance became another chore I didn't want to make time for.

Yesterday, though, I discovered PikaPods. "Self-hosting" without the fuss. Perfect.

www.pikapods.com

Cosmotechnics and AI: Reading Hamid Ismailov's We Computers A novel about a computer that writes poetry offers a glimpse into new ways to think about relationships with AI.

📝 We Computers is a novel narrated by an AI poet. It's the strangest and most thought-provoking book I've ever read about machine authorship. Part book review, part philosophical journey, this was an incredibly fun but challenging essay to write.

seanvoisen.com/writing/cosm...

Working on a new essay and I'm trying out Oliver Burkeman's editing method: Print out the first draft, delete everything, and re-type it all back in. Works surprisingly well!

The cover of Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics features a simple line drawing of planets in elliptical orbit inside a gray, irregular circle. The text is in hand-written cursive on a white background.

Calvino's "The Complete Cosmicomics"

Wild and imaginative short stories that retell scientific phenomena (e.g. formation of the moon, expanding universe, mitosis) in the first-person perspective of an always extant-being named Qfwfq. Especially loved The Distance of the Moon and The Light Years.

It’s not the desire to teach others what I know or think I know that makes me want to write but, on the contrary, the painful awareness of my incompetence. So would my first impulse be to write in order to pretend a competence I don’t have? But in order to pretend, I have to somehow accumulate information, notions, observations, I have to succeed in imagining the slow accumulation of an experience. And this I can do only on the written page, where I hope to capture at least some trace of a knowledge or wisdom that I just touched in life and immediately lost.

Whenever I sit down to write, I always discover I don't know what I thought I knew. Writing is both a process of thinking and of learning, that's the pain of it.

Italo Calvino, from his essay "Why Do You Write?" in which he called writing a "violence against myself."

I was wrong. This is actually the THIRD novel I've read recently that features AI as narrator. Besides "We Computers," I also recently read "Ancillary Justice" by Ann Leckie. Now I think I need to compose a list ...

The cover of Klara and the Sun is a bright orange red with a square cutout that reveals a teal page underneath featuring a single, offset yellow sun.

First up: "Klara and the Sun" by Kazuo Ishiguro

A beautiful and poignant phenomenology of AI in a dystopian future. I loved it more than "Remains of the Day" to be honest. This is the second novel in a row I've read that features AI as narrator (the other one was "We Computers" by Hamid Ismailov).

Trying a new experiment: tracking my book reads for 2026 as a thread right here 📚🤓

If you're looking for new things to read this year, feel free to follow along!

Here we go ...

2025 year-in-review A recap of my year and a brief look at trajectories for 2026.

📝 My personal year in review. Got it done, just under the wire.

seanvoisen.com/writing/2025...

... when you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely.

Suzuki Roshi with some words of wisdom that I always feel are very apt this time of year. If you're planning a new habit, taking on a new practice, going for some resolution in the new year, do so with your "whole body and mind." "Burn yourself completely."

A stack of the aforementioned books on a wooden table, along with a plain journal and a Rotring Isograph pen.

My reading stack for the holidays: Continuing through Yuk Hui’s “A Question Concerning Technology in China,” revisiting Borges, and hoping to crack the cover on Frederic Gros’ “A Philosophy of Walking.”

the own-work woodshed on writing as practice, internet fiction, and the right to be untalented

One of the habits I hope to cultivate next year is to write every single day. Trying to resist the mindset that each word must always lead somewhere, that each thing must be "publishable." Really appreciated the perspective on writing as practice in this essay.

www.late-review.com/p/the-own-wo...

In 2025 I both read more books and wrote more blog posts by changing one habit: I stopped using devices with glowing screens or an internet connection after dinner.

A bestiary of AI metaphors Ruminations on the many metaphors used for LLMs, and bit about Borges.

📝 Intelligent agents. Stochastic parrots. Blurry JPEGs of the web. We reach for metaphors as cognitive shorthand for the complexity of AI.

A few thoughts on the many metaphors we use for LLMs, with a suggestion that maybe the best one comes from Borges.

seanvoisen.com/thinking/202...

Design Engineer, Spectrum Web Join us and help build the next generation of our world-famous tools.

My team at Adobe is hiring a web components engineer to help us build out the future of our design system. Great opportunity for someone earlier in their career to jump in and help us continue to improve Spectrum Web Components. In-office hybrid in LA, Denver or NYC.

adobe.design/jobs/job-pos...

The cover of Hamid Ismailov's "We Computers" features a Persian poet with a bright pink computer framing his head.

I already gave my book recommendations for 2025, but if I could add 1 more it would be this: "We Computers" is an Uzbek novel about a French programmer-poet who writes an AI system for generating Persian poetry. Beautiful Eastern literary perspective on tech mostly dominated by Western discourse.